15 Thursday, August 20, 1970 1965-66 The train from Frankfurt arrived at Stuttgart a little after eight, and Kriminalkommissar Hagemann was indeed waiting for Miki on the platform. But the inspector’s manner was reticent and brusque, quite unlike the expansiveness of two days before. It could be, Miki thought, that his superiors had not looked kindly on the harebrained scheme that he had allowed Miki to embark on but that they could not now countermand without a loss of credibility for their institution. The Baden-Württemberg State Criminal Office, or LKA, was working hard to build a reputation as a crack crime-fighting force, giving wide publicity to the fact that it was, as of the year before, using electronic data processing to help its work. Hagemann’s greeting to Miki was a perfunctory “Good morning, Herr Wilner,” not followed by any “How are you?” or “How was your trip?” but only by “Would you come with me, please.” Without another word he led him to a waiting car, with its engine running and a plainclothes policeman behind the wheel.. It was only when they got to Hagemann’s office that the inspector began to speak to him, as though he were reading an imaginary checklist. “You will give me all your possessions, please,” he said, “except cash.” “Do I keep my wallet?” “No. I will provide you with one, and it will have your new driver’s license in it.” Miki placed his wallet on the desk, beside his keys, and withdrew the six hundred-dollar bills, six fifty-dollar bills and five twenty-dollar bills from it. Hagemann opened his desk drawer, put Miki’s keys and wallet in it, and took out another wallet – quite similar to Miki’s, only in a brown rather than a light tan shade – and a West German passport, which he opened so that Miki could study the photograph and other data. There it was: Etzel Andergast, single, living at Martinistrasse 46 in Stuttgart, born in Stuttgart on Miki’s birthdate. In the wallet there was an international driver’s license with the same data. “Your flight to Israel,” Hagemann went on, “will also be via Zurich. You will leave from here on Lufthansa at eleven, get to Zurich at eleven-fifty-five, and leave on Swissair at twelve-forty-five, which will get you to Tel Aviv a little after six. You are making your own hotel reservations, isn’t that right?” “Yes,” Miki said, “they’re already made.” “All right,” Hagemann said. “It is now almost nine o’clock. In a few minutes Fräulein Bothe – you remember her – will come in, and she will show you how to use the beard and the wig. At nine-thirty you will already be Etzel Andergast and you will be driven to the airport. If you would like, you can stop at the American Express office to get travelers’ checks.” “No, thanks,” Miki said. “I’d rather use cash.” “Good. Do you have any other questions?” “I don’t think so.” In a distant hallway the clicking sounds of several pairs of high-heeled shoes could be heard. One of them had to be Fräulein Bothe’s. *      *     * They spent a day walking around the center of Nicosia, window-shopping in the many duty-free stores. They each made one exception to the window-shopping. Brigitte bought herself a locally made goatskin handbag, while Miki found a new product that he had heard about but not yet seen: a portable tape recorder, made by Philips, that could run on batteries and used compact cassettes instead of reel-to-reel tapes. He thought that it might be useful in his reporting: he could dictate into it instead of taking notes. They drove around Cyprus for a week, visiting ancient ruins, medieval churches and monasteries, and modern beach and mountain resorts. There was a magical moment one afternoon when they were parked beside a monastery near the island’s eastern tip: the chanting of the monks blended with the song of the birds in the trees of the surrounding grove. He found the first use for his cassette recorder. He was also fascinated by the way the Greeks and Turks seemed to be living together and apart. In Nicosia, the road from the airport to the city center passed through a two-stage checkpoint with, first, blue-helmeted UN forces and then Greek Cypriot police waving them through; Brigitte thought that the license plate might identify their car as a rental vehicle, and he thought that she was right. On the northbound road to Kyrenia, the checkpoint was in three stages, with Turkish soldiers greeting them at the last one, and the sight of them, with the moon-star flag aloft, remained constant, including at the castle of Saint Hilarion. In Kyrenia itself, however, not only Turks and Greeks, but also Armenians and perhaps others seemed to live together without conflict. In Famagusta, on the east coast, a Turkish checkpoint had to be passed in order to go from the modern