6 Tuesday, August 11, 1970 1956-57 Miki was awake at dawn. It had been a lovely night. He thought that he would always remember it as the night of the stolen kisses, but then every night of love that he would have with Brigitte when her period was overdue felt like a stolen kiss. Brigitte was sleeping. Miki felt torn between his desire to wait for her awakening and his curiosity about any new developments in the Hemme case. Curiosity won the tug-of-war. He got up quietly, dressed quickly and padded downstairs in his slippers. Frau Schmidt had not brought the newspaper inside yet; she was probably asleep herself. He stepped outside the house into the driveway and to the gate in order to retrieve the MoPo from its slot. He looked at the front-page headlines as he walked back to the house, and sat down on the living-room sofa in order to browse. He did not have to search long for a story datelined Stuttgart, August 10, and titled “Württemberg Murder Mystery Grows.” In the matter of Axel Hemme, who was found murdered in the village of Unterriexheim last week, the Stuttgart State Attorney’s Office has issued a communiqué including some new and surprising elements. In examining the body, police authorities in Ludwigsburg (the district seat) have determined that the bullet that killed the victim came from a high-powered long-range rifle, rather than a pistol as at first supposed. Moreover – and this is the great surprise – they have found, in conjunction with the Baden-Württemberg State Criminal Office, that the victim had undergone extensive facial plastic surgery. On this basis, the State Attorney’s Office has retracted its previous assertion that the victim is not the same Axel Hemme who had been an SS officer in Poland. When asked why, if he had altered his appearance to avoid prosecution, Axel Hemme had not changed his name, the State Attorney’s spokesman replied that, since Hemme had not been charged as a war criminal by the Allies during the immediate postwar period, he was, at least until 1967, exempt from prosecution by the Federal Republic of Germany, and consequently did not feel the need for doing so. The State Police is conducting an inquiry among all plastic surgeons practicing in Baden-Württemberg to determine if any one of them had performed the surgery. In another line of the investigation, a tip from an undisclosed source has led to the provisional arrest of a suspect, a foreigner with an extensive criminal record. The impression is growing among the authorities that the killing was done for hire. A revenge motive has not been ruled out, possibly by someone who had suffered at Hemme’s hands. The last clause struck deep in his heart. It was just such revenge fantasies that he himself had harbored in his younger days. But how could hiring a killer to shoot Hemme from a distance, without ever confronting the monster, be anyone’s idea of revenge? No, it didn’t seem plausible. And while this article was not accompanied by a picture, his memory of the one that he had seen on Norderney was clear, and, plastic surgery or not, this was not the same Axel Hemme. He remembered those ice-cold eyes too well; they were not the same. He was also struck by the coincidence that the police investigating the crime was based in Ludwigsburg, the seat of the Central Office of the State Justice Administrations for the Investigation of National Socialist Crimes, which he had visited a few times while covering the Auschwitz trials in Frankfurt. He did not feel like reading any more of the paper. He went back upstairs to join his wife, still peacefully asleep, in bed. *      *     * The theater season began, as usual, in September. The first play that they attended was the premiere of a German version of The Diary of Anne Frank, which was being produced simultaneously in cities across West Germany. Brigitte’s reaction to the play was cautious, as though she were waiting for him to express his reaction first. He, after all, had been in Bergen-Belsen at the same time as Anne. But when he remained silent as they walked out of the theater, she asked him outright: “What do you think about the play?” “It’s a nice American play,” he said, “about a nice American girl named Anne Frank, whose family, for some reason, has to hide from the SS. There is nothing about their being Jewish, or about concentration camps. It isn’t clear why the SS are bad.” “But people know that!” “Here in Europe, perhaps, at least those people who would go to see the play. In America, I’m not so sure. And what can be more American than ‘in spite of everything, people deep down are really good’?” “I think I agree with you,” she said, “but most people in the audience seemed deeply moved. Some were in tears.” “Perhaps it brought out feelings of guilt, like a church service. I