14

Wednesday, August 19, 1970

1964-65

She was there to meet him at the Altona station. The hour was quite early by her schedule, but she was already fully made up and coiffed, as though she were going to the studio. The morning was already warm, and she was dressed in white – a simple short-sleeved knee-length dress, seemingly linen, and high-heeled shoes with no stockings – looking very much her spectacular self, and drawing the undisguised attention of the commuters and others gathered on the platform. But a closer look at her face, just before the kiss, revealed the appearance of fatigue. Without having to ask her, he knew that she had not slept any better than he had.

They began to walk out of the station to the parking garage, with his right hand holding his duffel bag and his left arm around her waist. He felt the curve of her hip through the linen of her dress and the silk of her panties, and it felt better than ever. They had been apart three nights, nothing unusual in their busy, peripatetic lives, but this time the time of separation felt especially long, especially since it was a week since her period had come.

“Are you going to work this morning?” he asked her when they reached her car and she opened the passenger door for him. They were the first words spoken by either of them.

She did not answer until she was seated behind the wheel. “Yes,” she said, “but I’m going to be late.” And, before starting the engine, she gave him one of the suggestive looks that were her specialty.

*      *     *

At the end of August, shortly before studio work on The Thirty-Year-Old Woman was to begin, Miki and Brigitte managed to work a weeklong vacation on Norderney into their schedule. This time the weather favored them for the entire week. Brigitte wore a wide-brimmed hat whenever she was out in the sun, because the part that she was to play in the first episode was that of a shy, homebound married woman who was not likely to get much of a suntan.

As was her custom when their took their vacation in August, Brigitte brought scripts to read. Miki, on the other hand, had already submitted two articles that were yet to run, and so he comported himself as a man of leisure. He decided to take some sailing lessons.

In the introductory class the instructor, a grizzled old salt in his fifties, rather proudly announced right off the bat that he was from Juist, not Norderney. He then joked that his people had to worry only about the sharks in the sea, while on Norderney there once had been sharks – loan-sharks – crawling on land, but now they were all gone.

As anti-Semitic humor, the joke was both subtle – since it did not mention the Jews by name – and crude. To the credit of the Germans taking the lesson, no one laughed. Miki felt his insides churning, but said nothing. He listened to the rest of the lesson, learned some of the jargon and basic concepts of sailing, and went to the office of the sailing school to tell the manager that he would not be continuing with the lessons.

Brigitte’s reaction to his report of the incident, later that day, was, “Is that all? Aren’t you going to report the instructor?”

“Report him? For what? For being a bad humorist?”

“No,” Brigitte said indignantly, “for being a damned Nazi. That so-called joke could have come straight from the Stürmer.”

“I know. I’m going to write an article about it.”

“That’s nice, but I’m going to get that instructor fired. I might as well use my star power to do some good. What’s the telephone number of the sailing school?”

“Please, darling…” he began, but he knew that it was useless, and he felt proud of Brigitte. He gave her the school’s brochure and walked out onto the balcony as if he did not want to be present when she made the call.

But of course he heard it through the half-open balcony door. “I am Brigitte Wilner,” he heard her say after she had been put through to the manager. “Do you know who I am?” After it was clear that the manager knew, she went on to tell him that the instructor who had taught the beginning class that morning was a Nazi and had deeply insulted her husband, who had been in that class and who happened to be a Jew. She then listened in silence, and as Miki looked at her in the shadows of the room he could see a satisfied smile come over her beautiful face.

Miki never did write the article about the anti-Semitic sailing instructor of Norderney. He was small potatoes compared to the Nazi criminals whose Frankfurt trial was still dragging on. Nor did Miki want to go on record against jokes at the expense of Jews.

And there were other matters. The presidential election campaign in the United States was heating up, and the two Westerners, Johnson and Goldwater, were not the Countess’s kind of Americans, so that Miki was given more leeway to write about the campaign than if someone like Nelson Rockefeller, whom she knew personally, had been nominated.

