11
Sunday,
August 16, 1970
1961-62
Though Hanna Korn was no longer Hanna Kidron,
she had not lost all of her kibbutz habits, and in particular the one of early rising,
especially in the summer. By the time Miki kissed the sleeping Brigitte
good-bye, he heard Hannas footsteps as she was going down the stairs. By half
past five he was turning from the Blankeneser Landstrasse into the Elbchaussee,
which, followed by the other roads that skirt the central city, would take them
to the airport. They had the road practically to themselves. For the first ten
minutes or so of the drive neither of them said a word. The cars radio was
playing the andante of a Haydn symphony.
It has been a wonderful
visit for me, Hanna said at last, but the business involving Nilis supposed
daughter made it intriguing, and your being prevented from leaving Germany made
it a little frightening. These things happen in Israel, but I didnt think they
would happen in the new Germany.
They even happen in England
and America, Miki said, when there is a police investigation involved. Ive
seen television shows about it.
Lets hope that its just a
routine matter that will be settled quickly, and that you can come and visit us
again soon, and this time you wont avoid me! She laughed.
I never avoided you, he
replied, laughing as well, only the kibbutz. The last time I was in Israel you
were still there.
The minuet began, and Hanna
said nothing in reply. After another lengthy silence, she asked, Is there
anything you would like me to do for you in preparation?
Yes, he said. Would you
contact Nili for me?
I already did. I called her
from the hotel yesterday. It was Saturday, so that she was at home. I had her
home number, but she also gave me her office number, and she said that you
should call either one. She has a part-time secretary at her office, but she
answers telephone calls herself. She says that it makes her clients feel better.
What kind of clients?
She is a divorce lawyer, and
she represents the women.
Not an easy job.
No, Hanna said with a sigh.
Heroic, in fact, in view of how divorce is done in Israel. You know about
that, I suppose.
Yes, Miki said, echoing Hannas
sigh. Men who are completely secular using rabbinical law to their advantage.
That strange state of ours,
Hanna said in Hebrew. But enough of that, she went on in German as the music
became allegro molto. I have a slip of paper for you, with both
telephone numbers the home number is the upper one and she will be
expecting your call, whenever you get there. She fished the slip out of her
purse and Miki, taking his right hand off the steering wheel, took it and put
it in his shirt pocket.
Thank you, Hanna, he said.
They were silent again. As
the music was ending, and the car clocks hour hand was approaching six, the
airport signs came into view.
* * *
The shooting of La Grande paix, originally scheduled
to span the summer, continued well into the autumn because of various delays,
one of which was due to a strike by French cinema workers. Hetty had warned
Brigitte that such delays were likely and advised her to forgo any acting
commitments before the end of the year. Brigitte and Miki also had to forgo
taking a summer vacation, except for a few days of hiking in the Vosges while
she took a break from filming on location.
Mikis first reflection on
the Eichmann trial dealt with words. He gave due credit to the coverage in Time
as well as in his own Die Zeit, and pointed out the identical meaning of
the two weeklies names. But mainly he dealt with the contradictions in the
word Holocaust, which, he noticed, was not unique to Time but was
fast gaining acceptance in the American press as the catchphrase for the Jewish
experience under the Nazis. He expressed his hope that the word would not gain
similar acceptance in German. He also noted that the Hebrew word Shoah,
which had become official in Israel, had been criticized there too. One of the
bases for the criticism was its vague meaning (it could be translated as
storm as in Proverbs, destruction or ruin as in Psalms, and desolation
as in Job). Another, given by the right-wing poet Uri Zvi Greenberg, was that
it described something like a natural disaster and not a link in the endless
chain of massacres of Jews. For himself, Miki concluded, what he had survived
was simply a war: Hitlers war against the Jews, one of the many fronts of the
Second World War, distinguished from the others only by the fact that the
enemy was unarmed and offered no resistance.
After Words Around
Eichmann had been published, he followed up on his first article about the
Peace Corps with a second one at the beginning of September, when the first
volunteers left for Africa. But an unforeseen incident in October piqued the
worlds attention: a volunteer in Nigeria had written a postcard to her
boyfriend at home in which she made a remark about the country referring to primitive
living conditions that she thought sympathetic (she had added, We had no idea what underdeveloped meant.
