9 Friday, August 14, 1970 1959-60 The call came a little after nine o’clock, and it was from the BGS official with whom he had spoken the day before, and who this time identified himself clearly as Lieutenant Wackel. “I misinformed you yesterday,” he said. “It is not the Hamburg police that is interested in you, but the Baden-Württemberg police. One of their detectives is on his way to Hamburg to talk to you. It would be appreciated if you were available to be contacted until he gets here.” “Of course, Herr Leutnant. I will give you another telephone number, which is connected to an answerer, and you can leave me a message there if I don’t pick up the telephone on this line.” “Thank you, Herr Wilner,” the lieutenant said. “You will hear from us without delay.” Baden-Württemberg! So perhaps it did have something to do with the murdered Axel Hemme! What else could it be? He had written about Hemme, the real Hemme of the SS, in his reporting of the Auschwitz trials, so that his connection with him was known. Perhaps it had to do with identifying the body. But was that so urgent that his trip had to be blocked? Brigitte was at the studio, and Frau Schmidt had the morning and early afternoon off, visiting with her son Klaus. Before she had left, Miki met with her to plan for the next day’s dinner party. It had been arranged a few weeks before, before the Wilners’ Norderney vacation, as a routine social get-together with Helmut and Margot. Since Margot and Miki no longer worked together, and Brigitte had not worked with Helmut in several years, such gatherings had become an indispensable means of maintaining the friendship. Hanna’s arrival, and her scheduled departure for Israel on Sunday, made it natural to include her, and in order to keep the company even, Max Schwab was invited as well. When Miki decided to leave for Israel with Hanna, the dinner would be a kind of farewell party for him and Hanna; now it seemed as it would be for Hanna only. He did not feel like sitting in the house, alone, waiting for a call from the police, so that he decided to go out for a bicycle ride. Since that spring, he used the bicycle that Brigitte had given him for his thirty-fifth birthday to take rides around Blankenese and its neighboring communities, and these rides took the place of the walks that he liked to take around the Outer Alster, whenever he felt the need to be alone, when they were living in central Hamburg. He still missed those walks, because there were invariably other walkers in the area, and their presence made him feel comfortable – alone but not isolated. He did not get the same comfort from the rare other bicyclists, mostly adolescents, who might cross his path in Blankenese. But the weather was lovely. A northwesterly breeze was blowing from the general direction of the North Sea, but not over the Elbe, so that he was spared the industrial aroma of the river that was ever the source of Hamburg’s prosperity. He was able, for most of the ride, to keep his mind off his predicament and on his work. Specifically, he was reviewing what he remembered of Ortega y Gasset’s and Le Bon’s notions of masses and crowds, respectively. When he returned home, an hour later, there already was a message on his answering machine. It was from Wackel, and it was an order – couched as a request – to present himself at BGS headquarters at three in the afternoon, with his passport. The last part of the order – “with your passport” – was expressed quite emphatically. *      *     * As the winter semester got underway, Miki found renewed time and energy to go on with his dissertation work. Somehow the conundrum that had plagued him during the preceding months solved itself when he came to the realization that the kind of freedom that he had in mind, essentially political freedom – the liberté that the French Revolutionaries placed alongside égalité and fraternité, the liberty that the American Revolutionaries placed alongside life and the pursuit of happiness and that Mill wrote his great essay on – was not a part of German thinking until the twentieth century, as when, for example, Rosa Luxemburg proclaimed that “freedom is always the freedom of the dissenter.” If Heidegger and Jaspers thought that they found it in Kant or Schelling, they were wrong. What Schelling, Goethe and their ilk had in mind was a more metaphysical or perhaps theological kind of freedom, in keeping with the German way of seeing things. Fichte, Hegel and Schelling alike related freedom to necessity, defining it as “doing all that nature demands” (Fichte), as “the union with necessity” (Schelling), as “the truth of necessity” (Hegel). Even such later thinkers as Feuerbach, Engels and Nietzsche, atheists all, could not break the bonds of this conception. It seemed to Miki that Freedom and the German Mind might be a good title for the dissertation, though it would certainly need a more scholarly-sounding subtitle. During his meanderings through nineteenth-century