A few days after the Wilners’ return to Hamburg, the Johnson campaign released an advertisement on American television – promptly shown on West German newscasts – in which a little girl counted to ten as she plucked the petals off a daisy, when her counting was overwhelmed by a countdown leading to a nuclear explosion, followed by Johnson saying, “These are the stakes… We must either love each other, or we must die.” Now there was something to write about.

Love each other, or die. Johnson’s stark choice made Miki envision The Garden of Earthly Delights. Some day, after Franco had gone the way of Hitler and Mussolini, he would go to Madrid to see the original triptych. He thought of the reproductions he had seen, of the center panel depicting a loving orgy and the right panel with the tortures of hell. But to him the orgy represented hope, not sin.

What was the meaning of the love-or-die message for those who espoused hate, like the accused in Frankfurt?

As he was writing his article about the daisy girl, Miki could not help pondering the fact that it was Brigitte, not he, who had protested about the possibly Nazi sailing instructor. He came to feel that it was not his place as a Jew to protest those manifestations of human hatred that took an anti-Jewish form. He now understood better why Jews like Goodman and Schwerner were risking their lives for the civil rights of others.

*      *     *

He managed to sleep for a couple of hours after Brigitte went to the studio. When he woke up he felt refreshed, though confused by what he remembered of his dream, in which the image of a naked Brigitte alternated with that of a miniskirted Fräulein Bothe.

He pushed the memory aside by thinking about the essay. After he showered and dressed he sat down at his desk and browsed through the photocopy he had made. He made little notations in pencil at the places where some revisions might be made. Not many: no more than one every page or two. In any case, it could wait until he heard from Paeschke.

He needed to reserve a hotel room in Tel Aviv. Staying at the Basel, his favorite, might be too risky, he thought. Even if he were not recognized, the owners were German immigrants who might well identify ‘Etzel Andergast’ as a fictitious name, raising suspicions. He decided on the large, impersonal Hotel Dan. When he telephoned the hotel and told the clerk – in English, of course – that he needed a room for Thursday night and three nights thereafter, he was told that only single rooms were available. That was fine with him, he said. He spelled the name Andergast for the clerk.

He next telephoned Billung and told him only that, if he were to hear any news about Michael Wilner, he need not be concerned. He tried to call Max Schwab, but there was no answer after eight rings. Some day, he said to himself, everybody will have an answerer.

Regarding anyone else who ought to be told, he would leave it to Margot. And Brigitte could tell Margot.

He bicycled into the center of Blankenese and went to his bank, where he withdrew four thousand marks and asked for it to be exchanged for United States dollars. “We don’t have so much foreign currency on hand in our branch, Doctor Wilner,” the teller told him. He was told to come back in a couple of hours, when they would have one thousand dollars for him.

Brigitte was home in time for lunch. As she was about to take her first spoonful of soup, he said, “Tomorrow I’m going to be arrested.”

She put the spoon back in the soup plate and looked at him without a word. He smiled.

“Not really,” he said, “but that’s what will be announced from Stuttgart. I’m involved in a kind of espionage intrigue that perhaps will make a film some day.”

“With a part for me?”

“As my wife, certainly,” he said. He took a spoonful of soup, and she followed suit. “But I don’t know yet,” he went on, “perhaps there is a mystery woman there somewhere that you could play. Anyway, tonight I’m going back yet again to Stuttgart. And what I will tell you next is completely confidential.”

She listened silently, sipping her soup, as he told her a few details of the scheme he was embarking on. He stopped the narration when Frau Schmidt came in to take away the soup plates and serve the grilled fish with potato salad.

He had told Brigitte that he would be traveling under a false identity, but did not specify the name. Brigitte noticed the omission, and as soon as Frau Schmidt was back in the kitchen, she asked, “And what name will you be traveling under?”

Miki hesitated. “My instructions,” he said, “are to tell you the minimum that’s necessary, and I don’t think that my pseudonym is necessary.”

“Of course it is,” she retorted. “What if something happens to you in Israel, and I hear on the news that a German tourist named so-and-so got into such-and-such trouble? How do I know if it’s you or not?”

He had to concede that she was right. “My name,” he said in a conspiratorial whisper, “will be Etzel Andergast.”