It really is a revelation and after we got over the initial horrified shock, a
very rewarding experience).
The postcard, however, was never mailed. It was found by Nigerian students, who
read it as an insult to their nation that provoked them to protest the program.
There, in a nutshell, was that American naiveté that he had warned about.
He read about the incident,
and sketched the article he was going to write about it, in his hotel room in
Tübingen, where he was covering an altogether different event: a debate between
the representatives of the Frankfurt School, Adorno and Habermas (who had just
become an associate professor at Heidelberg), and their critics, foremost among
whom were Karl Popper, Hans Albert, and Poppers student Dahrendorf. While the
debate dealt ostensibly with the methodology of the social sciences, its tone
was in fact far more philosophical than sociological: the concern was whether
method is to be grounded in dialectic (as Adorno advocated) or in epistemology,
an approach that Adorno dismissed as positivist.
Except in the narrow academic
world of social philosophers, the event was not regarded as an important one.
It was Dahrendorf who brought it to the Countesss attention. Since it was
known that Miki Wilner had a doctorate in philosophy and had in fact spent a
year in Frankfurt, where he had studied under Adorno and had met Habermas and
Dahrendorf, but was not himself an academic philosopher who might take sides in
the debate, it seemed natural to ask him to write about it. Miki did not mind,
but felt grateful to fate for having taken him out of the academic world.
The aftermath of the postcard
incident was not covered in the German press, but Miki was able to read about
in the Herald Tribune on returning to Hamburg the following week, after
spending two nights and two days with Brigitte, on a break from her location
shoot, in Strasbourg. It turned out that after the Peace Corps volunteers had
been ostracized by the Nigerian students at Ibadan University, one the
volunteers, who had had training and
experience in nonviolent resistance, told the Nigerian students in his dorm
that he would not eat if he couldnt eat with them. Other volunteers
followed suit. The students soon relented, and a reconciliation ensued. The
resolution, Miki wrote, boded well for the future of the Peace Corps.
In November, however, Kennedy
did something that belied the peaceful promise of the Peace Corps: he sent
18,000 military advisers to Vietnam in order to buttress the repressive
government of Ngo Dinh Diem, who like Kennedy was a Catholic, but in a mostly
Buddhist country. This action was a matter of high-level international politics
and as such was analyzed by the Countess. Mikis article dealt only with the
contrast between it and the Peace Corps.
Brigitte finally came home
mid-November. She was physically
exhausted, but eager to get back on the stage. Hetty had arranged with Ida Ehre
to give Brigitte a guest role as Joan of Arc in the Kammerspieles production
of Anouilhs The Lark, for which rehearsals would begin in January.
It was only at the beginning
of December that Miki and Brigitte at last found time to take a two-week vacation.
They decided to go to Italy, which was still sunny while Northern Germany was
already cold and rainy. And Miki had wanted to attend the founding conference
of the Association of European Journalists, which took place in San Remo.
They returned in time for
Miki to learn of two events in the world of justice: In Albany, Georgia, Martin
Luther King had been arrested along with hundreds of peaceful demonstrators
against segregation. In Jerusalem, Adolf Eichmann had been sentenced to die by
hanging.
* * *
When Miki returned home from the airport, he found
Brigitte already up and about. It was just as well; her period, which had come
four or five days later than calculated, was not over yet, and there would have
been no point in going back to bed.
She had canceled her plan to
get together with her friends, she told him.
Thank you, he said. Your
company will be lovely, but I still have several pages to write.
When do you want to do
that?
In the afternoon.
What time are you going to
Stuttgart?
Im taking the
twenty-two-fifteen night train from Altona to Frankfurt, and then the express
to Stuttgart from there.
In that case, can you make
it the late afternoon? Then we could drive out to the country somewhere and
have a village lunch.
How about Haselau? Its
close, and we havent been there since you filmed Germelshausen. The
food at the inn there was delicious, as I remember.
Yes, I remember that, too. I
just hope that if the people recognize me, they will forgive all the disruption
that we caused with the filming.
Yes, Miki said with a
laugh, all the disruption that you caused to their necks when they craned them
to get a glimpse of you. When she also laughed, he went on. I somehow dont
think that a film crew would be much of a bother for people who are used to
floods that break dikes and that bury villages under water.