city, entirely Greek, into the walled old city, entirely Turkish, where the Gothic cathedral was now a mosque. Brigitte pointed out to him that among the Turks hanging out in the square, there were some Negroes, looking almost purely African. “I wonder if they’re descended from Othello,” he suggested. “Not by Desdemona,” she countered, “but he certainly had women before he met her.” In Limassol, on the south coast, he found once again that he could drive through Greek and Turkish quarters with no obvious lines of demarcation between them, except for the abrupt change of the script on the signs between Greek and Latin. On the way back to Nicosia, they stopped in a village in the Troodos Mountains, where they cooled off from the Mediterranean August heat and hiked through pine-filled woods that reminded them of the Harz. They kissed good-bye at Nicosia airport before Brigitte boarded her flight to Frankfurt. An hour later, he was aboard the Cyprus Airways flight that took him back to Israel for the first time in thirteen years. By the time he landed, his first time at Lod airport, his anxiety was still there, but greatly diminished. The Hebrew that he heard spoken around him brought his own knowledge of the language out of hiding, and he caught himself, willy-nilly, thinking in Hebrew again. *      *     * Waiting at the gate at Echterdingen, he began to plot the strategy of his first attempt at non-journalistic investigation. His first contact would of course be Nili. Hanna had told him, when he was driving her to the airport, that she had already contacted her and that Nili would be expecting his call, either at home or at the office. Where would he go from there? That, of course, would depend on what Nili would tell him. But as he tried to explore possible sequels, he found thoughts of Elli Bothe intruding in his mind. “My name is Elli,” she said to him when she closed the door behind them once they were in the mirror-filled room that served as the disguise fitting room, after he had shaken her hand in the hallway and said, “Good morning, Fräulein Bothe.” She was wearing a miniskirt again, not quite as short as the first time, and seemed to be reveling in her sexiness. She probably had a good night with her boyfriend, he was thinking; good for her. But she was teasing Miki the whole time that she was doing her work: the way she stroked his face to make sure that he had shaved closely enough to allow a comfortable fit of the beard; the way she held his hands as she showed him how to put it on and take it off; the way she guided his fingers through the beard’s hair so as to get him used to the texture; the way she did the same things with regard to the wig; and the way she would periodically lean forward to give him an ample view inside her blouse. But, the moment her work was done and he felt himself to be Etzel Andergast – and, in some strange way, no longer Miki Wilner who was married to Brigitte Wilner – her manner changed abruptly. She opened the door, shook his hand formally and said, coldly, “Good-bye, Herr Andergast.” He was somewhat puzzled by her behavior, though he knew that there were women who enjoyed wielding seductive power over men even when there was no possibility of consummation. Brigitte had played a girl like that in The Queen Bee. But he could not help allowing himself the luxury of entertaining, at least for a moment, the possibility that Elli’s attention had been meant specifically for him and did not represent her general pattern of behavior, and that the shift was due to the sudden realization that this wouldn’t go anywhere, that she would probably never see him again. Nonsense, he told himself; male vanity leads us to thinking nonsense. Boarding was announced. Since his seat was near the back of the airplane, he was among the first to board, and on his seat he found, waiting for him, a copy of that morning’s Stuttgarter Nachrichten. He leafed through the paper, page by page, but found no notice regarding the arrest of Michael Wilner. Of course not, he told himself: the police will make the announcement today, so that the news will be in tomorrow’s paper. He wondered if he would be able to get the Friday edition of any German paper in Israel. Perhaps on Sunday, he thought. He went back to the beginning of the paper. Not much of importance seemed to have happened during the days just preceding August 20, 1970. Some schoolchildren in Penang, Malaysia, reported seeing a flying saucer with little men. The soundtrack of the film Performance, with Mick Jagger, was released. The Spanish actress Soledad Miranda, who had starred in the film Count Dracula with Klaus Kinski and Herbert Lom, died in a car crash in Portugal. She was on her way to meet… Artur