literature, as Witte had urged him to do, Miki came across the collected writings of Friedrich Gerstäcker, best known as the author of adventure novels with exotic locales – the Americas, the South Seas, Australia – that had inspired those of Karl May. Unlike the sedentary May, who almost never left his native Saxony, Gerstäcker was a compulsive world traveler who also wrote insightful and fascinating reports of his travels. Only a few of his narratives take place in Germany; one of them is a little romantic story, titled Germelshausen, about a village that comes to life for one day every century, just like the one in the American musical film Brigadoon that Miki and Brigitte had seen a few years before. In the course of his first journey, as a young man in his twenties, Gerstäcker lived for six years in the United States, wandering across New York State, the Middle West and the South. He was a keen observer of human inequality, not only in the slave states of the South – he wrote sympathetically about the ravages of slavery, and in particular slave auctions, several years before Uncle Tom’s Cabin – but also in the “free” states of North and, later, in colonial societies such as the Dutch East Indies. But, though he occasionally wrote of being “Americanized,” he remained forever German. His longing for his homeland never left him, and he lived among Germans whenever he could find them. And his notion of freedom was the romantically poetic German one: “Free, I was free,” he wrote. “The feeling of complete independence rose in my breast again, high and happy. No longer did I envy the birds whose southward flight I had longingly observed a short time before. I, too, was free like them and willing to use my loosened wings.” And what occasioned this feeling of freedom? Losing his business in New York, leaving his possessions behind, and setting out for Niagara. Miki included his reflections on Gerstäcker as a short chapter in his dissertation in order to show, in part, that his consideration of German literature was not limited to the classics but included popular writings as well.. Brigitte, during this time, was constantly busy. The party for her twenty-fifth birthday – the first one to follow their pact of five years before – was given by the cast and crew of Goose-Liesel, and while Miki was of course invited, he found that he did not really know how to celebrate the way show people did, despite Brigitte’s best efforts to include him in the fun and games. While the shooting was going on, she would come home in time for dinner, and share with him some – but not many – details of the work. The main one, the one that would be used in their love-play in bed, was that her male counterpart, in each of the tree episodes, was a student named Hans. For her part, she was named Liesel, but she was, respectively, a prostitute, a student, and a secretary. For the part of Hans, Thiele was originally going to cast three different actors, but in the course of auditions it became clear to him that Helmut Finke, a young actor from Hamburg whom Brigitte had already known at the Kammerspiele, could do all three parts better than any of the others. Miki had met Helmut at the party, and had found him to be the only one with whom he could have an adult conversation. Brigitte suggested inviting Helmut to dinner some time, before he went back to Hamburg, where his wife, who was also an actress, was doing television work. Even before the wrap, Brigitte became busy at the Deutsches Theater, work that took up her afternoons and evenings. And so there turned out to be only one opportunity for Helmut to visit, but the dinner conversation was so pleasant that they were left with no doubt that, once the Wilners were living in Hamburg, they would all be friends. After the wrap, in the course of postproduction, she still had to go back to the studio for work on some special effects that involved her. By early December Miki knew that he had his dissertation well in hand, with the first draft almost complete, and that he would be able to formally submit the finished product soon after lectures resumed in January. His final examination, known at Göttingen as the Rigorosum, could then take place, if everything went well, in February or March. After a vigorous bout of cutting and pasting, he had a final draft ready for the typist. It was quite short by dissertation standards, barely two hundred double-spaced pages. By then Miki understood enough about typesetting to know that when Human Freedom in the German Mind from the Enlightenment to the Present was published as a book, as the university required before he could be called “doctor,” it would be a slim volume of one hundred fifty pages. As he was leaving Witte’s office after handing him the finished typescript, on a Friday afternoon, he noticed an announcement by the university’s Esperanto club that it would present a concert in honor of L. L. Zamenhof’s one-hundredth birthday (koncerto en honoro de