All right, Brigitte said.
Ill drive, with the top down. With her sunglasses and the kerchief that left
her blond fringes and ponytail sway freely, she reminded him of photographs of
Grace Kelly.
* * *
Rehearsals of The Lark were going on intensely up
to the very last days before the scheduled dress rehearsal. The plays strange
ending was still causing problems. The dénouement, in which Joan is suddenly freed
from the stake in order for the coronation of Charles VII to take place, was
not proceeding to the directors satisfaction. The sudden entrance of
Beaudricourt shouting Stop! Stop! Stop! was not producing the desired shock.
And then came the North Sea
flood.
By the dress rehearsal on
Saturday, a model for decisive demeanor had been set by Helmut Schmidts action
of mobilizing the Bundeswehr to help save the victims. The actor playing
Beaudricourt based his entrance on Schmidts appearance on television, firmly
calling for help from all over Europe. He did not shout his
Stop! Stop! Stop! but said it in a calm
and measured voice. The effect was more profound than the shock that the
director had been aiming at.
None of the citys
dignitaries attended the premiere; to do so would have been seen as frivolous.
A statement from Mayor Nevermann was read before the curtain. But the audience
seemed to recognize, in the final rescue scene, an echo of what the city had
just gone through.
The Lark played to sold-out
houses until the end of its run, in March.
Because of the autumns
shooting delays, which were followed by further delays in postproduction, the
Paris premiere of La Grande paix, originally scheduled for December in
order to qualify for the Grand Prix du Cinéma Français, did not take place
until April. That fortuitous fact gave Brigitte a motive for adding April in
Paris to her growing repertoire of Broadway songs.
The delay in releasing La
Grande paix proved fortunate for the films commercial success. The critics
who had been championing the nouvelle vague of French film and several
of them were also among its leading filmmakers dismissed it as being
old-fashioned filmmaking, du cinéma de papa. Some even condemned it as a
second-rate remake of La Grande illusion, although, except for the First
World War setting, the two films had little in common; La Grande paix
was, first and foremost, a love story. But, coming as it did on the heels of
the Evian Accord that at long last put an end to the Algerian War, the film
found a French public that, tired of the wars turmoil (and the nouvelle
vague spoke precisely to that turmoil), was just in the right mood to
receive it warmly. And as the film was released in the provinces, the critics
of the provincial press came to defend it, timidly at first, against the
assaults of their haughty Parisian colleagues.
The premiere gave Miki and
Brigitte the opportunity of spending a few days in Paris again, though the days
coincided with Brigittes period and were not favorable to a reprise of the
romantic interlude that now lay eight years in the past.
When they returned to Hamburg
and had dinner with Helmut and Margot, their friends told them that The Beatles
were back for the third time and that they were performing at a brand-new place
called the Star-Club. You missed them at the Indra, at the Kaiserkeller, and
at the Top Ten, Helmut said. This may be the last time, so no more excuses!
* * *
Any fears Miki might have harbored that, in the two or
three years since the release of Germelshausen, Haselau had been turned
into a kind of theme park based on the film were allayed when they arrived in
the village, half an hour after leaving home. On this Sunday morning in August,
not one person could be seen walking along the villages three or four streets.
There were, however, cars
parked along the main street, which was shared by the church and the inn.
Evidently there were people in both places.
They parked in front of the inn and entered to have some coffee. A
young couple, seemingly the new generation of owners, were in charge. They
greeted Brigitte and Miki with friendly smiles that said, We know who you are
but we wont make a fuss.
A walk through the Haseldorf
marsh was pleasant, with the breeze from the Elbe mitigating the effects of the
heat, and lunch was delicious. Brigitte ordered a house specialty, fish fried
with bacon, but Miki insisted to the host that, being in Holstein, he should
have schnitzel à la Holstein, even though it was not on the menu. The host
explained that the dish was not named for the region but for the Prussian
diplomat of that name, a Baron von Holstein, who was a native of Brandenburg.