wouldn’t be surprised if a critic tomorrow compares it to a religious experience. And, by the way, didn’t I see tears on your lovely cheeks at Renate’s wedding, falling down onto your lovely breasts?” Brigitte, who had been careful to dress conservatively at Leon and Fela’s wedding in order not to upstage the bride, showed no such compunction when the bride was her sister. She mock-slapped him with the rolled-up program. *      *     * When he awoke again, Brigitte was not in bed. He could hear her movements in her room; she was probably getting dressed. This was her first day of work on the new series. He wondered what she would wear. He did not need to wait long to find out. She came into the bedroom just as he was sitting up, wearing a revealing mauve halter-top summer dress. He knew this dress; it had a matching short-sleeve jacket for cover-up purposes that she might put on when she went into an air-conditioned room at the studio. On her feet she still had mules. She leaned over to kiss him, giving him a delicious view of her cleavage. “Good morning, darling,” she said as she straightened up. “I saw that you have already read the paper. What’s new in the world?” “Pretty boring, for the most part. The peace between Israel and Egypt is holding. A peace treaty will be signed tomorrow between West Germany and the Soviet Union. Even in Indochina things are pretty quiet.” “Spoken like a true journalist.” “Yes, we are a bloodthirsty lot, aren’t we? Speaking of blood…” “Not yet,” Brigitte said with a mischievous smile. “That is not what I mean,” Miki said primly. “Of course not.” “No, at least not at this very moment. I’m talking about the murdered Axel Hemme in Württemberg.” “Axel Hemme in Württemberg,” Brigitte sang to the waltz tune from Goose-Liesel, the film that made her a star. She then turned serious. “Is there news about him?” He gave her a summary of the article and his own reflections on Hemme’s identity. “I trust you more than the police in this matter.” She glanced at the antique clock on the dresser. “You’d better put on some clothes so we can have breakfast,” she said. “I’m due at the studio in an hour.” After she was gone he was back at his desk. He was on page 9, ready to begin a new topic. Now let me focus on another category of movements representing postmodern fanaticism: those advocating “national liberation.” He sat in thought for a moment, then he rolled his chair to the bookcase that held the latest five-volume Brockhaus – he was waiting for the completion of the twenty-volume edition before buying it – and looked up a few entries. He liked using the oversized one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia, on the shelf below, but for the subject at hand the current edition, from 1963, was outdated. He browsed through a few other books and rolled back to the desk. He resumed typing. Several of these movements have borrowed both rhetoric and tactics from the successful Algerian National Liberation Front (FLN) and some of the other anti-colonial struggles in Africa and Asia. But these were classic struggles for the independence of a country from a colonial power, with the modern goal of forming a sovereign nation-state in the western sense, in the mold of the American Independence War. Such struggles normally have a clearly defined rationale based on the illegitimacy of the colonial occupation, as expressed, to repeat the American example, in the Declaration of Independence. What typically has happened in such cases is that, in time, the ruling class of the colonial power comes to accept the illegitimacy of the occupation, and eventually the independence of the colony is recognized in a formal agreement, examples of which range from the Treaty of Paris (1784) to the Evian Accords (1962) In the postmodern movements the nation whose liberation is pursued is, typically, defined not territorially but ethnically, and, as a rule, forms a national minority within an independent state. While there may be a territorial subdivision of the state in which the nationality in question forms a majority, the movement does not see itself as representing the territory (even when it advocates independence for the territory) but the ethnic nation. Examples are found, at present, mainly in Asia, from the Karen National Liberation Army in Burma, which has existed since the country attained independence in 1948, to the Moro National Liberation Front in the Philippines, which was formed only last year. There is no doubt that such movements will also spring up among the Kurds in Turkey and Iraq, among the Tamils of Ceylon, and among the Malays of the Patani region of Thailand. He helped another sheet find its way onto the platen. In Africa it is probably too soon for such movements to arise. While the recently concluded