“That’s a funny name,” she said, “but it sounds familiar.”

“It should. It’s the title of a novel by Jakob Wassermann. It just came into my head, out of thin air, when they asked me what my name would be. Etzel Andergast is a young man who searches for the truth. His father is a prosecutor, and he believes that one of his father’s cases is a miscarriage of justice. The book Etzel Andergast is actually the second part of a trilogy, after The Maurizius Case. I have most of Wassermann’s books in my library, by the way. You can look them over if you’re interested.”

“Wasn’t there a film of The Maurizius Case?”

“Yes, a French one, about fifteen years ago – no, sixteen. I remember seeing the marquee when we were in Paris in 1954. I don’t know if it ever came to Germany.”

“I think it did. I remember seeing it advertised in Hanover.”

They finished the rest of their meal in silence. After Frau Schmidt had brought them their coffee, Miki asked Brigitte if she needed to go back to the studio.

“No,” she said, “I’m done for today. What would you like to do?”

“It’s Wednesday, isn’t it? I think there’s an organ concert in one of the churches in Lübeck this afternoon.”

“What time is your train tonight?”

“The same as the one I took Sunday: the twenty-two-thirty night train to Frankfurt, then change for Stuttgart.”

“Then we have time. I will drive.”

“Wonderful. But we need to make a little stop at my bank. And, by the way, one more thing. When you have lunch with Margot tomorrow, tell her about this, as discreetly as possible. She will know whom else to tell.”

*      *     *

In the course of the shooting of The Thirty-Year-Old Woman Brigitte actually turned thirty, an event that was duly noted by the press. The party that was held for her at the studio, on the eve of her actual birthday, was covered on television, and Miki could see a fragment of it on the news in his Frankfurt hotel room. The news also reported the recent death of Cole Porter, with a mention of Brigitte Wilner’s success, the previous year, in Kiss Me, Kate.

He returned to Hamburg the next day, in time to have an intimate birthday dinner with her. He had been at the Frankfurt Book Fair, at which the Peace Prize was awarded to Nelly Sachs (whom he had the opportunity of interviewing), and his present for Brigitte was a set of three books. One was Balzac’s Une femme de trente ans, in a handsome new hardcover edition published by Garnier; the second was an antique edition, beautifully bound and illustrated, of Goethe’s Faust; and the third was an American book titled Can This Marriage Be Saved? It took her about ten seconds to grasp its significance: it was the fulfillment of his promise to remind her, when she turned thirty, that she was henceforth mature enough to play a marriage counselor.

A few days later, a new German Western film was released. It was not produced by Brauner but by a Bavarian company, and it was not based on a novel by Karl May but on one by Gerstäcker: The River Pirates of the Mississippi. It starred Sabine Sinjen (who no longer worked for Brauner) and a clumsily dubbed American actor named Brad Harris. Miki and Brigitte went to see it with Helmut and Margot, and they all found the film entertaining. Miki found Sabine Sinjen very pretty, but he could not help thinking how much better and more beautiful Brigitte would have been in the part. In the cinema’s lobby was a poster announcing that a month hence another such Gerstäcker-based film, The Gold Seekers of Arkansas, would be released.

Afterwards they went to a bar for drinks. After Helmut and Margot went home Miki told Brigitte that Gerstäcker had not written only Westerns or other novels with exotic locales, but also some novels and stories that take place in Germany.

“Would there be any with a part for me?” Brigitte asked.

“I’ll be glad to look in the library,” Miki said. The State and University Library of Hamburg made a point of housing every book having to do with Hamburg, and since Gerstäcker was a native of the city, his collected works would certainly be there. “But I remember a little story called Germelshausen, which I may have in my library.”

“Didn’t you once tell me that the musical Brigadoon was based on it?”

“I didn’t tell you; you told me. Or rather, you told me that it was based on a German story, so I made the connection.”

Details, details…

“Anyway,” Miki went on, “it’s about a young artist wandering in the woods when he meets a beautiful girl, who takes him back to her village…”

“I can imagine the rest,” Brigitte said.