Miki of course knew that, but feigned ignorance and loudly proposed that the
recipe had probably been in the barons family for generations, dating back to
its roots in Holstein. As the host went on earnestly explaining that neither
capers nor anchovies were native to the North Sea region, Brigitte, familiar as
she was with Mikis sense of humor, began to laugh heartily. The host finally
grasped that Miki was joking and joined in the laughter, but admitted that he
had seen Herr Wilner interviewed on television and always found him so serious
that he was not prepared for the joke. I wish I could joke about the things
that they ask me about, Miki said, but theyre a little too serious. He
ordered roast beef, provided it was from Holstein cattle. The host assured him
that it was he had entered into the joking spirit, rightly assuming that Miki
knew that the breed called Holstein was really from North America and was used
for milk, not meat and promised that henceforth the inn would have schnitzel
à la Holstein on the menu.
After lunch they took another
walk, through the ash-tree-lined avenue of the old hamlet of Bishorst, most of
which now lay under the Elbe, and on the dike along the great river. The Alster
Express, a Hapag container ship that had been launched with great pomp the year
before, was steaming upstream toward Hamburg. In a few weeks, when the merger
of Hapag and North German Lloyd was complete, the lettering on the ships side
would be changed to Hapag-Lloyd.
* * *
The summer of 1962 was when the young Wilners, enjoying
success in their chosen professions, could finally take an extended trip
together, and travel in a style that they now could well afford. It would be
six weeks long the second half of July and most of August and it would be
in the Anglo-Saxon world: Great Britain, the United States, and Canada, where
they would help Leon celebrate his fifty-fifth birthday. For Miki it would be a
working vacation, since he would be on the lookout for events and movements to
write about, and take notes for articles that he would write on his return. The
only project that he was certain of would be a side trip from Montreal to
Quebec, where he would interview the officials of the Quebec Liberal Party who
were now in power in the province, including, if possible, the premier, Jean
Lesage. He wanted a sense of the orientation that Quebecois nationalism was
following: was it ethnic or territorial? Or, in Seipels terms, eastern or
western?
Thinking about Quebec City
inevitably brought to his mind the memory of Louise, his flirtatious fellow
passenger on the Gripsholm. Would he run into her? And, if so, would they
recognize each other after twelve years? Quebec was not a particularly large
city, smaller than Hanover, and running into Louise was far more likely than,
for example, running into Helen in London.
He tried to understand why
the thought of running into women whom he had known briefly, and with whom he
had had no involvement, was bothering him. He had, after all, told Brigitte
about them, and it would be a simple matter to say something like Hello,
this is my wife, Brigitte or Bonjour, cest ma femme, Brigitte. But
he found a source of anxiety in the fact that he had once felt glimmers of
desire for women other than Brigitte.
He then remembered that, yes,
he had told Brigitte about Helen, but no, he had not told her about Louise. The
fact that his memory could so deceive him bothered him, too.
Brigitte, for her part, had
no worries to spoil her vacation. There were no impending work commitments: she
was floating on the wake of three successful films, and the series of
television films for which she had signed a contract with NDR, lucratively
negotiated by Hetty, would not begin shooting before late September.
It would also be refreshing
for her to be stepping outside the German-speaking world, into a universe where
she was not known as a star. But, having seen North by Northwest, and
deciding that some day she would play Eva Marie Saints role in a German
version of the film, she insisted that in New York they stay at the Plaza
Hotel, precisely in the kind of suite that Hollywood stars stayed at.
Miki was happy playing travel
agent again, using Die Zeits telex equipment for the purpose.
* * *
After returning from Haselau he packed for his trip: a
duffel bag with two changes of clothing and some toiletries, and the thin
briefcase that would contain an A4 writing pad and the completed
typescript. He debated whether to take
his portable typewriter, but decided against it. Since he was traveling light,
he decided that he would not burden the tired Brigitte beyond driving him to
the Blankenese station, where he would take the S-Bahn to Altona in order to
board the night train there.
The excursion had dissipated
much of the anxiety he had felt. He was now relaxed and knew that, before
dinner, he would have the essay finished.
The previous evenings dinner
conversation gave him an easy lead-in.
There are
pockets of anti-Zionism, even fanatical ones, in the Jewish community, both in
Israel and the Diaspora. But their fanaticism is not postmodern, or even modern
in the sense of being rationally based on political realities. It is premodern,
motivated by the firmly held belief that no Jewish state can be formed before
the coming of the Messiah, and it is no surprise that its exponents are to be
found among the ultra-Orthodox, whether Hasidic (especially the followers of
the rebbe from Satmar) or non-Hasidic (the organization known as Neturei
Karta).