la centa naskiĝtago de Doktoro Esperanto). He thought about it as he walked home, and by the time he got there he had an article ready to type. Language and the Polish Jew With the occasion of the one-hundredth anniversary of the birth of Dr. L. L. Zamenhof, there is no doubt that a great many articles will be written about Esperanto: about its potential for realizing its creator’s hope – expressed in the name of the language – for the peaceful coexistence of peoples by means of a common language; about whether it is easier (as Zamenhof had intended) or more difficult to learn than other possible international languages, natural or artificial; about the broader significance in human affairs of a supranational language; and other weighty issues. My own interest in Esperanto is limited. I studied it briefly from a self-study book, mastered its fundamentals, and laid it aside. The fascination that natural languages, living and dead, have always held for me is simply not there. For me, the anniversary is a stimulus for reflection on a different, though related, subject: the peculiar relationship that we Polish Jews – and Zamenhof was one of us – have with language. Writing ‘we Polish Jews’ gave him a strange feeling of self-satisfaction. He wondered if there was anyone else writing in Germany who could use that phrase. First of all, there is no one language that we call our own. It is not unusual to hear, within a single group of Polish Jews holding a conversation, for the language to shift, seemingly at random, between Yiddish, Polish and Hebrew, with some German or Russian (depending in part on which region of Poland the group originates in) making a not infrequent appearance. The same can be said of Polish Jews who have made their mark in literature. Julian Tuwim and Bruno Schulz wrote in Polish. Scholem Asch began by writing in Hebrew and changed to Yiddish. The Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon, on the other hand, began in Yiddish before turning to Hebrew, though he also edited The Book of Polish Jews in German. And I am not even including those who were born as Polish Jews but were educated outside Poland, such as the Russian poet Ossip Mandelstamm, the French novelist Romain Gary, and, with all due modesty, the writer of these lines. I should probably explain that by ‘Polish Jews’ I mean those Jews who lived in the pre-partition Kingdom of Poland, which included not only Greater Poland and Lesser Poland but also Ruthenia or Red Russia, Volhynia, and Podolia, regions that are now in the Soviet Union. The Jewish inhabitants of this territory can be said to have formed, at least in the vague eighteenth-century sense, a nation (recall that the Portuguese Jews of Bordeaux called themselves la nation juive portugaise), endowed with self-government (by the Va’ad Arba Aratzot or Council of Four Lands) and with a common culture that was fostered by great mobility between the various parts of the territory. One can extend the definition even further, to include the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, which formed a joint state with Poland (known as the Commonwealth of the Two Nations) and whose Jews (commonly known as Litvaks) were governed by their own council, but they shared most of their culture and linguistic predilections with those of Poland. The Lithuanian language played almost no role among them, since the language of the Lithuanian nobility was Polish (as famously exemplified by the poet Adam Mickiewicz), and most of the Jews’ contact with non-Jews was with members of that class. To the extent, then, that we Polish Jews can be called a nation, Fichte’s dictum that where there is a language there is a nation, and vice versa, simply does not apply to us. Like religion in North America, language is among us a matter of individual choice, both with regard to everyday conversation – in which case the choice may depend on the conversation partners – and to its use as the medium of expression by a writer or public speaker. Now that I am, in every respect except the strictly ethnic one, a German, I find that, when I regard my fellow Germans from a linguistic perspective, I identify more with those who speak both High German and a regional dialect (specifically Plattdeutsch) than with those who, like my wife, have the former as their one and only native language. True, I tell myself, there is something comfortable about not needing to make a decision, if only an unconscious one, about which language to use with one’s fellow citizens. But having a multiplicity of languages in one’s brain from the outset gives us a kind of freedom, and I am one of those who prefer freedom to comfort. He sent the article to Margot, but the reply came from Braune, and it had some sentences in Plattdeutsch mixed into it. He congratulated Herr Wilner, whom he hoped soon to be addressing as Dr. Wilner, on presenting – for a change – a Jewish point of view on something having nothing to do with the Nazi