17 Saturday, August 22, 1970 1967-68 As he had been at other times when staying at the InterContinental, he was awakened by the sound of the muezzin calling the faithful to morning prayer. A few minutes later, church bells rang for the same purpose. Different faithful, same fanaticism… He would write something about this when he expanded his essay into a book. Whenever he was away from Brigitte, he liked to begin his morning by looking at her picture in his wallet. Many of the photographs that he took of her were just for that purpose. He liked to change the photos frequently, so as to follow her varying moods and styles. Some three years before, she had begun to sport the newly stylish low necklines, and he began to photograph her even when she was dressed up, something he had not done previously. He was convinced that, with his eye looking through the lens, he could capture something that the magazine photographers could not. Brigitte agreed with him, though he was never quite sure that she was not simply humoring him. This time he had no wallet, no photograph, nothing on paper that would connect him to being Michael Wilner. He was forced to see Brigitte only in his mind’s eye, and he succeeded, but her image was continually being displaced, for moments at a time, by that of Nili, whom he had just seen in the flesh. He thought of the scene in the first act of Tosca, in which Mario Cavaradossi looks at a medallion with the dark visage of his beloved and compares it with the blond beauty of the unknown woman whose portrait he is painting, all the while singing Recondita armonia, ending with il mio solo pensiero, Tosca, sei tu! But in Miki’s case it was the blue-eyed blonde who was the beloved, the other beauty was not unknown to him, and he could not honestly say that, at that moment, Brigitte was his only thought. In fact, the thoughts that were gathering in his mind were being crowded out by one: his planned mission for that day, that of finding Tzvi. Unless Tzvi was away on some mission of his own, there was a very good likelihood that he would find him as Nili had suggested. Tzvi was probably a typical weekend kibbutznik, and would return to Refadim at every opportunity. Miki remembered how, on a field trip to Jerusalem, Tzvi had complained about the cold weather while everyone else was comfortable. He loved the heat of the Negev, and, since he apparently had no family of his own, it was quite likely that he would be tending his beloved fishpond on a Saturday, Refadim being as far from religious observance as any place in Israel could be. If Tzvi were not at the fishpond, then Miki would have to go looking for him. It might seem a little strange to the kibbutzniks that a bearded German tourist was looking for one of their own, but since they presumably knew what Tzvi’s work was, they might withhold their customary Israeli nosiness and direct him to Tzvi without asking any questions. How he would approach Tzvi when he found him would very much depend on the place and circumstance, and it was not something he could plan ahead. Perhaps some possibilities would occur to him in the course of the day, especially in the course of the long drive that he would be taking. Driving alone was, for him, always a good circumstance for thinking. But what if Tzvi were not there that day? Then his mission would be, essentially, broken off, or, as the Americans would say, aborted. He would then tell Interpol that, as far as he could determine, a Mossad agent named Tzvi Kaplan, an acquaintance of his from school days, was involved in the machinations, and he would let them take it from there. He showered, shaved, put on his disguise, and went down for breakfast. As he was crossing the lobby, a Western young couple, European or North American, walked out of the hotel. They were both blond. The man wore dark slacks and a blue short-sleeved shirt, and the woman a sleeveless dress whose hem was, unstylishly, well below the knee, though it displayed well-shaped calves. She had a purse slung over her shoulder and, folded over her left forearm, a dark garment – a jacket, sweater or long-sleeved blouse – that she would probably use when, in the course of her sightseeing, religious fanaticism masquerading as decorum would require her to cover her bare arms. From behind, her body type and hair reminded him of Brigitte. And at that moment Brigitte’s image, just as he had photographed her on that recent morning in Norderney, crossed legs and bikini-molded cleavage peering from the folds of her robe, came into his mind. It remained there, undisturbed, until he was ready to set off for Refadim. *      *     * The Countess’s autumn party was held at her house in Blankenese on the day after the sinking of the Eilat. Miki had predicted, in his third article, a naval attack on the pretext of a violation of territorial waters as one of the ways in which the truce might be broken, and while the guests at