“Yes, they fall in love, but actually it’s much simpler than Brigadoon. There are practically no other characters. The girl leads the man out of the village before it disappears because he misses his family.”

“How romantic!”

“Isn’t it? In his other writings Gerstäcker is much more of a realist. But in this story there’s a vivid description of a wild dance party that’s similar to his description of a Fourth of July celebration that he saw in America.”

“It sounds interesting,” Brigitte said. “How old is the girl in the story?”

“Probably eighteen or so. If I remember correctly, Gerstäcker’s beautiful girls are always very young. He seems to have liked them that way. When he was a widower around fifty he married a nineteen-year-old. But in this story age doesn’t really matter.”

“Of course not. Please try to find the book, sweetheart.”

The next day he searched in his library but could not find it there. He found it in a bookstore, a little book of 77 pages printed in 1949, tucked in among the recently issued editions of the novels from which the films had been made. He had it gift-wrapped and presented it to Brigitte as yet another part of his literary birthday present to her.

By the following day Brigitte had read the book and was eager to talk about it over lunch at a restaurant. “You’re right,” she said, “the girl’s age doesn’t matter. In fact she’s quite mature. But talk about realism! How are people supposed to reproduce in that place?”

“They don’t. Do you remember how it happens in Brigadoon? At some point they were frozen in time, and from then on they age by only one day every hundred years.”

“What if a woman conceives on one of those days? Nine months – two hundred seventy days – it would take twenty-seven thousand years for the baby to be born!” She laughed uproariously. The restaurant’s other customers, who of course had recognized her but pretended not to, couldn’t help staring.

“My darling Brigitte,” Miki said softly, “always thinking about sex.”

“I can’t help it,” she said, taking his hands under the table. But she had thought about more than sex. She had thought about conception. He felt the urge to change the subject.

“One way to read the story,” he said, “is that the whole thing is the young man’s dream.”

Brigitte thought for a moment. “Anyway,” she said, “I’ll show it to Hetty, and we’ll see what she thinks.”

Brigitte talked to Hetty about Germelshausen that afternoon, and at dinner she told Miki about the conversation.

“I didn’t have to show Hetty the book. She knows it, and she also knows that Brigadoon is based on it. She explained to me that the composer Fritz Loewe, who is a German Jew, didn’t want to write anything having to do with Germany so soon after the war. She thinks that the story has possibilities, and she will talk to writers and producers about it. But she also said that if I wanted to do another musical, Brigadoon might be a good one for me, not as Fiona but as the other girl, Meg, who in the stage version is just as important. In the film her part was cut down because the American censors thought she was too sexy.”

“Then it sounds like the right part for you,” he said.

She ignored his comment. “Hetty thinks that it would be fabulous if we could do both the film and the musical within the same time period, for example to have Brigadoon running when the film is released, and use one to publicize the other. But this will take some time. For one thing, someone will have to translate Brigadoon, which hasn’t been done in German yet.”

*      *     *

The concert, as he discovered on checking the MoPo’s cultural page, would be at six o’clock in the Jakobikirche, not in the Marienkirche as he had first supposed. This would leave them time to stop in Bad Oldesloe and take a walk through the marshlands of the Brenner Moor.

Brigitte needed a few minutes alone in her room in order to decide what to wear that would be appropriate both for a country walk and a church concert. She emerged in dressy, loose-fitting navy-blue slacks, low-heeled black sandals, and a sky-blue blouse with loose long sleeves that could be smartly rolled up, as they now were. Her blond hair and tawny face combined to give an image of clouds in a landscape of sky and sea.

It was their second country walk together in three days, a most unusual occurrence in their lives. The mood was quite different from what it had been on Sunday. Miki felt excitement over his upcoming quest, but no anxiety, and did not feel like talking much. Brigitte sensed his reticence, and though she would have liked to know more details than what he had told her at lunch, she refrained from asking questions. It was a two-way deal: Miki would have liked to know more about her television series, but knew better than to inquire. And so their conversation on the walk along the pathways of the moor was about wildflowers and birds and dragonflies. It was a novel experience for them, but a pleasant one.