regime, and expressed pride in having him as a collaborator on the Morgenpost. *      *     * The detective from Baden-Württemberg was introduced to him as Kriminalmeister Benzinger, from the State Criminal Office in Stuttgart. He was there to confiscate Michael Wilner’s passport, which he would take back with him to Stuttgart, and to ensure that Herr Wilner presented himself at said office on Monday morning. If Herr Wilner were to take the night train on Sunday evening, someone would meet him at the station in Stuttgart. “But, Herr Kriminalmeister,” Miki protested, “I have no identity card other than my passport. In America I can use my driver’s license as an identity card, but here in Germany…” “I know about identity cards,” the policeman said with a supercilious smile. “Don’t you think that the police knows what to do in such cases? I will give you a receipt for your confiscated passport, which will contain all the necessary data and which can be used as a temporary identity document. Now, the passport please.” ‘All the necessary data’ would not include a photograph, so that the ‘temporary identity document’ could not really be the equivalent of an official identity card. But Miki did not feel like arguing. Benzinger seemed to be about Miki’s age, obviously too young to have been a policeman in the Nazi era, but his manner was Gestapo-like enough to make Miki shudder. Perhaps, he thought, this man’s father was a Gestapo man, and the son learned his behavior from him. Miki handed his passport to Benzinger, who opened it to the photo page, looked up at Miki and down again just like a border policeman, and took his time reading the scant information contained in the document. He took a form out of his briefcase and with an old-fashioned fountain pen began to copy the information onto it. “Born in Poland,” he said aloud to himself. “Nineteen hundred thirty-five.” A few more strokes of the pen. “Hamburg-Blankenese.” When he was finished copying he signed the form with a flourish, turned it around towards Miki, who was sitting across from him, and said, “Now, would you please sign here,” as he handed him the fountain pen. There were some lines of print above the signature line, no doubt an agreement to abide by the rules and regulations governing the use of the document, but Miki was not given the time to read them. With the signing ceremony over, the detective placed the pen in a special compartment of his briefcase, Miki’s passport in another, and from yet another compartment extracted a rubber stamp and an inkpad. He stamped the document with a measure of pomp and gave it to Miki. “All right, Herr Doktor Wilner,” he said as he stood up. “Monday morning in Stuttgart.” Miki also stood up, and Benzinger reached his hand out to him, for the first time. “Good-bye.” All the hopes that Miki had harbored of finding out why he was wanted by the police in Stuttgart had vanished. Benzinger, obviously, would not say or do anything other than what he was ordered. In fact, he probably did not even know anything about the case. So, Miki said to himself as he walked out of the BGS building to his parking space, for the next three nights, two-and-a-half days, I won’t know what’s going on. Clouds of memories from the Nazi era began to gather in his mind, but he determined to chase them away. He would distract himself, he decided. *      *     * The financing and distribution deals that Role Thiele had arranged for Goose-Liesel made it possible for Brigitte to be paid a large portion of her fee even before the opening, and the Wilners were suddenly flush with money. “I’m following a family tradition on my father’s side: marrying rich women,” Miki joked. It was true that his mother’s father had been a wealthy merchant, and Leon’s business success was perhaps due to an inherited talent. Whether the tradition went back more than one generation, Miki did not know. And it was not only Brigitte’s pay that made them prosperous. Leon sent Miki, as a combined present for his twenty-fifth birthday – which he and Brigitte made a point of celebrating, though only with an intimate dinner and an exchange of presents – and his doctorate, a money order for five thousand Canadian dollars. This was worth over twenty thousand marks, almost half of Brigitte’s salary, and enough for Miki to pay, at least for the time being, his share of their henceforth considerably higher living expenses. Rolf Thiele, besides being a brilliant screenwriter, director and producer, proved to be a master of publicity as well. The fortuitous timing of Miki’s Rigorosum – which he passed summa cum laude, after receiving a mere cum laude on the dissertation itself, no doubt due to its brevity – two weeks before the scheduled premiere of Goose-Liesel made it possible for the kissing ceremony to be a part of the film’s advertising campaign. Miki was photographed kissing both the statue and Brigitte in all of her Liesel costumes, and the photographs found their way into