the party acknowledged the seriousness of the situation, there was much banter about Miki’s uncanny gift for prediction. He was called the Prophet Michael. The Countess seemed to see it as one of her duties as a hostess to separate from each other those of her guests who came as couples. In the case of the Wilners, this meant that Brigitte – wearing what for her would have been, up to then, an untypically low-cut dress – was left amid a cluster of admiring men, while Miki was to be introduced to those guests that he was not already acquainted with. As they passed one group in which he knew everyone, he overheard someone saying that Miki should write an article predicting the imminent reunification of Germany, a cause dear to the Countess’s heart. Before Miki had time for a riposte, Müller-Marein, who was at the center of the group, remarked, “When that happens, we can all be Deutschländer!” There was laughter from the others, remembering the neologism proposed by Miki a decade before. “Here is someone with whom you have a lot in common,” the Countess said as she led him to a ruddy-faced man of about fifty. “Max Schwab, Michael Wilner.” And she left them to their own devices. Max Schwab, who already seemed to know all about Miki, introduced himself. He was a Jew from Berlin who had been a Young Communist and lost no time in escaping from Hitler’s Germany, first to England, where he got a university degree (“Not Oxbridge,” he remarked, with a tone of pride, in English with an exaggerated upper-class accent), and then to Palestine, where he got an editing job with Schocken Publishing. After the war he moved with them to New York, but realized even before McCarthy that the specter of his Red youth might come back to haunt him, and moved back to Europe: first to London again, then Paris, Geneva and Zurich, working mainly as a translator. Finally he felt ready to return to Germany, and specifically to his hometown. But, as a native of Prenzlauer Berg, he did not feel at home in West Berlin, and so he recently took a job as a book editor with Christian Wegner, the Countess’s current publisher. He was in West Berlin when Kennedy said “Ich bin ein Berliner,” and when he heard that some semi-ignorant Americans – “a little knowledge is a dangerous thing,” he quoted – were claiming that what Kennedy had said meant I am a jelly doughnut and that what he should have said was “Ich bin Berliner,” he felt compelled to write to the New York Times. “This is what I wrote,” he said to Miki. “As a native Berliner, I never heard ‘Berliner’ referring to a jelly doughnut or any other kind of doughnut, though there are places in West Germany where it refers to some kind of pastry. But when one says ‘Ich bin Berliner,’ one means that one is literally a native or a resident of Berlin. President Kennedy is no such thing. He meant it metaphorically, and the only correct way to say that was just as he did. It is the same way in French, by the way: People say of De Gaulle, ‘C’est un Américain,’ meaning that he is in some ways like an American, but to indicate literally that someone is an American they would say ‘Il est Américain.’ That is what I wrote. What do you think?” “I think that you performed a valuable service,” Miki said. “Well, there is another service that I would like to perform,” Max Schwab said. “I have read your articles, and, as someone like you who had done both aliya and yerida, I agree with what you say one hundred percent, or maybe ninety-eight comma six. I would like to see your articles put together in a book. I still have connections in England, and America, and France, and even Israel, and I can see such a book getting a lot of distribution. I’ve done a bit of translating, so I would supervise the translations myself.” “But I haven’t written all that much – only about two to three thousand lines,” Miki said. “That isn’t enough for a book.” “This is where I come in. I’ll teach you a technique that I learned in America; it’s called padding. For example, in the articles where you report on conversations that you had, you of course summarize them. In the book you will expand them. There are other tricks, like giving people names even if you don’t know them, and inventing histories for them. Do you have any projects until the end of the year?” “Nothing urgent,” Miki said. “Good. If we can work on it until then, full time, then the book should be ready six months from now. You will get an advance from Wegner.” “Do you mean that this already has been arranged?” “The Countess has already talked with Wegner. That’s why she introduced you to me first.” *      *     * He skirted the Old City on the east and continued southward on old Jordanian roads through the West Bank, by way of Bethlehem and Hebron, stopping for a lunch of falafel at Khirbat Tatrit, the last town before reentering Israel. At the checkpoint traffic was light. The border guards showed some curiosity about his German