Brauner! The producer of Brigitte Wilner’s only flop! Coffee was served, and before he knew it the plane was landing in Zurich. By the time he reached the gate for the Swissair flight to Tel Aviv, in another terminal, boarding was already underway. And it turned out that the flight, though ticketed as Swissair, was actually El Al. He heard all about him a buzz of conversation in Hebrew, American English, French and Swiss German. No standard German, as far as he could hear. Not quite knowing why, he felt grateful for that. *      *     * The presentations of credentials by the new ambassadors, the Federal Republic’s Rolf Pauls in Israel and Israel’s Asher Ben-Natan in West Germany, were, as far as Miki was concerned, routine events. Pauls, as he told Miki in an interview, had had a friendly conversation with Golda Meir, the foreign minister. Even the demonstration that greeted Pauls as he approached President Shazar’s unassuming official residence – at which several thousand people carried placards reading Six million times no! – seemed to have, at least at first, a kind of rehearsed, routine quality, with the shouting reaching its expected climax at the playing of the German national anthem. It quieted down when Shazar made the expected speech about the suffering of the Jewish people. But when the ceremony was over and the ambassador was about to leave, chaos erupted. Stones were thrown not only at the embassy cars but also at the President’s official vehicle, in which Pauls was riding. Several policemen and demonstrators were injured, and some arrests were made. The evening’s reception at the Holy Land Hotel had to be cut short. No further disturbances marred the departure for Tel Aviv or the arrival there. In his article about the event, the first in the series, Miki wrote: “I wonder if those who shouted, waved placards and threw stones ever stopped to think that Ambassador Pauls might be representing someone like me, someone whose entire family, except for one uncle, is numbered among the six million.” He flew to Frankfurt, by way of Zurich, on the day following the ceremony, which was a Friday; the alternative would have been to wait till Sunday, and he did not want to spend a moment in Israel longer than necessary. But even so, the four-day stay left him with a feeling of melancholy, bordering on depression, that stayed with him throughout the weekend that he spent with Brigitte, especially since the lovemaking that ordinarily would have relieved the feeling was not available. “I’m really glad that we went to Cyprus instead of Israel,” he told her. “You would not have enjoyed it.” Saturday’s papers carried the news of the sentences in the Auschwitz trials. He thought about them most of the day, and on Sunday he wrote, in two hours, his last article on the subject, titled Justice after Auschwitz? On Monday he took the train to Bonn to attend the other presentation of credentials, at Villa Hammerschmidt in Bonn. This ceremony was even more uneventful than the preceding one. It turned out that the real event had occurred some days before, at Ambassador Ben-Natan’s arrival at the Cologne-Bonn airport, when a sizable crowd of journalists and representatives of Jewish communities gathered to greet him, and when he made a brief address in German (he was a native of Vienna), English and French. For the ceremony itself, President Lübke, being on vacation, was represented by the Hessian Prime Minister Zinn in his capacity as President of the Federal Council, and so those present were spared the gaffes that were beginning to make Lübke notorious. In Miki’s second article, which he titled “The Dog That Did Not Bark” (in allusion to the Sherlock Holmes story The Silver Blaze), he imagined the maladroit words that Lübke might have said on the occasion. Yet another article reported his interview with Ben-Natan, which was conducted in a mixture of Hebrew and German. Having discharged his assignment, he finally got around to writing the article whose title he had been carrying in his head since Cyprus. Brigitte had taken a break from her work in Frankfurt and was in Berlin, auditioning for some unspecified film to be produced by Artur Brauner, and so Berlin and its wall, newly rebuilt with concrete slabs between steel-and-concrete posts with a concrete sewage pipe on top, were very much on Miki’s mind. He began to type. Divided Cities I have recently written about two ceremonies, in which newly appointed ambassadors presented their credentials. Now I would like to write a few words about the geography of these ceremonies. While the first ceremony took place in Jerusalem, Ambassador Pauls quickly moved into the embassy that is located in Tel Aviv. And the second ceremony took place, of course, in