Between snatches of conversation, Miki let himself feel the warm, humid air as a foretaste of what he would experience in Tel Aviv two days hence.

When they arrived in Lübeck, Brigitte parked in a guarded lot outside the old city and they walked through the Holstentor, and along the Holstenstrasse and the Breite Strasse to the church. Along the way they got ice-cream cones: coffee for him, chocolate for her.

They got to the church just as Brigitte was licking the last of her ice cream, and they were seated in a pew at five to six. The sense of timing for which Brigitte is famous, Miki thought, is not limited to her acting.

*      *     *

For his thirtieth birthday Miki also received a book, but not from Brigitte. It was from Margot, and it was not bound but in the form of proofs. Margot had assembled a collection of Miki’s articles from both the MoPo and Die Zeit, from German, West German, Germanian to his reports from the Auschwitz trials. She also had, unbeknownst to Miki, procured a publisher, and a contract all ready for Miki’s signature was included in the gift package.

Leon’s gift was the usual money order, the amount being Miki’s age times one hundred dollars, but this time there were two such money orders in the envelope, one signed by Leon and the other by Fela. This amount, over 22,000 marks, was almost equal to his annual salary, and would be of great help to him in meeting what he saw as his share of their living expenses.

Brigitte’s present was for him an IBM Selectric typewriter, on which she had already typed a page of loving birthday wishes. The machine came with a rolling cart, and Brigitte dramatically rolled the cart into the living room of their apartment, where the small birthday party was being held.

On Brigitte’s insistence, Hetty was at the party too, accompanied by a middle-aged screenwriter named Otto Färber who was one of her clients, and, apparently, her lover of the moment. But Hetty made an announcement: she had sold the idea of a television series based on the marriage counseling idea to ZDF, reserving the rights for an eventual feature film, and Miki would get a writing credit for having proposed the idea. “That isn’t the kind of writing I do!” Miki protested, but Hetty told him not to worry: in this business he didn’t have to do any writing to get credit. In fact, her friend Otto would write the pilot.

Otto explained that the idea of the script was that the marriage counselor to be played by Brigitte, Frau Doktor, was having the same problems with her own marriage as the couples that she counseled, and the humor was in her obliviousness to the similarities.

Hetty added that she knew the main author of the book, “Doctor” Paul Popenoe, who had an institute in Los Angeles. “He isn’t really any kind of doctor,” she explained, “he only has an honorary degree, but he insists on being called Doctor and he introduces himself on the radio with This is Doctor Paul Popenoe. But he gives good advice. Quite a few people in Hollywood go to see him. I went to him with my last husband, and he said quite frankly that our marriage could not be saved, and that I would be better off not marrying again. I have followed that advice.”

The party took place, on Miki’s request, on a Sunday evening several days after his actual birthday, to make sure that Brigitte’s period had ended, because to them no celebration was over until it was completed in bed. But after the guests had left she informed Miki that unfortunately she was still bleeding, and rather profusely at that. He insisted that, if the bleeding did not stop by morning, she call her doctor as soon as possible.

Brigitte did, in fact, call her gynecologist’s office and was told to come in immediately. Miki accompanied her. They took the underground to St. Pauli, because Dr. Severs’ office was located there, and most appropriately so: half of his practice consisted of examining and treating the women who worked in the district’s brothels. The other half comprised middle-class women in conventional marriages and their sometimes – and in recent years, since the introduction of the birth-control pill, more often than not – wayward daughters. Dr. Severs was, in other words, not the kind of doctor who would typically treat a woman of Brigitte Wilner’s status (as was Dr. Heyde, Ida Ehre’s husband), but he had been recommended to her by Dr. Krause in Hanover, who had helped her overcome the menstrual pains of her adolescence and whom she continued to see while living in Göttingen. She even did so during the year in Frankfurt, when she would combine stopovers in Hanover with her occasional weekend trips to Bad Harzburg.

It was during their first year in Hamburg that she began seeing Dr. Severs, who had been a resident together with Dr. Krause and with whom he still exchanged information and performed collaborative studies. He became her regular gynecologist when they moved to Hamburg for good.