newspapers and magazines throughout the German-speaking world. By this time, he had already settled into the part that he would now be playing for years to come: that of the spouse of a film star. He had found an apartment for them in the same neighborhood as before, near the Alster, but significantly larger, and with more modern appointments, including a laundry room with an electric washing machine and dryer, and in the kitchen an electric dishwasher, all made by Miele. At the time of their move, just before the premiere, they did not have nearly enough furnishings to fill the place, but the shopping expedition would have to wait until the hubbub around the film, the photo sessions and press conferences and interviews, would die down. The film turned out to be, in fact, a star vehicle for Brigitte Wilner. The script was clever, provoking much audience laughter, but emotionally superficial. The art direction, showing Göttingen during the Kaiser era, at the start of the Nazi era and in the present, was competently done. The special effects, allowing the bronze statue of a ten-year-old girl to be transformed into each of Brigitte’s incarnations as a ripe beauty in her twenties, were excellent. The direction showed Horst Schmiede’s inexperience: he was unable to impose a unified style of performance on the cast, and the acting by the secondary characters ranged from matter-of-fact to highly theatrical. And while each of the three eras depicted were well differentiated by the music, the costumes and other props such as cars and telephones, the task of creating a distinct period feel for each era seemed to have been beyond Schmiede’s powers. After the showing, there was polite applause for the film, and more of the same for Horst Schmiede when he was asked to rise. It was better for Helmut Finke, but the presenter knew what he was doing when he saved Brigitte for last: she received a standing ovation that lasted ten minutes. The reviews confirmed the reception. The film was described, mostly, as enjoyable but simple-minded, and the screenplay was characterized as not being on a level expected from the same Rolf Thiele who had written The Girl Rosemarie and Labyrinth. Brigitte, on the other hand, received unanimous raves. Several reviewers compared her to Liselotte Pulver and Nadja Tiller, if not favorably than at least as a worthy rival. Brigitte’s portrayal of the prostitute in the first episode led one critic to speculate that perhaps Rolf Thiele had been too hasty in making The Girl Rosemarie. “Brigitte Wilner would have been not merely very good, as Nadja Tiller undoubtedly was, but perfect,” he concluded. Only one review, in the MoPo, made mention of the lovely waltz tune, sung wordless during the transformations from statue to woman and reprised with words during the final credits, and of the fact that it was sung by Brigitte Wilner. While Brigitte, in robe and reading glasses, was scanning the clippings of the reviews – which Schmiede, acting once again as Thiele’s assistant, had sent her – over the remains of their room-service breakfast, Miki was seated at the desk of their room at the Hotel Atlantic, busily tapping away at his Olivetti. Elvis Presley’s recent return from Germany to America had given him the idea for an article that he titled Germany’s Loss, and he hoped to have a draft ready to show to Margot at the lunch date that they had scheduled for that day. He had not seen Margot in four years, but the correspondence that they had maintained over the past one and a half let him feel that he was meeting a close friend. And so it was, though her appearance surprised him. He had expected her, as a married professional woman, to look more elegant than she had as a student, when she favored wool skirts and flat-heeled shoes. But she arrived in the restaurant wearing Mustang jeans, with a leather vest over a black long-sleeved V-necked T-shirt, and looking even more like a student than before. But her curly brown hair, warm smile and hearty laughter were just as he had remembered them. “Is this the style in Hamburg now?” he asked her after their greeting. “Not yet,” she said with a laugh, “but it soon will be. We’re in the sixties now!” “And?” “You know what Macmillan said about the wind of change? He was talking about Africa, but changes are also happening in Europe and America. And you, Michael Wilner, are here to write about them!” “Even changes in fashion?” he asked after the waiter had taken their orders. “Why not? Your wife is a film star now, and she will be what in English is called a trendsetter, so you will have a chance to observe the changes first-hand.” “Is Elvis Presley’s going back to America such a change?” “Absolutely.” “Well, then I have already written about it.” And he handed her the typescript. She looked at the title, scanned the first paragraph and laughed. “This is fabulous. Keep it up.” “What about political changes?” he asked her. She reflected for a moment. “You know, the MoPo is