Bonn, not Berlin, and that is where the embassy will be. Berlin and Jerusalem cannot, it seems, claims their rightful place as capitals because they are divided cities. Cities can be divided in various ways. Some are divided by the sheer human diversity that is present in them. Human diversity is a wonderful thing, and to be able to experience it within the confines of one city is a fascinating opportunity. It is its diversity that makes New York such an exciting place to be: in the course of a stroll on the Lower East Side, one can pass from a neighborhood that is almost a reproduction of a Jewish shtetl in Eastern Europe, through one that can have been transplanted from Cuba or Puerto Rico, to one that is a mixture of Polish and Ukrainian. And, because this diversity is due to immigration, its nature shifts as each immigrant group assimilates into the general population, so that what today is Ukrainian was, a generation ago, German, and the district of Harlem, which is now populated by the so-called Negroes (as the late Black Muslim leader Malcolm X called then) was once largely Jewish. The shift can be observed in space as well: the neighborhoods overlap, their boundaries are not rigid. All in all, being in such a place is, as I said, a fascinating experience. There are other cities in which the division, along some cultural line, is permanent. Montreal and Brussels are striking examples. Such a permanent division is not always visible to the naked eye. Barcelona is, at first sight, like any other Spanish city. All the signs, all the books in bookstores, all the newspapers at newsstands are in Spanish. A stranger is invariably addressed in Spanish. But if one listens to the conversations of the people, only some of them will be speaking in Spanish, while others will be doing so in Catalan. He was at the end of the page, and inserted another sheet. He went on. Belfast is another city that is divided beneath the surface. Only English is spoken, but there are well-defined Catholic and Protestant districts whose people, by and large, do not mix. And in Northern Ireland “Catholic” and “Protestant” are not simple confessional labels; even an atheist must be one or the other. There is an old joke about a Belfaster who introduces himself as a Jew, and is asked, “But are you a Catholic Jew or a Protestant Jew?” These designations are, instead, masks for ethnic divisions, the “Catholics” being the indigenous Irish and the “Protestants” the descendants of immigrants from Great Britain. I have been told that the two groups speak different kinds of English, and a local person can readily tell one from the other. But then we come to cities that are divided by force -- by a so-called green line or a wall – with armed checkpoints as the only way to move from one side to the other. In Nicosia the experience is, at this time, relatively benign. No one gets shot for trying to cross the dividing line. Tourists in rental cars, which are clearly marked as such, are waved through checkpoints without even a passport check. This brings us back to Berlin and Jerusalem. His telephone rang. At this time of night, it could only be Brigitte. “Hello, darling,” she cooed excitedly. “I got the part!” “Congratulations!” he said. “You know, of course, that you never told me what the part would be.” “I know. I’ll tell you when I get home. But what I’ll tell you now is that it’s a lot of money, the most I’ve ever been paid. We can now afford to buy a villa in Blankenese!” We? he said to himself. What do you mean, ‘we’? He remembered an American joke, in which the Lone Ranger says, “Tonto, we’re surrounded by Indians!” and Tonto replies, “What do you mean, ‘we,’ paleface?” But he said nothing into the telephone and waited for Brigitte to go on. And she did. “By the way, Brauner sends you his regards. He is a fan of yours!” “I wish it were mutual,” Miki said. “Come on, don’t get nasty.” “I’m not being nasty. I admire Brauner’s achievements – I wrote about that – but I just don’t care for his films. I’m glad you didn’t get that part in the Western.” This time it was her turn to be silent. “Did I offend you?” he asked. “No, but first of all it was not going to be a Western, and, second, sometimes I’m not sure that you know what it means to be an actor. You’re an opinion journalist, and you write what you want to write about, and you get it printed, and that’s it. For us it’s different. Unless one is Greta Garbo, we cannot always afford to pick and choose parts.” “I understand,” he said with what he hoped was an apologetic tone. He did not tell her that he, too, would sometimes get journalistic assignments that he would rather not do, such as the one he had just completed. “I hope so, darling. You’ve lived with an