Biafra secession may have been fueled by ethnic nationalism on the part of the Ibo, it was not the result of a popular movement but of a military coup. In the future, however, we may see such movements among the Somalis of the Ogaden in Ethiopia; among the Berbers of Algeria (though Arabs and Berbers fought side by side in the FLN) and Morocco; and any other places where those who regard themselves members of a minority ethnic group (and that is often a matter of personal choice) feel themselves to be culturally, politically or economically oppressed because of their ethnicity (another subjective evaluation). Once again, it is the fuzzy subjectivity of the ethnic notion of “national liberation,” as distinct from the concrete goal of territorial sovereignty, that makes these movements postmodern. Perhaps the height of fuzziness is reached by the “black nationalism” or “black liberation” movement in the United States as represented by the Black Panther Party and similar organizations. He was at the midpoint of page 10. He felt the need to take a break, and more specifically the urge to piss. On his way back from the bathroom the memory of a recent news item caused his mind to sidetrack. He added a parenthetical sentence to the last paragraph. (Just a few days ago, a judge in California was killed in an attempted prison breakout for one of the party’s leaders.) They are the postmodern counterpart to the civil-rights movement led by the late Martin Luther King and his colleagues, which is “the very model of a modern” movement: rational in its conception, nonviolent in its execution, open to discussion and negotiation. And its successes have been remarkable, comparable to that of the “modern” independence movements: the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968, the Nobel Peace Prize for Dr. King. By contrast, the postmodern movements espouse vague, essentially unattainable (because they are undefinable) goals such as a “social revolution” that would entail “self-determination” for minority groups. The goals are subsumed by the means: militant, often violent tactics. Yet another instance of “the medium is the message” that is so characteristic of postmodernity. *      *     * Just as the semester was getting underway, Miki’s attention was distracted from his studies by events taking place in the world at large. An anti-Soviet student demonstration in Budapest quickly turned into a popular revolt that toppled first the ten-meter statue of Stalin in the city center and then the Communist government. When Soviet tanks entered the city they were met with armed resistance for which the Red Army was unprepared, and after a few days a ceasefire was arranged with the new government headed by Imre Nagy, which the Soviet Union recognized. Meanwhile, Israeli troops invaded the Gaza Strip and the Sinai, heading for the Suez Canal. They were soon joined by French and British forces – marines and paratroopers – operating from aircraft carriers; Great Britain and France were still smarting over Nasser’s nationalization of the canal. Also, news leaked out that troops of the Israeli Border Guard had perpetrated a massacre in an Arab village in Israel. While the world was preoccupied with the Suez crisis, a second Soviet invasion of Hungary took place, and this time the Hungarian resistance was brutally suppressed. It was evident that international reaction, which had been vocal during the first intervention, had become muted. To condemn an invasion by the USSR while Great Britain and France were invading Egypt would have been hypocritical at best. Miki wondered if the timing of the two events had been coincidental. Perhaps the Kremlin knew about the impending Suez attack and used it as a cover for its own action. There were Soviet spies everywhere, after all. Just a few months before, Burgess and Maclean, who had been spying for the USSR while working in the British Foreign Service, had reappeared in Moscow after being out of sight for five years. But this kind of information required a spy who was in the high echelon of the military, and it was more likely that such a spy would be found in Israel. Many high-ranking officers were Mapam members, like those in his kibbutz, and there was a chance that some of them had not lost their old Stalinist sympathies, even after the Prague and Moscow trials. Miki remembered a man named Israel Beer, a lecturer in military history at Tel Aviv University, who had come to Refadim to give a lecture on the War of Independence. Beer had served in the war, and while he was no longer active in the IDF, he spoke in a bragging tone about his exploits and about his close relationship with Ben Gurion. But he had been a Communist in his native Austria and fought on the Communist side in the Spanish Civil