19 Monday, August 24, 1970 1969-70 That morning he had to skip the Dan’s breakfast. In order to catch the eleven o’clock flight to Zurich, he had to be at Lod by eight, and the shuttle that took him there left the hotel at 7:15. And then, in the line for the security check, about eight or ten meters in front of him, he saw her. This was not a mere resemblance, like that blonde in Jerusalem, two days before, who put him in mind of Brigitte. No, this was the girl, the Mossad’s Ora, looking, from the back, just as she did when he dropped her off at the Blankenese station. The fit of her jeans was the same, and the long brown hair covered the big hoop earrings that she was probably wearing in exactly the same way. What was she doing, checking in at the airport, as if she were just another passenger and not a Mossad agent, at the same time as he? Had he been followed? Had his presence in Refadim been detected? Was he still in danger? Of course, before he could think of what, if anything, he could do that was in any way different from what was planned, he would have to get a front or at least a side view of her, to be absolutely certain of her identity, if only to be able to report it to Interpol without coming across as paranoid. She was alone, and showed no inclination to turn her head in any direction. There were now only a few people between her and the security-control agent. It was important for Miki to see if she would be treated differently from other passengers. She was not. The same questioning, the same scrutiny of her passport, the same examination of her baggage, all while never looking in any direction but straight in front of her. She got through the control and walked straight ahead. He still had at least twenty people ahead of him in his line; it would be some forty minutes, he calculated. And, within the first of these minutes, she vanished. His anxiety now combined with his hunger to form what he experienced as a single sensation of discomfort. The only relief that he could provide for himself was to remind himself continually that he would be with Brigitte again that night. It worked; once again, that Norderney photograph came to dominate his conscious mind. Once he cleared security, he raced to the nearest coffee bar, which served an English-style breakfast of runny fried eggs and lukewarm toast that he wolfed down with two cups of coffee. Only then did he go to the Swissair counter to check in. His flight, it turned out, was going on to London after stopping in Zurich. He requested, and was given, an upgrade to business class of the tourist-class ticket that Hagemann had given him, so that he could sit as near the front of the plane as possible; he had enough dollars left in cash to make the payment. And then he saw her again in the line at the gate, her head still turned away from him. It was uncanny, as if she knew that he was there and would not let him see her face. He thought he might see her on the bus that took them from the gate to the aircraft, but he had no such luck. The bus that she was on filled up before he was out the gate, and, once aboard, after ascertaining that she was not in either the first-class or the business-class section, he knew that there was no way that he would see her again before Zurich. *      *     * The Hebrew version of The Long Seventh Day took much longer to go to press than the English and French ones. Max, at first, entrusted the translation to a young Israeli woman of German-Jewish descent who was a doctoral student in German literature at the Free University of Berlin. But while this young woman had done some acceptable translations of fiction, she did not know enough of the German terminology relating to modern history and politics. Max then found another Israeli, this one a native of Germany who had been living in Munich for some years, but this man had not kept up with changes in Hebrew. Finally, Max and Miki had to work together over the summer, becoming close friends and consuming copious amounts of St. Pauli beer, to splice what the two translators had written and make sure the terminology was adequately translated. The typescript was finally ready at the end of the summer, and, because of the High Holy Days and Sukkot, did not get to the printers until October. By the time the book was shipped to bookstores, at the end of the month, Israel was deep in the Knesset election campaign. Miki arrived in Israel a week after the Bundestag elections in which the SPD-FDP coalition won a majority that enabled Willy Brandt, at last, to become chancellor. It was also a few days after Israel’s football team, led by Mordechai Spiegler, had won the second of two matches against New Zealand, holding the Kiwis scoreless both times. This meant that if Israel were to defeat Australia – whose best athletes, like New Zealand’s, concentrated on rugby rather than soccer – in December, then it would be the only country representing Asia in the following year’s World Cup. What a great irony, he thought. Ask any Israeli if he thinks of himself as an Asian, and you’ll get an incredulous laugh. And all that because the Arab countries and their sympathizers, including North Korea as a loyal Soviet satellite, had refused to play Israel. He chided himself for not thinking, in writing his book, of the possibility of Israel’s participation in yet another international sporting event in Mexico – after the previous year’s Olympics – that might provide