When in the wake of Goose-Liesel Brigitte became a star, it became necessary to avoid having her come in through the waiting room. She was given a key for the door through which the doctor and his staff entered the office, and this was how she came in on that day. Miki was made to wait in the doctor’s consulting room, reading the MoPo, while Dr. Severs and a nurse went into the examination room with Brigitte.

They were there for a long time. Miki finished reading the paper and stood up to look at the spines of the books on the doctor’s shelves. To his surprise, they were not all medical books; quite a few were social-science texts.

Finally Dr. Severs came in, sat behind his desk and asked Miki to sit down as well.

“We did some tests,” the doctor said, “and since Frau Wilner’s cervix is quite sensitive, we had to give her some sedation to perform them, and she is still resting.”

“What’s going on?” Miki asked.

“We won’t know all the results for a while. I have given her medication to stop the bleeding. We do know that the blood that she was losing was not menstrual blood, but its makeup is indicative of a certain condition, as are some other symptoms. But there is a problem, and perhaps you can help me with it.”

“How so?”

“You see, the symptoms are consistent with Frau Wilner’s age – they commonly show up around thirty – and with the traumatic experience that she had as a child, but not with her lifestyle.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, my colleagues and I find this condition in prostitutes and in women who have led a, shall we say, Bohemian lifestyle, in other words, in women who have had many sex partners. But I see from the chart that when I first saw Frau Wilner in 1957, she was already married to you.”

“Yes, we were married the previous year.”

“And how long was the relationship before that?”

“Let me think – four years. Since 1952 we have been practically like husband and wife, and even when we were not living together, when she was a student in Hanover, we were never far apart – I was first in Bad Harzburg and then in Göttingen – and we saw each other constantly.”

“In that case,” Dr. Severs said thoughtfully, “I’m going to have to perform more tests, including biopsies.”

“You mean, there’s a possibility of cancer?” Miki said, the alarm evident in his voice.

“As far as I can tell, there is no tumor anywhere, so at worst it’s carcinoma in situ, and that is quite treatable. But it will be necessary to check her uterus and her ovaries, and, depending on how the Pap test comes out, her cervix. But what I need to tell you now is that, at least until her next period and possibly well beyond that, perhaps for several months, there is to be no intercourse. I am not saying no sex, if you know what I mean, but no intercourse.”

“Yes, Herr Doktor, I know what you mean. Thank you very much.”

Of course Miki knew what the doctor meant. But while his and Brigitte’s sexual repertoire comprised a plethora of foreplay and a multiplicity of positions (which she, for the most part, took the lead in assuming), it invariably culminated in penetration. And though she could achieve orgasm in a variety of ways, she never felt satisfied until she received his gift of love inside her body.

At first, the exploration of sex without intercourse was an interesting challenge for both of them, but after three weeks they began to find it quite unsatisfying. Brigitte’s state came more and more to resemble a menstrual period of indefinite duration, and, as during her normal periods, her sexual desire dwindled to nothing.

The results of the Pap test, which came in about then, were inconclusive; they indicated a mild dysplasia, not malignant, but not consistent with the bleeding that she had experienced. More tests would be called for, and the continence would need to continue indefinitely.

Brigitte was still, at this time, filming episodes of The Thirty-Year-Old Woman at NDR. In the one that she was currently working on, her character was a spinsterish high-school teacher who develops a crush on a student, and since the crush remains unconsummated, she felt quite comfortable in the part. But she was beginning to dread her part in the episode that was to follow: a Bohemian artist with a wild love life. Feeling herself sexually unfulfilled, she feared that she would be unable to assume the role fully.

She called Hetty to inform her that she had a medical condition that required continence for an indefinite length of time, and told her of her fears. Hetty, to her surprise, said that she understood her perfectly. “For a visceral actress like you, that’s perfectly natural,” she said. She went on to propose that she, Hetty, would inform NDR that her client would be, for medical reasons, unable to continue with the series for the time being, and that she would ask ZDF to put Marriage Counseling on hold.

“As they say in America, I will ask them to put it on the back burner,” she said.