War. And Miki did not fail to notice the worshipful gaze that he had furtively directed at the portrait of Stalin that hung on the dining-room wall. Now Ben Gurion was in power again. If Beer was truthful about his closeness to the old man, he might have been in position to know about the plans for the invasion. And if not Beer, then some other man like him. Miki talked casually about his concerns and suspicions with Brigitte. She was interested, though these matters lay outside her sphere of knowledge. The times that were most conducive to talking about world affairs were those of her periods. Now that they were husband and wife, they spent all their nights in bed together, chastely if so ordained by her calendar, and conversation served as a distraction from the continence. Brigitte’s usual response, when Miki brought up some political issue on his mind, was to interpret the situation in terms of a personal drama, and she would improvise dialogues among the likes of Khrushchev, De Gaulle, Adenauer and Ben Gurion with the appropriate accents. It was enjoyable, but he missed having someone with whom he could discuss world affairs seriously. But at the university there was no one with whom he could do so. General theories of society, mostly Marxist, and the more abstract the better, were the order of the day in Frankfurt. He missed the common-sense pragmatism of Northern Germany that pervaded even the universities, and that for him had first been embodied by Hanna. *      *     * They recognized each other the instant she walked through the gate. She was still her trim self, sporting the same slacks-and-blouse style that flattered her trimness. Her skin, though it no longer had the surprisingly youthful glow of her forties, was still remarkably firm for a woman of her age. Her dark-brown, almost black, hair seemed unchanged, though, as the famous American advertisement put it, only her hairdresser knew for sure how much of that might be due to his help. Miki, as he ran up to her, wondered how much he had changed since the age of seventeen. He had grown about two centimeters, and he wore his hair a little longer, though not as long as he had worn it five years before (or as Brigitte would still have liked). That had been his only concession to the style of the sixties. He had never sported a beard or mustache, keeping his face smooth with a succession of ever more efficient Philips shavers since the single-headed one that Leon had given him for his fifteenth birthday. He wanted to feel free to kiss and nuzzle every square centimeter of the velvety sweet nougat of Brigitte’s skin and of her other, even more delicate, tissues without fear of irritating her with a stubble. All in all, he concluded, he had probably not changed too much. Hanna gave him a maternal hug and said, “Miki! It’s so good to see you!” She was, quite naturally, saying du, as she had back in Israel, where he had done the same to her, but now he hesitated before responding. She immediately noticed his hesitation. “You’re wondering if you should say Sie to me, now that I’m an old lady!” she said, laughing. “Not old lady,” he said, “but an old teacher. Former teacher, rather.” “If I’m still Hanna, and not Frau Korn, not to mention Fräulein Korn, then it should be du, shouldn’t it?” “Of course, Hanna. How has your trip been?” “Wonderful. I had wanted to go by ship to Venice, as you did – you see, I remember! – but there are no more passenger ships on the Mediterranean, so I flew to Rome, which was wonderful, and then went by train to Milan, and from there to Venice. I spent three days there, then took a night train – very nice – to Vienna, and I spent four days there. And here I am, in my hometown, after thirty-four years – that’s more than half of my life! And tell me, have you become a good Hamburger?” “Completely. I’ve even learned how speak Platt, even though there aren’t many people I can speak it with.” “That’s something I never learned, though my brother spoke it fluently.” There was a pause, as she seemed to remember that she had lost her brother in Auschwitz. As she had told him at one of their meetings in Lehavot Hadarom, she had absolutely no relatives left anywhere. She swallowed, took a deep breath, and said, “Do you know the first place I would like to see, even before you take me to the hotel?” He tried to guess, but she wouldn’t let him. “The Jews’ Aquarium! Do you know what that is?” “Of course,” he said. “The Alsterpavillon. But that’s only two hundred meters from the hotel, so that you can get yourself checked in and we can walk over.” “Good,” she said, “as long as we get there by six o’clock, before it’s too late for me to drink coffee.” They had reached the baggage claim, where the bags from the Vienna flight were just beginning to arrive. “That