passport, and one of them joked to the others about the tourist’s name being Etzel. Another said, “Maybe his wife is named Hagana!” Miki did what felt to him like a convincing performance of not understanding them, and half an hour later found himself in Beersheba. The directions to Gush Hatsarot, the block of settlements and villages that included Refadim and Lehavot Hadarom, were clearly signed. The road leading there seemed new; he reminded himself that he had not been there in eighteen years, so that even if it was fifteen years old, it was still new to him. For about twenty-five kilometers it was pure desert, with occasional Bedouin tent clusters as the only form of human habitation. All of a sudden, the scenery turned green, and before long the sign for Kibbutz Refadim, exactly like the one he remembered though probably painted anew, came into view. He parked the car about two hundred meters from the entrance to Refadim, in the partial shade of a tamarisk tree whose presence he did not remember, though it looked old enough to have been there during his time. It was a little after two o’clock, and the temperature was at least thirty-seven degrees. As he walked along the deserted road toward the kibbutz, his eyes felt the sun’s rays bend around the rims of the sunglasses. Even behind the dark shields, he had to squint his eyes. He walked through the gateway and looked to his left. The eucalyptus trees screening the fishpond had grown considerably, in height and girth, now forming almost a solid wall. From behind them, he could hear a faint noise that sounded like raking. He approached a narrow gap between two trees on tiptoe. Looking through the gap, he saw a man with a long-handled net, fishing eucalyptus leaves out of the pond. Miki did not need to look twice. The man was Tzvi. A large hat shielded his face from the sun, but what Miki could discern of his features was unmistakable. Tzvi had hardly changed at all. Miki waited until Tzvi had his head and body completely facing the pond before he slithered through the gap and stood about two meters behind Tzvi, who turned around startled. “Tzvi Kaplan,” Miki said before Tzvi could say anything, and, with his left hand, removed his sunglasses. He felt no need to remove his beard, supposing that, if Tzvi was indeed a Mossad agent, he would have been trained to see through disguises. The supposition was correct. “Michael Wilner?” Tzvi said, uncertainly. “Yes.” “I… you…” Tzvi seemed unable to put two words together. “You are surprised? I am supposed to be under arrest?” “Yes,” Tzvi said, becoming coherent at last. “I heard about it on the radio.” “Is that where you get your information, on the radio?” “Well, maybe a little more,” Tzvi said with a falsely modest smile and a flicker of arrogance in his eyes. Now Miki knew everything. Tzvi’s facial gesture confirmed beyond any doubt that it was he who had been behind the cabal: the hiring of Petrov to kill the wrong Hemme, the attempted frame-up, the false Ora. “Tell me something, Tzvi. Who is the girl who pretended to be my daughter?” Feeling sure of himself again, Tzvi chortled, as though the whole matter had been a big joke. “Her name happens to be Ora, just like Nili’s real daughter. That’s what gave us the idea. She’s quite a piece, isn’t she? You know, we had originally intended that she would seduce you first, and then tell you, so that you would think that you had fucked your daughter.” And he chortled again. With his sunglasses still in his left hand, Miki felt his eyes half blinded by the sun, and, in that state, he suddenly saw Tzvi’s face transform until it was no longer Tzvi Kaplan that he was seeing, but Axel Hemme. Not the Axel Hemme whom he remembered from his childhood and who had haunted his dreams, but the pudgy-faced young SS man whose picture Kriminalkommissar Stracke had shown him. With no thought behind his action, he swung his right fist into Tzvi’s left cheek with such force and speed that Tzvi bent over to his right, towards the edge of the pond. Half-consciously copying a gesture he must have seen in a film, Miki put his sunglasses back on and, forming a fist with his newly freed left hand, he sent Tzvi another punch, this one also connecting with the left cheek. Tzvi was now reeling forward along a circular arc whose diameter was along the edge of the pond. When one of his feet reached the edge, he lost his balance and fell, face down, into the pond. Miki had no doubt that Tzvi would quickly scramble out of the pond and go after him. His mind told him that Tzvi was probably well trained in hand-to-hand combat and that it would be best for him to get away as fast as he could. But Tzvi did not move in the stagnant water, and Miki felt his feet glued to the ground, watching Tzvi in fascination. He counted, slowly, to ten, and in all that time the only movement he saw was that of fish swimming around Tzvi’s prone body. On the count of ten he declared