A modern form of
religiously based anti-Zionism can be found in the Diaspora, and especially in
the West, among those Jews who see Jewishness as a purely religious
manifestation and deny the existence of a national Jewish identity, and hence
see no need for a Jewish homeland. This was the case, especially before the
founding of Israel, among the Reform Jews of North America. There are even
those, like Hillel Kook (alias Peter Bergson), who concede this case by using
Hebrew as the term for those who are Jews in the purely national sense.
Fifteen pages
done. He pressed on.
Another
nonfanatical form of anti-Zionism is that propounded by the advocates whether
Jewish, Arab or neither of a binational state in Palestine. While this form
may be regarded as modern in its conception (it has been held by such prominent
thinkers as Martin Buber and Judah Leon Magnes), in practical terms it must be
called romantic, based as it is on the notion that such two traditionally
hostile ethnic nations as Arabs and Jews can live peacefully side by side
within the confines of a single state. We need only observe the situation in
Cyprus (especially since the Greek colonels coup of 1967) and Malaysia
(witness last years race riots in Kuala Lumpur) to see how naïve this idea is.
At this time, the only functioning binational state is Czechoslovakia, and this
is a state in which the two nations have no tradition of mutual hostility and
are culturally very close, and in which, since last year, each of the two has
its own republic. Before that, as in every such situation where one nation is
stronger (demographically, economically, militarily) than the other, the
Slovaks complained of unequal treatment by the Czechs. Thirty years ago they
took advantage of the Nazi conquest to get a state of their own, and there is
no reason to suppose that, should the circumstances change, they will not try
to do so again.
We have come, at last, to
the anti-Zionist movement par excellence: the one comprised of the many
organizations whose goal is the liberation of Palestine.
This is, in reality, a
tangled web of movements with modern, postmodern and even premodern
characteristics. What they have in common is an adamant refusal to acknowledge
the existence of Israel as a state. To the extent that the reality of Israel
must be dealt with, it is called the Zionist entity, a usage that is, in
fact, common throughout the Arab and Muslim world.
The Palestine Liberation
Organization, in its original form, may be regarded as representing a modern
form of Arab anti-Zionism. It was not founded as a popular movement of
Palestinian Arabs but as an organ of the Arab League. Its chief sponsor was
Nasser, and its organizer and first leader was Ahmad Shuqairi, a lawyer who
acted as the representative of Palestine to the League, but who is a
Lebanese-born pan-Arabist (the son of a Palestinian father of Egyptian origin
and a Turkish mother) and has at various times also represented Syria and Saudi
Arabia at the United Nations. As fanatical as he sometimes may sound (he has
spoken of throwing the Jews into the sea), he is a thoroughly modern man.
He had begun
page 17. He stopped typing, got up from his chair and walked around his study
before returning to the desk. Out of his binder he pulled his three copies of
the Palestinian National Covenant, in the Arabic original and in English and
German translations, and glanced at them alternately as he resumed his typing.
The basis of
the formation of the PLO is laid out in Article 8 of the Palestinian National
Covenant, which is its charter, as follows: The phase in which the people of
Palestine is living is that of national struggle for the liberation of
Palestine. And the goal is clearly spelled out in Article 15: The liberation
of Palestine, from the Arab viewpoint, is a national duty to repulse the
Zionist, Imperialist invasion from the great Arab homeland and to purge the
Zionist presence from Palestine. Its full responsibility falls upon the Arab
nation, peoples and governments, with the Palestinian Arab people at their
head.
Now, he said to
himself as he leaned back in his chair, let me show off my newly acquired
knowledge of Arabic.
But it should
be pointed out that Arabic has two words that are rendered in Western languages
as national, because of the peculiarly Western conflation of nation and
state. The one that occurs in Article 8 is watani, which has a
territorial sense (watan means homeland), while the one in Article 15
is qawmi, which has an ethnic one (qawm means people). The
Covenant thus expresses simultaneously two nationalisms: a Palestinian one (wataniyya)
and a pan-Arab one (qawmiyya). It seeks, in Article 18, for the Arab
Palestinian people to exercise wataniyya sovereignty and qawmiyya
freedom. But it is clear that the former is subordinate to the latter, as
evidenced by the fact that neither Egypt nor Jordan ever made any offer of
sovereignty for the parts of Palestine that they controlled until 1967.
