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 inspectors 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.
Hagemanns 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
Hagemanns 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 drivers 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 Mikis keys and wallet in it, and took out another wallet
quite similar to Mikis, 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 Mikis birthdate. In the wallet there was
an international drivers 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, isnt that right?
Yes, Miki said, theyre
already made.
All right, Hagemann said.
It is now almost nine oclock. 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. Id
rather use cash.
Good. Do you have any other
questions?
I dont 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 Bothes.
* * *
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 islands 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 theyre 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 beards 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 Ellis 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 wouldnt 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 mornings 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 tomorrows
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 Wilners 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 Republics Rolf Pauls in Israel and Israels 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 Shazars 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
Presidents official vehicle, in which Pauls was riding. Several policemen and
demonstrators were injured, and some arrests were made. The evenings 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. Im
really glad that we went to Cyprus instead of Israel, he told her. You would not
have enjoyed it.
Saturdays 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-Natans 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 Mikis 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 Mikis 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. Ill tell you when I
get home. But what Ill tell you now is that its a lot of money, the most Ive
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, were 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, dont get nasty.
Im not being nasty. I
admire Brauners achievements I wrote about that but I just dont care for
his films. Im glad you didnt 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 Im not sure that you know what
it means to be an actor. Youre an opinion journalist, and you write what you
want to write about, and you get it printed, and thats it. For us its
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. Youve
lived with an actress long enough by now.
Not nearly long enough. When
are you coming back?
In three days. Brauner
doesnt like to waste time, so Ill be doing costume and makeup tests while Im
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 doesnt 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 dont know, he said. I
dont get big lump sums like you, but I am paid pretty well, and Leon sends me
big presents, so Ive 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
youve saved up enough?
I dont mind dreaming for a
few years more.
What about me? Im 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. Its taken me a longer time, but now I am a
film star. Shouldnt 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 isnt what I expected
from you. Its as if I didnt 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.
Havent 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. Its just that youve
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 its my work. Weve been in Hamburg for five years, Im a successful
actress, but I still live like a beginner.
You havent 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 youre not ready
for that, all right, Ill try to respect that. She smiled at last, to Mikis
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. Its for you.
About ten seconds later he
heard Nilis unmistakable voice. Yes?
Shalom, Nili. Do you know
who this is? If you know, dont 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 Nilis office
was about a fifteen-to-twenty-minute walk from the Dan.
He decided to have a light
supper in the hotels dining room, though he still wasnt 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 oclock, 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 Egypts 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.
Interpols 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 Ill 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 Brauners 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 Brigittes 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 Ill go to Paris, she said. Whatever I do in September, Ill
arrange my schedule so that I can go with you. Who knows when Ill have another
chance to see your only relative!
A few weeks later, with
Brigitte in Yugoslavia for location work on Brauners 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 Leons, it was in English, and it confirmed
Brigittes 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
didnt 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.
Felas 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 womens 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 womans 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 newspapers 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 Brigittes 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 wars end after his fathers 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 Schmidts 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 Schmidts 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 journalists 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 snails 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 Mikis other associates from Die Zeit,
and Brigittes from theater, film and television, with their life partners;
and, no doubt through the miracle of Helgas 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 Brauners 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
Brigittes participation that, on this occasion, brought out reviewers who
normally wrote only about art films, but if this was so it was to the films
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 Brauners few out-and-out failures.
It turned out to do well,
however, in Yugoslavia.
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