“Then what can I do?” Brigitte asked.

“Any part where you don’t have sex or aren’t in love with another character. A human character, anyway; with God, it would be okay,” Hetty said with a laugh. “You could do Joan of Arc again as you did so wonderfully in The Lark, but you can also take your pick of Schiller or Shaw.”

“Shaw, of course. I did Saint Joan in Göttingen. I haven’t done Schiller yet.”

“Speaking of Shaw and Anouilh, you could do Eliza in Pygmalion, or Anouilh’s Antigone. There’s also Laura in The Glass Menagerie… all great parts! I could go on and on…”

Brigitte found Hetty’s knowledge of theater truly impressive. “So how do I get these parts?” she asked. “I am not in a theater company any more.”

“But you’re a star, darling. Any company would be thrilled to have you as a guest artist. We have a girl working at HKA, Dani Hartwig, who knows the repertoire of every professional theater in the German-speaking world, even the GDR, though of course we won’t go there.”

“But we’re in the middle of the theater season!”

“You’d be surprised at how much things change. Let Aunt Hetty take care of things, darling. I work for my ten percent.”

“But there is a problem. I am having a series of tests done for my condition, and I can’t be too far from Hamburg.”

“Then we will limit ourselves to Northwest Germany. Shall we keep it to within two or two-and-a-half hours by train, so you can make it to and from rehearsals on the same day? Then we should have Hanover and Osnabrück as the outer limits, or perhaps go as far as Münster and Göttingen?”

“I’d love to work in Göttingen again. I was very happy there.”

“It’s where you got your start as a star, darling. I remember Goose-Liesel. Yes, let’s keep Göttingen on our map. I will put little Dani to work. And I will see what there is in film and television.”

*      *     *

The concert had been superb – Buxtehude, Reinken and Bach on the recently restored great organ – and they were back in Hamburg, beside the main station, a little before nine o’clock. Brigitte made a turn to find a parking space and, miraculously, a space came free just before she drove past it. Their plan had been to find a restaurant to have a little supper before Miki’s trip, but as they got out the car they discovered that it was parked in front of a hotel. It was a two-star, not the kind where they would normally stay, but they looked at each other and with smiles confirmed that their intentions were the same.

The clerk was startled to see Brigitte Wilner standing in front of the desk, but he also recognized her husband, Michael Wilner, from having seen him on television news shows. He was very sorry, but they had only a room with a single bed available. It did not matter, Miki assured him; they needed it only for an hour. He paid in cash, and they walked up the stairs hand in hand.

In the station, on the way to the platform, he bought a sandwich and a bottle of orange juice for his supper, and, once they were standing in front of his sleeping car, he gave Brigitte a long, gentle kiss before he boarded the train without another word. The conductor showed him the way to his compartment, where he ate his sandwich, drank his juice, brushed his teeth and went to bed.

He thought that after the lovely day he had spent with Brigitte he would sleep well, but it turned out to be the usual sleeping-car experience. He managed to sleep only fitfully.

*      *     *

Immediately after he returned to Hamburg from the last session of the Frankfurt trial, after hearing the closing arguments, he received a call from Margot. It was to tell him that, as he already knew, Israel and the Federal Republic would be establishing diplomatic relations. Since Die Zeit did not at the time have a correspondent in Israel, Theo Sommer had suggested at an editorial meeting that Miki, who – as was well known among the staff – spoke Hebrew, should go to Israel to cover the presentation of credentials by the West German ambassador. Afterwards he might as well come back and go to Bonn for the converse event, time permitting. M-M and the Countess had approved the suggestion.

Margot’s matter-of-fact relaying of the assignment gave Miki a feeling verging on panic, as though sleeping demons that he had left behind in Israel might beset him when he set foot there again. Of course he would be there as just another German journalist with a press pass, but what if he were recognized? As someone who had done aliya and then left, just before he was to do his military duty, to settle – of all places – in Germany, he thought that he might be viewed as a kind of deserter. He thought of his kibbutz companions – Tzvi and Ruti and Sara and Yossi and Nili and Moshe and the others – who were now all adults like him, perhaps in positions of responsibility, and whom he might encounter, even in the course of a brief journalistic visit.