Curiously, while Article 5
defines the Palestinians as the Arab citizens who were living permanently in
Palestine until 1947, Article 6 concedes that Jews who were living permanently
in Palestine until the beginning of the Zionist invasion will be considered
Palestinians, with the Zionist invasion considered to have begun in 1917.
This setting of a specific date and the implied consequence that the Jews who
do not meet it will be thrown into the sea is eerily reminiscent of the fractions of Jewish blood that were
specified in the Nuremberg laws, and the Covenant itself unwittingly provides
the reminder by calling Zionism (in Article 22) fascist and Nazi in its means.
He had begun
page 18, and he knew that he was in the homestretch. He probably would not need
more than one sheet, at most two, after this one.
He got up to stretch his limbs again and, suddenly struck by a
parenthetical thought, he sat down again and resumed.
The notion of
a Palestinian identity, incidentally, is so new that only two years ago, when
Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, his killer, Sirhan Sirhan, a Christian Arab
native of Jerusalem, was generally described in the media even the Arab media
as a Jordanian.
Parallel to the official
and modern PLO, a number of other nationalist organizations formed among
Palestinian refugees in Lebanon and the Gulf States, and these may be regarded
as postmodern. Foremost among them is Fatah (the name is a reverse acronym for
Palestinian National [watani] Liberation Movement), founded in Kuwait
in the late 1950s and led by Yasir Arafat.
About the same time, the
Palestine Liberation Front was formed in Syria. Near the end of 1967 it merged
with those Palestinians who, under the leadership of George Habash, had
previously been active in the Arab Nationalist (qawmiyyin) Movement a
pan-Arabist movement whose intellectual leader is Constantin Zureiq but who
were disenchanted with its modern, rationally oriented pan-Arabism, to form the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Since then, as is typical with
postmodern movements, splinter groups have broken off (PFLP-General Command,
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine), variously calling themselves
Socialist, Marxist-Leninist and Maoist.
The disenchantment with
pan-Arabism in the wake of the Arab states defeat in the Six-Day War was
common to most Palestinians. Shuqairi resigned as president of the PLO, and
after Fatah and PFLP joined the organization in 1968, their postmodern views
came to dominate it. The phrase Armed
struggle is the only way of liberating Palestine was added to the Covenant,
and early in 1969 Arafat was elected chairman of the PLO. At present the
ideology of Fatah is the dominant one.
He began page
19. He felt like a marathon runner nearing the finish line.
Just a few
weeks ago Arafat declared, Our
basic aim is to liberate the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan
River. We are not concerned with what took place in June 1967 or in eliminating
the consequences of the June war. The Palestinian revolutions basic concern is
the uprooting of the Zionist entity from our land and liberating it.
The notion of uprooting by means of armed struggle a state that,
whether one calls it Israel or the Zionist entity, has managed to defeat by
conventional military means the armies of all the states surrounding it (not to
mention the great likelihood, according to what we have been learning during
the past two years, that it has nuclear weaponry as well) is so absurd that it
can be attributed only to an ideology in which the attainment of goals is
irrelevant, and the only thing that matters is the process. This, in a
nutshell, is the essence of postmodern fanaticism.
As someone who wishes the Palestinian Arab people well and hopes to see
them living in a state of their own at peace with Israel, I can only despair at
how their cause has been turned from a tool of pan-Arabism to the plaything of
postmodern fanatics.
It was time for a conclusion.
He would try to keep it brief.
There remains the
question: where do the postmodern fanatics, the kind who are likely to engage
in terrorist action, come from? And that question brings up a related one: why
has the past decade been so propitious to the formation of postmodern fanatical
movements?
Earlier on, I suggested
that a modern fanatic may be molded from a dissatisfied mass-man. This is the
kind of fanatic who attends mass rallies and marches in goosestep to fulfill
his leaders commands.
But what leads educated
young people to join clandestine cells in which they play at guerrilla warfare?
The answer to
the question would need a page of its own. After writing 19 on the last one, he
went on.