still an SPD paper, and since the Godesberg Program one could say that there is a party line.” “But I like the Godesberg Program!” he protested. “Yes, but the people who wrote it are all of our parents’ generation, or even older, and there are things between the lines that people our age probably don’t understand. Braune is of that generation, and I don’t think he is ready for political opinion from people like us.” “No wonder the SPD is in the opposition,” Miki remarked. “That’s exactly what I think,” Margot said with a smile. “It needs some young, or at least younger, blood.” Their lunch arrived: bratwurst for Miki, herring for Margot. “Do you mean someone like Willy Brandt?” Miki asked. “Sure, or even our own Helmut Schmidt.” *      *     * When Miki got home, Brigitte was already back from the studio, looking comfortable in jeans, sandals and a navy-blue tee-shirt as she was sitting on the sofa, reading a magazine. But her hair was done up in what he called her Minna von Barnhelm style, and what she called her incognito style. He wondered if the series she was preparing for took place in the eighteenth century. When she saw him she removed her glasses and put them and the magazine down on the coffee table, got up and ran towards him. Putting her arms around him, she asked, “Well? What have you found out?” “Nothing,” he said after kissing her. “I have to go to Stuttgart Sunday night, and I won’t know anything till Monday morning.” “Poor Miki,” she said, letting him go. “Let’s go out and have fun,” he said. “We haven’t been in St. Pauli in a long time. Not since the Star-Club closed.” “All right,” she said. “Let me change.” “No, don’t change. You look just right as you are.” “But I have to look like Brigitte Wilner,” she said, pronouncing her name in an exaggerated dramatic tone. “But you already have you hair in your incognito style.” “Grow up, darling,” she said with a laugh. “It’s been ten years since Brigitte Wilner could go out incognito. Now, Michael Wilner, on the other hand…” “What about him?” “He’s been a celebrity for only two years, so perhaps… But seriously, at the very least I have to change shirts. I need to wear something more clinging and low-cut.” “But that’s unfair,” he protested. “You’ll get me excited, and then…” This sort of discussion between them was not new. Only the details, and the jokes, changed from one time to another. But this time it was not as lighthearted as usual. They were not going out simply to have fun, but for the sake of distraction from the tension that held Miki in its grip. *      *     * For some reason the reception accorded to Goose-Liesel was, for the most part, much friendlier away from Hamburg. In Frankfurt and Cologne, in Munich and Stuttgart, even in Zurich and Vienna, critics and public greeted the film warmly. Only in West Berlin were they as cool as in Hamburg. Brigitte had to make personal appearances for the film’s publicity in all those cities, and on occasion – when an accompanist was available – to sing the theme song, which was becoming known as the Goose-Liesel Song. A recording of the song (the version with words) was released on a 45-rpm disk, with the instrumental version on the B-side, and became a minor hit. It was not until May, when the film’s box-office success was assured, that she and Miki found the necessary time to furnish their apartment in a style that, on the one hand, Brigitte’s status required and, on the other hand, made it comfortable for guests from different walks of life. The size of the apartment also meant that a cleaning woman, a young Serbian named Milena, had to be hired to come in twice a week to do housecleaning and laundry. Miki continued to act as the cook, buying cookbooks and experimenting, cautiously at first, with new recipes. But, as his confidence grew, and as he no longer felt confined to economical ingredients, he found himself paying less and less attention to the details of the recipes and using his imagination more and more. Brigitte seemed to have no problem with his newfound culinary adventurousness. For their first dinner party, Brigitte and Miki agreed to invite their respective best friends and their spouses: Helmut Finke and his wife, the actress Christine Baumann; and Margot Klohse-Wallmann and her husband, Dr. Erich Klohse. The main dish was pheasant with foie gras. At dinner, a lively conversation went on among Brigitte, Miki, Helmut and Margot, who were all in their mid-twenties and interested in the world around them. At the same time a private conversation took place between Erich and Christine, who happened to sit next to each other. Erich Klohse was over thirty and had not been outside the university world in well over a decade. Christine had begun acting in teenage parts on television when she was fifteen and now, at twenty-one, was still doing so. Neither of them knew much of the world outside the one they worked in, and they were each fascinated to discover the other’s world, though it was also