depends on how long your baggage takes,” he said. “How many pieces do you have?” She raised her right index finger, and immediately used it to point at a seemingly brand-new navy-blue suitcase. “I have mazel today,” she said. They continued with some more chitchat until she got into the passenger seat of his car and closed the door behind her, its slam being followed a second later by that of the trunk cover after Miki had put the suitcase there. He entered the car and turned on the engine. “I’m sure,” she said as he started driving toward the garage exit, “that you would like to hear about the people you knew at the kibbutz.” He felt relief at not having to bring the matter up. “Of course,” he said. “You know how it is with teachers,” she said. “Every year there are some pupils that one keeps in one’s memory, and one forgets the others.” “Whom have you kept in your memory from my class?” “Well, you,” she said, and they both laughed. “From Refadim,” she went on, “I can tell you about Marcel, and Nili, and Yossi Tal, and Tzvi Kaplan…” He felt even more relief over her naming Nili with no prompting from him. “Marcel and Nili, and you, of course,” she added, “were the ones who did not come back for the twelfth grade.” This was getting interesting. “Marcel!” he said. “As I remember, he insisted on being called Moshe. I tried practicing my French with him, but he wouldn’t speak anything but Hebrew.” “That’s true,” she said, “but then he decided that he was tired of being the only Moroccan, and he transferred to a kibbutz that was mostly North African.” “And Nili?” Miki asked with feigned nonchalance. “Ah,” Hanna began with a smile, “Nili the beauty queen…” “Yes, she was quite beautiful.” “No,” Hanna said, “I mean that literally. She was in a beauty contest.” “What?” he almost shouted, flabbergasted. “When?” “In twelfth grade,” Hanna answered. Miki began to feel confused. “You remember, perhaps, that beauty contests had just recently begun in Israel…” “Of course I remember. The very first one had taken place a little before I got there, and I remember the reaction in Refadim. Capitalist exploitation! Bourgeois decadence! Judging women like cattle!” “Just imagined what happened when one of their own girls decided to enter it. In Israel, a girl has to be at least seventeen and a half to enter, but most girls wait at least until they finish high school. Not Nili. She calculated that she would turn seventeen and a half just when the contest would begin, which was in the middle of the school year.” Miki remembered that Nili was four or five months younger than he, so that this would put the moment just about the time that she would be giving birth to Ora! Something didn’t fit. “So,” Hanna continued, “she moved to Tel Aviv to live with an aunt and uncle. Her parents agreed; Nili usually got what she wanted.” “Are you sure you’re talking about Nili Osher, who was in my class?” “Of course I am sure. She’s Nili Rosen now, by the way. Your friend Tzvi was the only one who supported her decision; he argued about it in class, with everybody against him.” “Yes, he liked to argue.” “I think he was in love with Nili, but she didn’t want him.” There was now no doubt as to which Nili she was talking about. “She liked you, didn’t she?” And she smiled. He ignored the last remark. “So what happened to her?” he asked, trying to hide his embarrassment and confusion. “She got something like fourth or fifth place in Miss Tel Aviv. She couldn’t compete against the city girls, who knew how to dress and how to use makeup and even how to walk. Nili had never worn high heels in her life. If I’m not mistaken, the judges encouraged her to come back the following year, but I think she lost interest. She finished high school, went into the military, went to university – the Tel Aviv Law School, which later became Tel Aviv University – and now she is a lawyer in Tel Aviv. She used to visit me regularly, while her parents were still in Refadim. Now they also live in Tel Aviv, but she still writes me occasionally. And since I’ve moved to Jerusalem we have talked on the telephone.” “You said her name was Rosen now. Does that mean she married?” “Yes. I believe that he was also a lawyer, and she had a child – a daughter, I think – but they got divorced. But the last time I saw her, she seemed happy.” “Do you happen to know her daughter’s name?” he asked, feeling as though he were grasping at straws. “No. I think she’s about ten.” “I have a strange story to tell you,” he said after a pause. “But what happened with Tzvi?” “Tzvi Kaplan? He’s still a member of Refadim, though he doesn’t spend much time there, just weekends. He became an officer, distinguished himself in the Sinai War, and made a career in the military. Now he is a macher in the Misrad habitakhon.” Into