actress long enough by now.” “Not nearly long enough. When are you coming back?” “In three days. Brauner doesn’t like to waste time, so I’ll be doing costume and makeup tests while I’m here.” “Remember to take some photographs of the new wall for me.” “I already have them. Good night!” “Good night, my darling.” He would wait for the photographs before going on with the article, since he wanted to write about Berlin first, with a realistic description of the wall. Meanwhile, he had some reading to do. It was an essay titled “Torture” in the latest issue of Merkur – he got a free subscription once his Kennedy essay was published there – by a man, writing under the name Jean Améry (originally an Austrian named Hans Mayer), who had experienced torture as a member of the Belgian Resistance and who had been imprisoned in Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen as well. Müller-Marein had asked Miki if he would like to write something about it. When Brigitte came home to Hamburg before going back to work in Frankfurt, she gave him the photographs, which were exactly what he needed for the Berlin section of his article. She repeated her words about having enough money to buy the house of their dreams. “You have enough money,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that we have it.” She was taken aback. “What difference does it make?” “Well, we never signed a community-property contract. Your money is yours. If the house is to be our house, I would like to pay my share, just as I do now, with all our expenses.” “And when might that be?” she asked in an edgy, almost – but not quite – sarcastic tone. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t get big lump sums like you, but I am paid pretty well, and Leon sends me big presents, so I’ve been saving.” “You once told me that the men in your family had a tradition of marrying rich women.” “That was when I was a poor student, and besides I was joking.” “So we have to wait until you’ve saved up enough?” “I don’t mind dreaming for a few years more.” “What about me? I’m a famous actress. I can honestly say that, but I am thirty years old. I am not one of those girls – though I have nothing against them – who won beauty contests and, before they were twenty, started making one film after another, half a dozen a year, and got rich very quickly. It’s taken me a longer time, but now I am a film star. Shouldn’t I be living like one?” “Are you concerned about your image? Do you want to show magazine reporters how you live?” “This is getting ridiculous,” Brigitte said, now with genuine anger in her voice. “It isn’t what I expected from you. It’s as if I didn’t really know my husband, after nine years of marriage. Is this some sort of… male pride that I have never seen in you before?” Miki realized that Brigitte had swallowed some derogatory adjective – such as ‘stupid’ or ‘crazy’ – with which she was going to qualify ‘male pride,’ and he appreciated her restraint. “Probably,” he conceded, “just as I have never seen this kind of anger in you.” “Haven’t you? Even on stage or on the screen?” “Well, yes…” “I act who I am, you know. Every emotion that you see me act out comes from me. It’s just that you’ve never done anything before to make me angry like this. And, for your information, yes, I am concerned about my image. I work in a certain world that you may not approve of, that you may find shallow and superficial, but it’s my work. We’ve been in Hamburg for five years, I’m a successful actress, but I still live like a beginner.” “You haven’t said anything about it. We could have moved long ago into a large, even luxurious, apartment, like the new ones overlooking the Outer Alster.” “I thought that we might as well move into a villa, and skip the intermediate step. But if you’re not ready for that, all right, I’ll try to respect that.” She smiled at last, to Miki’s relief. He had felt himself on the verge of conceding in the course of the argument, but now he felt glad that had not done so. Yes, there was some male pride, probably needless, behind his obstinacy. And then the unwelcome thought, the one that he dreaded, came into his mind again for one of its rare but disturbing visits: that, in some corner of his mind, he resented Brigitte for being unable to make him a father. *      *     * The first thing he did after locking himself in his room at the Dan was to remove the beard in order that his skin might breathe. The procedure did, as Hagemann had warned him, produce a moment of pain, no doubt enhanced by the stubble that had grown under the false beard since morning. He fished his battery-operated Philips shaver out of his bag and shaved as closely as he could. He then removed the wig and took a long shower. It was