The answer
would seem to be that here, too, there is disenchantment at work
disenchantment with modern ideologies such as bourgeois democracy, state
nationalism and pan-Arabism. What has happened, specifically, in the 1960s is
that the line between culture and politics has been blurred, and the crisis of
modernity that cultural critics have been trumpeting has spilled over into the
political arena. We may expect to live with the results of this spillover for
generations to come.
This is it, he said
to himself. He returned the carriage a few times and typed his name before
unrolling the last sheet from the platen. He penciled in the number 20 and
turned the switch off. He got up and placed the whole sheaf in his briefcase,
closed its latch and put it on top of the duffel bag that lay on the floor
beside the door of the study.
It was past seven oclock,
and it was getting dark outside. As he opened the door he wondered what
Brigitte was doing. There was no sign of her downstairs. The only sound he heard
was the television in Frau Schmidts room. The kitchen table was set for
dinner. He thought that a light dinner perhaps some cold slices of the
leftover breast of veal would be nice after the very filling country lunch.
He went upstairs. The bedroom,
its door open, was empty, as were the guestrooms. The only closed door was that
of Brigittes room. He opened it softly, and saw that she was curled up on the
sofa, sleeping gently. On her chest was the open script.
The thought of looking at it
surreptitiously while she slept flew into his mind, and flew right back out. He
began to tiptoe back out of the room, but he heard her stir, and then he heard
her close the script with a slam of the pages.
You looked at the script,
didnt you? she said in mock anger.
I read the whole thing, he
said. Now I know everything about your series. Ill sell the information to Bild-Zeitung.
Springer will love you, she
said with a laugh as she sat up. He sat beside her and they nuzzled for a few
minutes. What time shall I take you to the station? she asked.
Half ten is fine, he said.
Then lets eat. Im hungry.
She kissed him again, biting his lower lip.
Wait, he said. The lip
isnt cooked yet.
So what are we having?
Breast, he said as he undid
her negligee and slid his mouth down from her neck. She pulled away from him.
This breast isnt cooked
either, she said and stood up. Lets
have the one thats in the refrigerator.
* * *
The recent introduction of nonstop travel by jet airplane
over numerous time zones brought with it a condition that, in 1962, had not yet
received the succinct name of jet lag, but was already talked about by
long-distance travelers.
It turned out to affect
Brigitte and Miki Wilner in opposite ways. When their BOAC Boeing 707 landed at
Idlewild Airport it was early afternoon, but Mikis body had already passed a
long waking day, and by the time they arrived at their suite in the Plaza Hotel
he collapsed on the bed and fell asleep. Brigitte, meanwhile, was full of energy
and excitement, which she could quell only by watching color television, for
the first time in her life, in the suites parlor.
Hunger woke him up in time
for dinner, but afterwards, having drunk perhaps a little too much wine, he was
too tired to accompany Brigitte to the Persian Room to hear Kitty Kallen
perform. She insisted on going, alone if necessary.
He woke up when she came back
to the suite, somewhat tipsy. She began to undress, and when she saw that he
was awake, she began singing.
If a custom-tailored vet
Asks me out for something wet,
When the vet begins to pet, I cry
Hooray!
But I'm always true to you, darlin',
in my fashion,
Yes, I'm always true to you,
darlin', in my way.
He had not closed the drapes,
but there was no moon that night, and the slivers of light from neighboring
skyscrapers gave her naked body, swaying to the rhythm of her song, only the
slightest illumination, just enough to stimulate in him a powerful erection.
When she began the second stanza, I enjoy a tender pass / By the boss of
Boston, Mass., she was close enough to the bed that he could reach out and
grab her arm. She laughed and exclaimed, This isnt a tender pass! but
gave in readily.
By the next evening, when
they went to see the musical I Can Get It for You Wholesale, he was
almost on a normal schedule. He felt a little sleepy when the third act began,
but the singing of Miss Marmelstein by a young singer-actress named
Barbra (not Barbara!) Streisand got him fully awake and ready to enjoy the rest
of the evening.
The effect was the opposite
on the way back. They had decided ahead of time that their return from Montreal
would be on Air France to Paris, where they would spend a night commemorating
their first foreign trip together, eight years earlier, before taking the night
train to Hamburg. Their recent few days of April in Paris did not count.