her German Hanna had managed to mix the Yiddish (though German-sounding) word for ‘big wheel’ and the Hebrew name, literally ‘security office,’ of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. “Does he still tend the fishpond?” “I think so,” Hanna said with a laugh. They had reached the Alster. Miki glanced to his right as he turned onto the Neuer Jungfernstieg, and saw Hanna’s face well up as the view of the sunlit lake struck her for the first time in a third of a century. He heard her murmur Faust’s line, “Abide a while, you are so fair!” He slowed to a crawl in first gear to let her linger over the sight. She took a handkerchief from her purse to wipe her eyes, sniffled, and turned to him with a smile. “We must be arriving,” she said. The Ora story could wait until they were seated at the Alsterpavillon. If the check-in went quickly – and there was no reason why it shouldn’t – then they could be there a little before her coffee deadline. He wanted to by home by seven, to meet Brigitte for dinner, so that he would have to tell the story briefly, even summarize it, and there might not be enough time for Hanna to offer any clues to explain what now seemed to be a hoax. It was just as well, perhaps; he would let Hanna think about it and dig into her memory to explore possible lines of exegesis. *      *     * By the beginning of spring, when Brigitte was starting work on the fourth and last film under her contract, they knew that Frankfurt was not their place. Brigitte was itching to get back on the stage, and the Frankfurt theater scene did not impress them. Hamburg was quite another matter. There, Gustaf Gründgens was artistic director of the Deutsches Schauspielhaus, and Ida Ehre was running the Kammerspiele. It so happened that Ida Ehre had appeared that year in a television film based on Zola’s Thér`se Raquin, which aired about the same time as the second of Brigitte’s films, and Brigitte had written the great Jewish actress an admiring letter, not neglecting to mention that her husband was a Jew who, like Frau Ehre, had been in a concentration camp. She received an admiring letter in return, hinting not too subtly that if Brigitte ever wanted to return to Northern Germany, she would find welcome in Hamburg. Ida’s friend Gustaf Gründgens had already engaged a young Swiss woman for juvenile leads in his theater, which mainly did classics, but if Frau Wilner wanted the challenge of modern theater with something to say about society, she would find herself at home in the modest Kammerspiele. The pay would not be what television work had accustomed her to, and, since NWDR had just split into WDR and NDR, it would be a year or two before such work would resume in Hamburg, but she had no doubt that Brigitte had the makings of a star. And then there was the possibility of film, since Hamburg was the home of Real-Film, where such great directors as Geza von Cziffra and her friend Helmut Käutner plied their craft. Here, however, Ida Ehre cautioned Frau Wilner that she unfortunately would not be of much help, since she was not on the best of terms with the studio’s two bosses, both of whom were her fellow Jews and concentration-camp survivors. When Brigitte read the letter to Miki, he commented, with a laugh, “Clashing Jewish egos! Nothing new about that!” For he, too, was by this time disenchanted with the Frankfurt School, and, in particular, dismayed by its overemphasis on Marxist theory as interpreted by the clashing egos of Adorno and Horkheimer, with poor Habermas caught between them. The only enjoyable part of their seminars was the participation of a young Hamburger named Ralf Dahrendorf, who, after getting his doctorate in philosophy from his home university, went on to study sociology at the London School of Economics – he spoke with reverence of his teacher Karl Popper – where he was completing his dissertation for a second doctorate. While in London he seemed to have developed a kind of English wit, and he did not hesitate to use it when confronting Marxist dogma. But he did not stay in Frankfurt for the whole time; before the summer semester was over he moved to Saarbrücken for his habilitation. Miki also felt the positive attraction of Hamburg. For one thing, the atomic physicist Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker, one of the eighteen signers of the just-promulgated Göttingen Manifesto against the nuclear arming of the Bundeswehr, had just been given a chair in philosophy there, and the philosophy of science was an area that Miki had not explored yet. For another, history was taught, as in Göttingen, in the philosophy faculty, and with the great historians Fischer and Zechlin – who were known to be at odds with each other – still active there, he could complete the requirements of