a knockout and turned away toward the eucalyptus trees, walking slowly at first and then faster, but still on tiptoe. He was on the alert for pursuit, but there was none. Once his was out the gateway and within sight of the car, he began to think. Chances were that Tzvi would be found by his fellow kibbutzniks and given first aid, and then… Or perhaps not. And if that were so, then Miki would have killed him. Like most people who have never killed another human being, Miki had often wondered what it would feel like to do that. And now that he had – probably – done it, what he mainly felt was concern over what to tell Interpol. And Brigitte. It should be the same story. Also, a little concern about his safety, lest he were found. But – and this surprised him – no remorse. As he neared the car and still heard no footsteps behind him, he slowed down. When he reached the car, he leaned on the passenger door, which was shaded, and took three deep breaths. He was now certain: Tzvi was dead. But had he, Miki, killed him? True, it was his punches that had made him fall into the pond. But Tzvi had been tending the pond for twenty years, and there must have been other accidental falls. Was there some toxic substance in the pond? Did he have a heart condition, perhaps undiagnosed in someone so young, that led to a circulatory arrest? As he let himself into the driver’s seat, Miki concluded that he would never know the answers to these questions. Once Tzvi was found, the cause of death would be determined, but, as he had learned from the Le Carré novel, a secret agent’s death under mysterious circumstances is not something that a government would publicize. He would therefore never know whether or not he had killed a man. An analogy formed itself in his mind: this sort of ignorance was like that of a man who has a random sexual encounter and never finds out whether he fathered a child. Taking a life, creating a life… The analogy inevitably led him back to himself. It did not really apply to his situation, but for the few days during which he believed the Ora story he had felt as if he had lived the previous eighteen years in just such a state of ignorance. He now knew how absurd this was. Nili – the real Nili and not the one concocted by Tzvi’s Ora, perhaps the outgrowth of Tzvi’s unrequited fantasies about her – was far too conscientious, too intelligent to have allowed such a situation to happen. Feeling completely safe, he decided that, before heading out to the Beersheba road, he would drive a kilometer or so on the dirt road that led to the fields of his youthful trysts. When he came within sight of the special olive tree, he stopped and turned around. He was filled with feelings of tenderness, and it took a conscious effort to replace the image of Nili in his mind’s eye with that of Brigitte. He drove as fast as he could, forcing his mind to concentrate on his driving. But that ruse worked only until he got to Beersheba. Once he passed the city center and entered the Tel Aviv highway, he had to drive at the speed of the traffic, which was dominated by military trucks. The War of Attrition was over, he remembered, and soldiers were being sent back from the Suez Canal. It occurred to him that the thinking behind Tzvi’s plot was precisely that of the Israeli military. A two-pronged strategy: a surprise attack behind the enemy’s lines to weaken his defenses, like the bombing of the Egyptian airfields that began the Six-Day War, and at the same time a frontal assault, like the Sinai invasion. In his case, the supposed daughter was intended as the surprise that would that would addle him to the point of inability to mount a proper legal defense. The idea of the girl seducing him struck him as the height of absurdity. As he had written in his book, Israel’s refusal to obey the ancient Chinese maxim, ‘Know your enemy,’ has been one of the main dangers to its survival. Sun Tsu had written, ‘If you know yourself but do not know the other, then you will win one battle and lose another.’ Did Tzvi know his old friend so little that he thought that Miki might succumb to the charms of a moderately pretty girl with big earrings and big boobs? Miki Wilner, who was married to Brigitte, the one that Tzvi had once mistaken for Brigitte Bardot? In all likelihood, the seduction plan was abandoned by Ora herself. As young as she was, she did not seem inexperienced, and her woman’s intuition must have told her that Miki was not likely to fall prey to her charms. Now, if Ora had been the one who hired Petrov, might her body have been a part of the payment for the mysterious Bulgarian’s services? And then he suddenly remembered: Tzvi had said zehu ma shenatan lanu et hara’ayon, ‘that’s what gave us the idea,’ and hitkavannu, ‘we had intended.’ That first-person plural could only refer to the Mossad. This meant that Miki was considered a public enemy at some high echelon. But why? What he had said and written was not any more subversive of official Zionist doctrine than what Israelis like Amos Oz or Uri Avnery were saying: that Jews must understand the aspirations of the Palestinian Arabs, even if their only way of expressing them was through terrorist acts. There were non-Israelis, Jewish and not, who were saying the same things. But Miki was a hybrid: he had made aliya, he had been a kibbutznik, he spoke Hebrew like a sabra, he knew Israeli society inside out, but he deserted Israel to become a German married to a shiksa. That combination was something that an overgrown shtetl like Israel could not tolerate. *      *     * The publication of The Long Seventh Day had an inauspicious beginning. It was delivered to bookstores at a time when the tumultuous events of April 11 – when Joseph Bachmann tried to assassinate Rudi Dutschke and tried to commit suicide afterwards (failing in both) and left-wing students blockaded the new Springer Press headquarters in Berlin, with many (one of them being Ulrike Meinhof) arrested – were still very prominent in people’s minds and on the television news. And its publication was quickly followed by the even more tumultuous events of May in Paris. But it so happened that the Israel Broadcasting Authority, Kol Yisrael, had just begun television broadcasts, and its news editors were under a mandate to air any news that might be relevant to Israel, and so the publication of the book was reported uncritically to the Israeli public. Some German-language journalists were present in Israel at the time, covering the aftermath of the war, and somehow they got hold of copies of the book. When, some weeks later, Egyptian artillery strafed the Israeli front line on the east bank of the Suez Canal, almost exactly as Miki had predicted, quotations from the book were sprinkled in their reports. Even the name given to the conflict, War of Attrition, arose as the retranslation of the Hebrew translation of what he had called a war of exhaustion. Miki quickly became a celebrity in the news media. The new editor-in-chief of Tagesschau, West Germany’s most important television news program, which had just begun airing in color and which, conveniently for Miki, was produced by NDR in Hamburg, invited him to be a regular guest, and he was treated as an authority on the Middle East. His often critical pronouncements on Israeli policy provoked complaints from the organized Jewish community, in contrast to the support he had received eighteen months earlier in conjunction with the Améry controversy. This time he was accused of being a traitor to his people and a self-hating Jew. His being a Bergen-Belsen survivor did not immunize him against such attacks, anymore than it did Israel Shahak in Israel. But Miki, unlike the sanctimonious Shahak (of whom he had no recollection of ever meeting in Bergen-Belsen), was able to fend them off with humor. “If I hated myself, would I be married to a beautiful actress?” he once asked rhetorically. Max’s hunch that there would be interest in the book outside the German-speaking world proved correct. Very soon there were offers, negotiated by Max, from publishers in France, Israel, Britain and America. The American publisher, in particular, offered an advance that was – other than what was in store for him when he would turn thirty-five – larger than any sum of money Miki had ever personally known; it was in the range of what Brigitte would earn for a starring role in a multinational coproduction. “At last, you’re a bigger star than I am,” she said to him good-naturedly. “Now we can buy a house together.” She was making a point. Up to now, with the quarterly payments from the trust fund and the additional income from his German royalties and his lecture and television fees, he had been able to build up his savings considerably faster than before, but not fast enough to have his share of the price of their dream house before the fund became his. But now there was no longer any need to wait. “Yes,” he agreed. “Let’s call that real-estate agency in Blankenese.” She then confessed that she had been steadily in touch with the agency for years. He wondered whether to confess to her in turn that, for him, it had been just a matter of time, by now less than two years, before he too was a millionaire in his own right. He decided, at least for now, to stay with the original plan of telling her on her thirty-fifth birthday. He also decided that, since he now did not need the salary, he would no longer work as a staff writer with Die Zeit, though he would continue as a free-lance contributor. He had been thinking about making the change ever since February, when Margot told him that Rudolf Augstein had called her five years to the day after his previous call to her – his memory was astonishing, she thought – and she decided to accept his offer at Der Spiegel. Müller-Marein, her patron, was on the verge of retiring from Die Zeit. The