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 Hanna’s 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 car’s 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 Nili’s supposed daughter made it intriguing, and your being prevented from leaving Germany made it a little frightening. These things happen in Israel, but I didn’t think they would happen in the new Germany.”

“They even happen in England and America,” Miki said, “when there is a police investigation involved. I’ve seen television shows about it.”

“Let’s hope that it’s just a routine matter that will be settled quickly, and that you can come and visit us again soon, and this time you won’t 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 Hanna’s 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 clock’s 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.

Miki’s 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: Hitler’s 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 world’s 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 Popper’s 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 Countess’s 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 couldn’t 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. Miki’s 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 Kammerspiele’s production of Anouilh’s 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?”

“I’m 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? It’s close, and we haven’t 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 don’t 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. “I’ll 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 play’s 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 director’s 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 Schmidt’s action of mobilizing the Bundeswehr to help save the victims. The actor playing Beaudricourt based his entrance on Schmidt’s 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 city’s 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 autumn’s 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 film’s 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 war’s 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 Brigitte’s 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 village’s 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 won’t 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 baron’s 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 Miki’s 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 they’re 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 ship’s 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 Seipel’s 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, c’est 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 Saint’s 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 Zeit’s 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 evening’s 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 year’s 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 revolution’s 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 leader’s 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 o’clock, 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 Schmidt’s 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 Brigitte’s 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, didn’t you?” she said in mock anger.

“I read the whole thing,” he said. “Now I know everything about your series. I’ll 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 let’s eat. I’m hungry.” She kissed him again, biting his lower lip.

“Wait,” he said. “The lip isn’t 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 isn’t cooked either,” she said and stood up. “Let’s have the one that’s 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 Miki’s 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 suite’s 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 isn’t 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 night’s 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 Monroe’s 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? “Don’t write about me while I’m 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 (Leon’s) and a Lincoln Continental (Fela’s).

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 Leon’s 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, m’yertzeshem. 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 didn’t 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 Lesage’s 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 nephew’s 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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