his minor subject in modern history by attending their lectures and seminars. *      *     * “And how did it go with Hanna?” Brigitte asked at dinner, after giving him a sketchy précis of her activities at the studio, which appeared to combine art and business, and the fact that she would need to return the next morning for a live interview. “It was wonderful seeing her. She wants very much to meet you. She saw Last Year in Bad Ischl in Vienna.” “I hope she had a good laugh.” “She loved it. I suggested we have lunch together, after your interview.” “I don’t see any conflict,” Brigitte said after reflecting for a moment. “Before I tell you any more about Hanna, there is something else I need to tell you, something that I’ve been meaning to tell you for three days, but I’m glad I didn’t, because I would have had to change everything.” “It sounds mysterious,” she said with a mischievous smile. “It is, very much so. Tell me, how would you feel if I told you that I am the father of a seventeen-year-old daughter?” “Seventeen… nineteen-fifty-three… fifty-two… Israel… Perhaps a little bit surprised, but not very.” “Really?” He was the surprised one. “There is something I’ve never forgotten. When we lived in Bad Harzburg you once asked me about the Ogino-Knaus method, and then you changed the subject to talk about Hanna. Do you remember?” “Vaguely,” he said, not as truthfully as he would have liked. “Since I can’t get pregnant, I am sensitive about anything that has to do with it. And so I thought that there might have been something personal about the question.” He said nothing, lost in admiration of his wife’s perspicacity. “So,” she went on, “do you have a seventeen-year-old daughter?” “No,” he said, “but for three days I thought that I did. You know, the mysterious girl with the big earrings…” “Yes?” Brigitte was now wide-eyed with curiosity. He finally told her, between spoonfuls of pudding, the full story of the past four days, from Frau Schmidt’s report of the girl’s first visit to Hanna’s clarification. He also told her that he had taken a photograph of the girl. “I’d like to see it, but first it’s my turn to ask you a question,” Brigitte said when he finished. “How would you have felt if you found out that you really are the father of a seventeen-year-old daughter?” “I was afraid you would ask me that. Frankly, I don’t know.” He was being evasive, as he always had been on this subject, and Brigitte knew it, and he knew that she knew it. He decided on a different track for his evasion. “But you’re quite good at figuring out how other people feel,” he said. “How do you think I would have felt?” They had finished eating. Brigitte put her dessertspoon down and gave Miki a long look before speaking. “If, as you say, I’m good at figuring out how people feel, it’s when I can detach myself and use my imagination. That’s what acting is, for me at least. But in this situation I’m not sure I can do that. I’ve always been comfortable, even content, with not having children. I’ve never really felt the desire to be a mother, and I’m happy giving all my love to you. Besides, speaking pragmatically, my career has moved more slowly than with other actresses my age, and having children would have slowed it even more. But with you I’ve never been sure. You’ve never expressed or shown any regret at not having children, but if my condition had been different…” “But I chose to be with you, knowing exactly what your condition was.” “Yes, but we were seventeen.” “Now we’re thirty-five,” he said, “and I feel the same, only more so.” He reached his hand across the table, and it was met by hers. The track of evasion was returning to its habitual course. Clasping her hand firmly, he stood up and began to move away from the table, pulling her along. “That pudding was sweet,” he said, “but what’s next will be even sweeter.” He felt her resisting his pull. He looked at her quizzically. She stroked the arm that was trying to pull her with her free hand. “Wait,” she said with a smile. “What is it?” he asked. “You haven’t shown me the girl’s photograph.” He let go of her hand, quickly went to his study and brought back the photograph. Brigitte looked at briefly and said, “She has a pretty smile. But if she is not your daughter, aren’t you curious about who she is?” “Of course I am.” “Are you going to try to find out?” “I’d like to, but, you know, I’m really not that kind of journalist.” “But you could go to Israel, take the photograph with you, show it to people that you know, and see if anyone knows who she is. “Yes,” he said, “I could do that.” “Now,” she said as she took his hand, “about that pudding…” He vaguely remembered that he had not done any writing that day, but in short order all thoughts of doing any typing that evening evaporated from his mind.