well past seven, Israeli time, when he finally felt settled. It was an hour earlier by his clock, and he was not feeling hungry yet, especially after the ample lunch served by El Al. But before even thinking what he would do next, he had to, absolutely, contact Nili. He fished out the small piece of paper that he had hidden in a pants pocket – one of the few possessions, along with a handkerchief, a comb and his watch, that he did not surrender to Hagemann – and read the two numbers that were written on it. The upper one, he remembered, was the home telephone. He felt nervous he dialed it. A young girl answered the phone with “Hallo!” He wondered if her name was Ora. “Hallo,” he said. “Is your mommy home?” “Yes,” the girl said, “just a moment. Mommy!” she shouted. “It’s for you.” About ten seconds later he heard Nili’s unmistakable voice. “Yes?” “Shalom, Nili. Do you know who this is? If you know, don’t say my name.” “Yes,” she said without hesitation, “I know.” “Can I see you tomorrow morning?” “Yes, we can have coffee at the Café…” “No, it must be in private.” “Come to my office, then. I have no appointment until half past nine. Is half past eight all right?” “Yes.” “Then, Shalom.” “Shalom. Oh, I almost forgot. Tell me the address.” Nili laughed. “That might help,” she said before she gave it to him. By this time he knew Tel Aviv well enough to figure out, even without consulting a map, that Nili’s office was about a fifteen-to-twenty-minute walk from the Dan. He decided to have a light supper in the hotel’s dining room, though he still wasn’t feeling hungry. In disguise again, he dressed and went downstairs. He had a chicken salad and some white wine, paid the waiter in cash, and went back to his room. It was just after eight o’clock, and he turned on the television. He kept the volume low, so as not to advertise his knowledge of Hebrew to passers-by in the hall. The news had just begun. Most of it was concerned with Egypt’s ongoing deployment of Soviet ground-to-air missiles near the Suez Canal, in apparent violation of the agreement that supposedly put an end to the War of Attrition. Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and a general named Ariel Sharon who headed the Southern Command made indignant declarations to the camera. During the few minutes allotted to other news he almost dozed off when he heard his name. “Police in Stuttgart, Germany, announced the provisional arrest of the Jewish German journalist Michael Wilner in connection with a murder that was discovered there two weeks ago, in a possible case of mistaken identity. No further details were released.” He looked at the screen and saw his picture, the one that was on the jacket of his book. He felt strangely elated. Interpol’s disinformation plot was working. He was now taking part in a bit of international intrigue, and he had to make sure to play his part to the best of his ability. He wondered if Nili had heard the news, and how she reacted to it. Surprise? Puzzlement? Suspicion? Tomorrow I’ll begin to be a spy, he said to himself. He still had the largely unread Neue Zürcher Zeitung. He turned off the television and began leafing through the paper. *      *     * At the beginning of October Brigitte took a monthlong break from the ARD Joan of Arc series and came back to Hamburg to begin rehearsals for the upcoming Maid of Orleans, which would be staged in December. She would need to return to Frankfurt sporadically for touchups in November. The series would air, in monthly installments, beginning in January. A week after coming back to Hamburg she went to see Dr. Severs. She came home with a grin that she could barely suppress. “I know that thirty-one is not one of our numbers,” she said to Miki, “but we can celebrate my birthday this year.” The emphasis on ‘celebrate’ was unmistakable. The Maid of Orleans, with Brigitte Wilner in the title role, received enthusiastic reviews. The critics detected in her performance a sexual charge that was unusual for the role, but quite believable. In January, when Brigitte was finally done with being Joan of Arc and, with her hair grown back to its old length, was working at Brauner’s studio in Berlin, Miki, who some time earlier had written Leon about his experience in Israel, received a surprising reply. Old Zionist that he was, Leon wrote, he felt embarrassed that he himself had not yet been to the Holy Land. Somehow, each time he and Fela had discussed such a project, something would come up to thwart it. This year, however, he decided to obey the rabbinical adage im lo akhshav eimatai – “if not now, when?” – and make the trip after all. Going there in summer was out of the question – neither of them could handle the heat – but what did Miki think of