clear that Klohse was not immune to Christine’s physical charms. Margot was an attractive woman, and he had no doubt known other attractive female students before her, but a glamorous young actress in a revealing evening gown was something new for him. Something about the dinner – perhaps the foie gras, Brigitte later joked – proved to be sexually stimulating to both Brigitte and Miki, and after the guests left they rushed to bed, leaving the cleanup for the morning, that is, for Milena. As he was kissing his beautiful wife, Miki’s mind could not keep out flashes of Margot’s brown curls or Christine’s generously displayed bosom, but as he felt them with his hand and mouth he remembered that no woman had hair that was silkier, or breasts that were shapelier, than Brigitte Wilner. In the morning Miki commented on the surprising rapport between Christine and Erich Klohse. “That’s nothing,” Brigitte replied. “By now they’ve already forgotten about each other and they’re back in their own little worlds. But Helmut and Margot, that’s another matter. I could see sparks flying.” “Really?” Miki tried not to sound shocked, but it came through nonetheless. He had already come to terms with the fact that in such matters Brigitte was far more perceptive than he. “Don’t be shocked. Margot is a very desirable woman. I think you were a little bit in love with her yourself, when you were in that class with her in Göttingen.” “That’s ridiculous,” Miki protested. “I could never be in love with anyone but you.” He wondered what signals he might have given off when he talked to Brigitte about Margot, and could not help feeling annoyed with himself. “When I say ‘a little bit in love,’” Brigitte said, “I don’t mean ‘in love,’ just slightly infatuated, nothing that would threaten what you and I have. It happens to me all the time. I couldn’t kiss a man passionately on the stage or on the set if I didn’t feel something, but I have it under control. It’s a part of my work… or am I getting into sausage-making?” “No, this isn’t about technique, it’s about feelings.” “You know, sweetheart, that in my work one cannot always draw the line, especially if one studied with Ida Ehre. ‘Mastery of feelings, that’s what it’s all about,’ she likes to say. And, by the way, it’s a part of your work too. ‘Being married is work’ is something else she likes to say.” “But what about Helmut and Christine? She’s beautiful.” “A beautiful child,” Brigitte said. “They’re married only because she got pregnant when they had a fling a couple of years ago. After they married she had a miscarriage. He admitted to me that they were still married because she was making a lot of money and he was a struggling actor, but now, after Goose-Liesel, this is changing. Now,” Brigitte went on without giving Miki a chance to absorb all the information, “do you think Margot is in love with her professor?” “I don’t know,” Miki admitted. “We corresponded quite a bit during our last year in Göttingen, but she never said anything about her personal life. I told you that I was quite surprised when I found out that my editor would be named Margot Klohse-Wallmann.” “I think Helmut and Margot would make a great couple,” Brigitte said with a mischievous smile. “I think you ought to play a marriage counselor,” he said with a laugh. “And you, my darling Miki,” she said as she took his hands and caressed them, “are doing a very good job of playing a career counselor. Maybe you can be my agent! Thiele told me that the idea for Goose-Liesel came from you.” “I had asked him not to tell you.” “Well, as they say in Hollywood, that’s show business,” she said. “But I think I’ll wait till I’m a little older to play a marriage counselor, don’t you think? Would people trust a twenty-five-year-old marriage counselor?” “Probably not, just as they don’t seem to trust a twenty-five-year-old political commentator. But when you turn thirty I’ll suggest it again.” A few days later Margot called Miki at home to arrange another lunch meeting. After telling him how much she enjoyed the dinner party – he wondered if her enthusiastic manner was her natural way of expressing such things, or if it had something to do with meeting Helmut – she announced somewhat secretively that she had some important news. “I’ve been offered a job at Die Zeit,” she said, “and I’d like to take you with me.” “Does Braune know?” Miki asked. “Not yet. But I’ve talked with M-M and the Countess, and they would be happy to have you. And you would be free to write about politics – they were quite clear about that – with no party line to follow. What do you think?” “It’s like a dream come true,” he said. “May I tell Brigitte?” “Of course,” Margot said. “Brigitte just signed a contract for two films yesterday, and, by the way, Helmut will be in one of them. We should probably have another party to celebrate, for the four of us.” “Then let’s make it just the four of us!” Margot said excitedly and laughed. Brigitte had been right, Miki