Countess, who would take over as editor-in-chief, was known for her antipathy toward women journalists other than herself, and her acceptance of Margot had been grudging all along. *      *     * The clerk at the Dan gave him his key with no comment about his absence the night before. It was almost five o’clock. Since it was Saturday and the hotel was kosher, the dining room would not be open. He would, a little later that evening, need to go out and find a non-kosher café-restaurant where he could get something to eat. Then he remembered Abie Nathan’s place, Café California. His friend Abie, whom he had met in Germany, was in America at the time, raising funds for his project of buying a ship from which he would send peace messages by radio. It was just as well that Abie would not be there, for he was an astute man, and he just might recognize Miki behind the disguise. Another possibility for a non-kosher dinner would be Mandy’s; it was owned by the Israeli husband of Mandy Rice-Davies, whose saucy line “Well, he would, wouldn't he?” had provided the best laugh of the comically sordid Profumo affair a few years before. That affair might have been one of the first indications of the sexual revolution reaching England, for what condemned Profumo was not what he had done, but that he had lied about it, and the new byword had become to be honest, to express oneself, to enjoy life in the form of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Soon after the affair came The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Marianne Faithfull, George Best and their ilk, and for people who might be only a decade younger than Miki, their lifestyle was the new paradigm. Poor Profumo: like Miki, he was married to a beautiful actress, but evidently was not satisfied as Miki was. Perhaps the problem was that Valerie Hobson ended her career when she married Profumo, though she was still young and beautiful. To Miki, perhaps the most exhilarating aspect of his marriage was being able to see Brigitte on the stage or on the screen, acting convincingly passionate with different men, while he knew that her true passion as a woman was reserved for him, her lucky husband. In the end, when he finally went out for a walk, he contented himself with a shawarma sandwich in a pita at a sidewalk stand. Most such stands were run by pious Yemenites and would not be open on the Sabbath, but he found an open one whose owner seemed Bulgarian. He saw no point in having anything other than Middle Eastern food while in the Middle East, but then he didn’t mind having it back in Germany either, now that the recently immigrated Turks were opening restaurants where they served shawarma under the name döner. The more people mingle, he thought, the better a place will the world become. *      *     * The tumultuous aftermath of the European student protest movements of 1968, whether the April events of Germany or the French May, found Miki Wilner preoccupied with other matters. Since he was now viewed as an authority on Israel and the Middle East, he had to keep up with events there, by reading as much as he could find of the Israeli press (in particular Haaretz and Ha’olam Hazeh) and, as much as he could understand with the help of a dictionary and the Harder-Paret book, of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram. There was also the search for a house in Blankenese. Not many were coming on the market at the time, and at one point Brigitte suggested extending their search to a wider area than Blankenese proper, for example Rissen or Nienstedten. But Miki said that it wouldn’t mean the same to him, and Brigitte agreed to wait. By this time he was paying only scant attention to the writings of the soi-disant thinkers of European neo-Marxism who were perceived as the intellectual leaders of the protest movement. In the literary sections of the press he noticed the publication of furor-evoking books such as Christian Enzensberger’s Great Essay on Dirt and Jean Baudrillard’s Le Syst`me des objets, but he felt no desire to read them. But while Miki did not follow the protest movement in detail, he could not help noting something about it that bothered him. Many of its participants liked to think of themselves as the European version of their predecessors in Berkeley and other American universities. But, by reading the New York Herald Tribune and other American publications, Miki noticed that those American student protesters had turned to an active participation in conventional politics, and had hitched themselves to the star of Robert F. Kennedy, called Bobby, who was now a United States Senator from the State of New York. And then came the day on which Bobby Kennedy won the presidential primary election of the Democratic Party in California, and at the victory celebration was shot dead by a man whom the press called a Jordanian, but who was in fact a Palestinian Arab, and had acted as such, to