joining them there in late September, perhaps between Yom Kippur and Sukkot? Better yet, he – and possibly Brigitte as well – might join them in Paris, and then travel to Israel together. Miki had already been aware that four years had passed since he had last seen his uncle, and that their meetings had been quadrennial since 1954, precisely in World Cup years. He replied that he would love to meet them in Paris; that Brigitte’s presence would depend on her work commitments, but September was usually a busy time for her; and that he would give serious thought to going to Israel again. He realized as he was writing the letter that the prospect no longer filled him with dread. When he summarized his letter for Brigitte when she came home on a break from her shoot, she was indignant. “Of course I’ll go to Paris,” she said. “Whatever I do in September, I’ll arrange my schedule so that I can go with you. Who knows when I’ll have another chance to see your only relative!” A few weeks later, with Brigitte in Yugoslavia for location work on Brauner’s film, another letter came from North America, but it bore a United States stamp and a Florida postmark. It was from Fela. The letter seemed to have been written independently of Leon’s, it was in English, and it confirmed Brigitte’s premonition. It was also written confidentially; Leon was not to know about it. The crux was that his health was seriously deteriorating. He was no longer in condition to be an active partner in the business, and since he didn’t like being a silent one, he would be selling his share to the other partners. The trip to Israel would be for the entire winter, so as to get away from the Canadian climate, which was getting to be too harsh for him; this was why they were now in Florida. In Israel, Leon would try to find some healing in the spas, such as Tiberias and the Dead Sea. Fela’s letter left no room for hesitation. Of course Miki would go to Israel in September. When Brigitte came home from Yugoslavia, she had only a short time to rest before going to NDR to work on Marriage Counseling, work that would have begun the previous September if it had not been for the delay caused by her condition. The producers at ZDF decided to keep it within the current season by airing each episode as soon as it was finished, in the American fashion, rather than filming the whole series ahead of time. A staff of additional writers had to be hired to assist Otto Färber in churning out scripts. What the series lost in novel-like cohesion it made up with the freshness of the situations and the youthful humor that the young writers contributed, and the series proved enormously popular. Brigitte became accustomed to putting on her glasses and being addressed as Frau Doktor in television interviews. Her schedule for the coming autumn and winter, meanwhile, had been arranged. Hetty had procured for her a three-week engagement as Laura in The Glass Menagerie at the Josefstadt Theater in Vienna, beginning on the first of October with rehearsals during the preceding week. She had also found producers both for the Germelshausen film and for a stage production of Brigadoon. Filming would be in late October – immediately after her return from Vienna – for the outdoor scenes and in November for interior work. The Brigadoon translation, commissioned by a theater impresario in St. Pauli whose goal was to turn Hamburg into the German capital of the musical, would be done some time after the beginning of the year, and casting would begin shortly thereafter *      *     * There was not much world news in the paper. Most of its pages were devoted to the ongoing debate over women’s suffrage in Switzerland, which would be decided on the cantonal level in Zurich by a referendum to be held in November, and on the federal level early in the following year on a date yet to be determined. It had been approved in Valais in April, but the purely French-speaking cantons – Geneva, Neuchâtel, Vaud – had approved it more than a decade before. Miki wondered about the disparity. He had not previously thought of the French-Swiss as being more progressive than the German-Swiss. The arguments against suffrage struck him as bizarre. The old ones, based – without mentioning it explicitly – on the Kinder-Kirche-Küche trinity, were, at this time, merely laughable. But the new ones, invoking woman’s spirituality that somehow transcended politics, were rank idiocy, and it seemed barely conceivable that a serious paper such as the NZZ would print them in 1970. The newspaper’s own editorial was, fortunately for its reputation, in favor, and its journalists predicted that the referenda would pass overwhelmingly. So the Swiss Confederation, in so many ways a forerunner of the