thought. *      *     * In the end he was thankful that Brigitte had followed her own counsel and put on a different shirt, besides replacing her flat-heeled sandals with wedge-heeled ones. The sight of the lovely, perfectly rounded tops of her breasts, whether peering at him across the restaurant table or swaying on the dance floor, was satisfying in itself, even when, as this evening, it did not presage deeper satisfaction later in the night. The other diners at the restaurant were discreet and did not let on that they were in the presence of a film star. If they looked at her, it was only for a moment. It was different at the clubs, where the guests’ normal inhibitions were loosened by alcohol, and Brigitte was the object of intense, if friendly, staring. Groups of people whispered about them, and Miki realized that he, too, was gossiped about. There was no doubt that they were a celebrity couple, something like a small-scale – very small-scale – version of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe. But Miki noticed that only a fraction of the club guests seemed to recognize them. As they walked past the tables on their way in and out, he noticed that those who paid them no attention, for the most part, spoke English with varying accents. The clubs of St. Pauli seemed to be overrun with Anglo-Saxon tourists to an unprecedented degree. In a flash he understood why. “You know,” he said to Brigitte as they were leaving their third and last club of the night, “since the Beatles’ breakup their fans seem to be making a pilgrimage to the place where they got their start.” “I think you’re right,” she said. “I wonder if the people who named this place Sankt Pauli imagined that someday it would be a place of pilgrimage.” “Yes, to worship Saint Paul, Saint John, Saint George and Saint Ringo.” “Why not? Do you remember when we visited New Orleans, and at the St. Louis cathedral I said that I was there to worship Saint Louis Armstrong?” “And do you remember what the first Beatles record had on it?” “When the Saints Go Marching In,” she said, as they both laughed uproariously, and pointed across the street. “We heard them sing it right there at the Star-Club.” “They saw themselves as future saints. This district should be renamed as Sankt Pauli–Johannis–Georgii–Ringo. No, better yet, Ringonis.” “Ringonis?” “Yes, that’s the correct Latin genitive of Ringo.” “When it comes to Latin I’ll have to take your word for it. But I like the sound of Ringonis. It has a nice ring to it.” They were still laughing when they reached the parking lot of the fish market, where Miki’s car was parked. As he went to the passenger door to open it for Brigitte, he noticed that the car next to his bore a Stuttgart license plate. It was the first time since they left home for their night out that Stuttgart was on his mind. The thought did not bother him one bit. *      *     * By August, Helmut and Margot had separated from their respective spouses, and begun living together in an apartment not far from the Wilners’. Margot took advantage of her change of employment to become – even before the divorce – Margot Wallmann once again, and as such she appeared on the masthead of Die Zeit as associate editor. Miki found out that Die Zeit had taken on another Polish Jew as a collaborator: Marcel Reich, who had recently escaped from Poland and called himself Reich-Ranicki, would be its literary critic. But R-R, as Miki and Margot referred to him, would remain in Frankfurt and would not be a member of the editorial staff. Brigitte, meanwhile, found out that, in the wake of Goose-Liesel’s success, Rolf Thiele had no trouble finding backing for another independent production with a starring role for her and in which he would participate behind the scenes but which he not personally direct or produce (the Hollywood term executive producer was not used in Germany), while he was preparing to write and direct an Austrian production of Lulu starring (yet again) Nadja Tiller. Its tentative title was The House of Birds and it would be shot in and around Hamburg, with location work in the Schleswig-Holstein countryside. She would start work at the end of August. Miki had just written his first article dealing with the Nazi past. It was twice a long as his usual output, and it discussed, with some irony, the recently resolved dispute between Israel and Argentina over the legality of Eichmann’s capture. Müller-Marein decided to split it and to run it in two consecutive issues. The Wilners now had a little over a week with no obligations. They looked at each other at the dinner table and said, almost in unison, “Let’s go to Norderney!” When Miki called their favorite hotel to make a reservation, he was told that it was being renovated, and would not reopen till the following season. Once again they had to settle for a place that was not the one of their romantic memory – now eight years in the past – but once again they had a passionately beautiful time together.