protest Kennedy’s pro-Israeli stand. The media did not make much, if anything, of this connection. Even the Israeli press called Sirhan Sirhan simply a Jordanian. Only in a small sector of the Arab press was he glorified as a Palestinian hero. But to Miki the assassination was a premonition of further terrorist attacks in the West, not only by individuals acting alone like Sirhan but also by organizations that might be offshoots of the Palestinian Liberation Organization. He wrote an article expressing his premonition. At the same time, far-left elements of the protest movement hailed Sirhan’s action as a strike against capitalism. The coincidence struck Miki as ominous, and he wrote another article predicting that, before long, extreme leftists would take the anti-Israeli Palestinian nationalist cause as their own, on the basis of a simple-minded formula that equated Israel with the West and hence with capitalism. He warmed his readers to be on the lookout for such a fallacious conflation. He now also incorporated these ideas in his lectures and television interviews, and once again he was pelted with criticisms, this time from the West German and Austrian left. At a lecture in Munich he actually had eggs thrown at him. He responded with “Thank you, but I prefer them fried.” Immediately after the lecture, the news spread that members of a recently formed organization called the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, led by George Habash (who had previously been one of the leaders of the Arab Nationalist Movement), had hijacked an El Al plane on its flight from Rome to Lod and diverted it to Algiers. The crew and passengers were being held hostage. On his return from Munich Brigitte told him that in his absence she had already found a house that was for sale and that seemed to her to be perfect. Despite his usual night-train fatigue, he was ready and eager to see it. The house was a little more than a kilometer from the Blankenese station, and since Brigitte was wearing comfortable shoes, they walked along the Blankeneser Landstrasse until they turned into a side street where they found it, about 150 meters away. The agent was waiting for them. What struck Miki as symbolically important was that the house bore the number 7. It was to be, for him, the House of the Long Seventh Day. It was a slate-roofed two-story villa of ivy-covered brick, built shortly before the First World War for a Jewish businessman .His three children, who grew up there but emigrated to America in the 1930s, reclaimed ownership after the war and rented it out, but after twenty years decided to liquidate it. It was not very large by Blankenese standards – for example, like the villas in the Falkenstein neighborhood farther west – but its quiet elegance suited Brigitte’s taste, and the Jewish connection appealed to Miki. It had a fence with a gate and a small garden in the front, and a large but cozy garden in the back. On the ground floor were the kitchen, with a built-in table for casual eating, a living room that, while not as large as the Countess’s, could comfortably hold a grand piano and a dining table for up to twelve people, a guest bathroom, a bedroom with its own bathroom that would be the perfect quarters for Frau Schmidt, and a library that would be Miki’s study. On the upper floor were another bathroom, the master bedroom with its own bathroom and with a balcony overlooking the back garden, and three additional bedrooms, one of which had already been used as a boudoir by the previous lady of the house and would be so used by Brigitte, while the other two could be guest rooms. “Mother and Bruno can stay here when they visit us!” Brigitte exclaimed. Miki felt a pang of loneliness over not having anyone that he could welcome as a guest in their house, but did not express it. He did not wish to dampen Brigitte’s joy. The house did not need any aesthetic remodeling other than painting, but it had been neglected during the years of absentee ownership and needed some roof repair and a considerable amount of technical work – wiring, plumbing, heating and the like – to bring it up to modern standards. The work would take at least a month, perhaps more, the agent told them, and so they would probably not move in before August, or even September if unexpected problems arose. One commodity that the house was well supplied with was telephone lines: there were four independent ones, since some of the rooms in the house had been sublet. One of them was the room that would be Frau Schmidt’s, and Miki and Brigitte decided that it would be convenient for their housekeeper to have a telephone of her own. They also would each have an unlisted personal telephone line, and the fourth would be Miki’s professional line – which he needed, since he no longer had a desk at Die Zeit – leading to an answering machine. Brigitte did not need one of these; all of her business-related calls went to HKA.