twentieth-century world, would get a little closer to it. But join it? No. There was still no prospect of United Nations membership. He was feeling sleepy. The two consecutive sleeping-car nights were having their effect. But it was too early to go to bed. He still had his disguise on him, so that he could go out for a walk along the sea without much ado. The moon, only two or three days past full, was high in the sky and shining brightly. To see its light shimmeringly reflected in the Mediterranean would be a treat. He put on his shoes and stepped outside. As he was walking he struggled to keep his mind filled with Brigitte, and only with Brigitte. Remembering the pleasures of the previous day, the sex at home and the walk in the country and the organ music in the church and the sex in the hotel across from the station, kept him in a good mood. When he was back in his room he felt relaxed. *      *     * At the end of April, when Brigitte had only two Marriage Counseling episodes left to be filmed, the sale of tickets began for the Hamburg concert, to be held two months hence, of what would probably be The Beatles’ last tour of live performances. The tickets sold out in a day. But when Hetty Goldschmidt called to inquire if seats were available for the likes of Brigitte Wilner, she was told, “Yes, of course.” Shortly thereafter they found the apartment that would suit their – and in particular Brigitte’s – needs until they were ready to buy a villa by common consent. It was twice as large as the preceding one – and therefore more than three times as large as the first one – and it did, in fact, overlook the Alster. It included, moreover, a self-contained room for a maid or housekeeper. Brigitte had long been thinking of engaging one, and a woman who worked as a dresser at the NDR studios and who liked to be known only as Frau Schmidt (her forename was Elfriede), had expressed interest in working for her. She was both a war widow and a divorcee, and both of her husbands had been surnamed Schmidt. Her twenty-year-old son Klaus, who was born at war’s end after his father’s death, lived on his own in Pinneberg, where he worked at the ILO plant making motors for snowmobiles, while her fifteen-year-old daughter Ingrid was living in Bergedorf with her paternal grandparents. There was, then, no obstacle to Frau Schmidt’s taking up residence in the apartment. Miki quickly found that he liked Frau Schmidt. She was quiet but pleasant, and her cooking, something he no longer had much time for except on special occasions, suited his taste. It was tacitly understood between the Wilners that Frau Schmidt’s salary would be defrayed by Brigitte, as would some other expenditures that could logically be associated with her star status, such as his travel expenses when he accompanied her, but not the cost of their joint vacations. These, along with such basic expenses as rent and food, were shared, except that Brigitte, needing more space (for herself and for Frau Schmidt) than Miki, paid three-fifths of the rent while he paid two-fifths. Even with these concessions, Miki would have been stretched thin to pay his share with his journalist’s salary alone, were it not for the generous birthday checks that Leon continued to send every February. His savings account was still growing, but at a snail’s pace. They arranged the move, and the purchase of additional furnishings that the size of the place required, so that the housewarming party would coincide with their tenth wedding anniversary. Miki and Frau Schmidt joined forces to prepare the food, with some help from Helga, who had come with Bruno from Bad Harzburg. Some forty people attended: Helmut and Margo, of course; some of Miki’s other associates from Die Zeit, and Brigitte’s from theater, film and television, with their life partners; and, no doubt through the miracle of Helga’s persuasion, Renate, Jürgen and their two daughters, the now eight-year-old Elisabeth and the four-year-old Ursula, made the trip from Frankfurt. A few days later came the premiere, in West Berlin, of Brauner’s film. It was not a major cinematic event, since Brauner produced an average of ten films a year, and the first-rank critics did not usually bother reviewing them. Perhaps it was Brigitte’s participation that, on this occasion, brought out reviewers who normally wrote only about art films, but if this was so it was to the film’s detriment. The general tenor of the reviews was that Brigitte Wilner was the only good thing about the film, and that she was wasted in it. The negative reviews affected the box office all over the German-speaking world, and it turned out to be one of Artur Brauner’s few out-and-out failures. It turned out to do well, however, in Yugoslavia.