These thoughts and feelings went through his mind in a flash as Margot was asking, pro forma, “What do you think?” He might have told her of his misgivings if they had been talking as friends, but she was just doing her job as his editor. He tried to wriggle out of the assignment by telling her that he had not spoken Hebrew in a dozen years and would probably come across as a babbling fool when he tried to do so. It was a lame pretext, and Margot rightly laughed it off.

He resigned himself to accepting the assignment, though he took pains to hide his feeling of resignation from Margot and even to feign some eagerness. The need to be insincere with a good friend like Margot made his stomach churn. After hanging up he wondered if he was meekly obeying his superiors’ orders, like those good Germans in the dock in Frankfurt. Of course not, he said to himself. There is no moral issue here, only personal discomfort.

It was only then that he thought about the older people he had known in Refadim: Hanna, Yitzhak and Shulamit, Tzvi’s parents, Nili’s parents… His mind lingered on Hanna. I wouldn’t mind running into her, he said to himself. Perhaps she will be in Jerusalem for her hairstyling…

With Brigitte in a state that was tantamount to seemingly endless menstruation, Miki prepared himself for yet another series of disturbing dreams, hoping that his anxiety would dissipate by the time of his departure.

But Brigitte had news for him. She had gone to see Dr. Severs after all the tests had been done, and he finally found the diagnosis and the cure. “What is it?” Miki asked, but she answered, “It doesn’t matter, it’s technical.” She went on to tell him that they had to abstain from intercourse for another six months. “But it’s already been three months!” he exclaimed. “Then it will be nine months,” she said laughing, “just like a pregnancy!” Her flippant remark provoked a pang that shot through Miki’s viscera, a momentary reminder that he would never have a child with the woman he loved.

And she had more news. Just as 1963 had been her year of Lois Lane, if only in the Cole Porter version, so this was going to be the year of Joan of Arc, in several versions, and she would accordingly cut her hair short. The Junges Theater in Göttingen was going to revive its Saint Joan production of six years before, with the starring role reprised by the now-famous Brigitte Wilner, in June as a three-week addendum to its regular season. In the following season, she would be in Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans at the Thalia Theater in Hamburg.

The most interesting development, though, was that ARD, in Frankfurt, had made an arrangement with French television to coproduce a series about Joan of Arc starring Myl`ne Demongeot, but De Gaulle had, in Hetty Goldschmidt’s American parlance, put the kibosh on it, insisting that such a production must be purely French. Since ARD had already made an investment in preproduction, it would consequently do a German version on its own, from a point of view that was far less chauvinistically French, and Joan would be none other than Brigitte Wilner. Work would begin in the latter part of August.

The next morning, as they were trying to relax in bed after another night of intimacy without penetration, he told her that he would need to go to Israel in the middle of August, for a week or so, in order to cover the arrival of the first West German ambassador. Her reaction was one of excitement: “Then let’s go there together for a week before that! We can make it our vacation, instead of Norderney! Then I’ll come back to work and you can do your journalism.”

He was taken aback. It made sense to spend their August vacation somewhere other than on Norderney, since to be on that island without making love in their accustomed way seemed inconceivable. But despite the publicity efforts of the Israel Tourism Organization to attract West German visitors to the Holy Land, it had never entered his mind that Israel might, for him, be a vacation destination.

He had told her several times before that he dreaded returning there, though he never gave her a single concise reason. This time he explained to her that he would find the tense, closed-in atmosphere that he remembered even more oppressive than he had then, now that he had some experience of a freer world.

Brigitte acknowledged that she had heard him express his aversion to Israel, but thought that he might be ready to overcome it. “After all,” she said, “you overcame stronger feelings than that in order to become a German.”

“But I had you,” he said, feeling himself well up and taking her in his arms. His desire to enter her was stronger than it had been since the beginning of their forced abstinence, and he had to think about other things in order to keep it in check.

He had an idea. They could have a week’s vacation together before he took on his journalistic duties in Israel, but they would have it in Cyprus.

 

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