Miki had a café noisette
with his croissant at Orly while they waited for their bags, and, with the help
of several more in the course of the day, he managed to keep himself awake
until ten in the evening and to achieve a normal nights sleep. Brigitte, on
the other hand, could barely stay on her feet during their visit of the Louvre,
and in the afternoon it was her turn to collapse in the hotel, only to pass a
restless night next to her peacefully sleeping husband.
The following day was rainy,
and Brigitte spent much of it taking catnaps, while Miki looked over the notes
with which had filled his A6 notebook. As he looked over the events of the
trip, he realized that he had material for at least ten articles.
First, he thought of the
personalities who had taken part in events that he had, more or less,
witnessed. On the eve of their departure from London he had seen, on BBC
television, the rally of the British fascists at which their leader, Oswald
Mosley, was attacked by a crowd of (mostly Jewish, Miki thought) protesters.
Two days later, in New York, he saw on television the press conference at which
John F. Kennedy first mentioned the suspicion of Soviet missiles in Cuba. He
arrived in Los Angeles, after two days in New Orleans during which tried to get
a sense of the South in the midst of the civil-rights struggle, on the morning
when the news of the discovery of Marilyn Monroes body broke through the radio
broadcasts. Not long afterwards, he could see in another television newscast
this time in San Francisco the dejected figure of Martin Luther King as he
was leaving Albany (Georgia) after the second failure of his protest movement
there. Finally, there was Jean Lesage, whom he managed to interview in person
in Quebec. Each one of the five was worthy of an extended personality sketch.
He could then branch off and
write more general essays about movements associated with each of the five:
British and perhaps, more generally, European fascism; the future of
relations between the United States, Cuba and the Soviet Union; changes in
American culture; the civil-rights movement; and the Quiet Revolution in
Quebec.
And then there was Leon. Some
day, Miki thought, he would write about his uncle. Perhaps even a book. But
when would that be? Dont write about me while Im alive, Leon had joked to
him. Or was he joking? Leon seemed to have aged quite a bit in the four years
since their meeting in London, and to Brigitte, who had not seen him in a
decade, he looked older by a generation.
Leon had changed in other
ways as well. He was not only a rich man, but lived like one. The house was the
same one that Miki had visited eight years before, but it had been greatly
enlarged and renovated, and it now featured fully appointed guest quarters
where Miki and Brigitte stayed above the two-car garage. The cars in the
garage were a Cadillac (Leons) and a Lincoln Continental (Felas).
Leon was also a member, and a
leading member at that, of a synagogue, of a North American type known as
Conservative, blending a modern outlook with traditional ritual. The rabbi was
quadrilingual in English, French, Hebrew and Yiddish and did not hesitate
to use all four languages when addressing the congregation. And Leons speech,
in whatever language, was peppered with Hebrew phrases referring to God, in
which the word God was, in honor of the Second Commandment, replaced by the
name, so that thank God would be barukh ha-shem (blessed be the name)
and God willing would be im yirtzeh ha-shem (if the name wills). But
while Leon recited his prayers in the synagogue with a modern Hebrew
pronunciation as was the custom there, though not obeyed by most of the older
members he said those phrases in the old Polish Ashkenazi way: burekhashem,
myertzeshem. The latter phrase stirred in Miki a long-buried memory: he
remembered hearing it spoken by the adults around him, at the beginning of the
war, when referring to their hopes of survival, and thinking that it was a
Polish phrase made up of words he didnt know mierce szem.
Leon used both phrases
abundantly when answering in the rosiest of terms inquiries about his
health, but on their last day together he handed Miki a large sealed envelope that,
Leon said, contained his will, and that Miki was not to unseal until the right
time. Au moment juste was how Leon put it, having resumed his
French-speaking habits when Lesages secularist Quebec Liberal Party replaced
the very Catholic Union Nationale in power. Under the Liberals, Leon
said, it was possible for him to be a French Canadian Jew, not merely a Jew who
happened to live in the Province of Quebec. His newfound identity, he further
told Miki, made it easier for him to accept his nephews being a West German.
That declaration, Miki
thought as he listened to the voice of Charles Aznavour singing Tu exag`res on
the Paris radio, was worth an article on its own.
The night ride in the
sleeping car to Hamburg proved restful for both of them, and they arrived at
their apartment feeling fresh. Miki felt his fingers itching for the feel of
his typewriter keys.
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