an opportunity for a display of terrorism against it. He would discuss it in his talks, though he would emphasize, just as he had in the book’s prediction about the Olympics, that the Mexican security apparatus, helped by the USA, was more than adequate to stave off such a threat. He would repeat his skepticism about the capacity of the West German police to do the same in Munich, three years hence. His first appearance was at a meeting that Uri Avnery had arranged in Rehovot. It was, technically, a campaign meeting for the Ha’olam Hazeh party, but to Avnery the election campaign was aimed more at education about the future of the country than propaganda for the immediate elections. In his introduction, he made it clear that his friend Miki Wilner was not there to ask people to vote for this or that party, but to give them his vision of the future, a vision that events so far had proven very clear-sighted. As Miki rose to go to the table that served as the dais, sketchy notes in had, he saw that the audience was small and mostly middle-aged, or at least with no one who was significantly younger than he was, with one striking exception. In the last row he saw a young woman, perhaps even a girl, with long brown hair, wearing jeans and a navy-blue short-sleeved, high-necked top fitting snugly around her opulent breasts. From her earlobes hung enormous hoop earrings that came within a few millimeters of touching her shoulders when she sat with her head upright. “Last week,” he began, “Moteleh Spiegler showed us that it is possible to be a hero in this country while wearing a uniform that consists of a striped jersey and shorts, and firing balls that don’t hurt anyone, except in their pride.” The audience laughed. The girl smiled. She had a pretty smile. “Unfortunately,” Miki continued, “being a peaceful hero in these days is no guarantee against danger. Israelis are in danger wherever they appear, and especially when they appear in situations of high profile. They are, just as you are here in the Land of Israel, in danger from terrorism. My friend Uri Avnery may not like the term ‘terrorism’ when applied to the actions of organizations like Fatah, but it doesn’t matter what we call it. What matters is to ask yourselves what you can do to protect yourselves from this danger, at home and abroad.” This time the girl’s face was expressionless. “As we have seen, greater military strength, and even whatever is or is not being done in Dimona” – some in the audience laughed nervously at the allusion to the suspected-but-denied work on atomic weapons – “will not protect you, just as it has not protected the United States against getting bogged down in Vietnam.” The girl seemed to stop paying attention. She slumped in her chair, he head slightly tilted to her right so that the right earring was resting on her shoulder. “And, unfortunately, your conflict with your neighbors is being compared to the imperialistic actions of the United States. I believe that this comparison is unfair, and I have said so in my book, where I have listed all the ways in which I think that it’s unfair. Did you think that I wasn’t going to mention my book?” This time the audience laughed heartily. The laughter seemed to startle the girl out of her distraction and made her sit up straight and look at him directly. But she showed no emotion, and this was how she remained for the rest of his talk: mostly distracted, perhaps even dozing, but every so often startled into attention, when she looked at him expressionlessly. When his talk ended, she walked out before the friendly discussion began. At the end he received warm applause, and decided to keep the same format for his subsequent talks. In Jerusalem his host was Amos Oz. In Tel Aviv, Hanoch Levin, a young playwright who, the year before, had written the satirical cabaret show You and Me and the Next War. In Haifa, it was Buli Yehoshua. He had expected to change the details of his talks as events might dictate, but it so happened that the string of violent clashes – the one that had begun in February with the bombardment of the Dead Sea Works by Katyusha rockets launched from Jordan, continued with bomb explosions in Jerusalem, an airplane hijacking, and almost weekly, sometimes daily, cross-border attacks, all with massive Israeli retaliation with airplanes and tanks – had run out of steam as the Jewish New Year began, a few days after crushing air and land attacks on Egypt. Now, during the election campaign, the country’s mood seemed sanguine, almost euphoric. (Miki had left his own euphoria, occasioned by Willy Brandt’s election victory, back at home.) He decided to emphasize even more the cautions that he had been urging against such optimism. One evening, in a bar in Tel Aviv, he overheard a soldier taking leave from his friends and declaring lightheartedly, “Well, it’s time for me to get back to the Sinai and kill some Arabs.” Hanoch Levin, who was sitting across from Miki, gave him a meaningful look, and they each raised their glass and took another drink. Just then a burly unshaven man holding a large glass filled with some sort of liquor, from which he was swigging loudly, passed their table and put his arm around Miki, shouting something in what sounded like Russian and looking at the far corner of the room, as though he were posing for a photograph. A drunken sailor, Miki thought. The girl with the big earrings was, strangely enough, present at every meeting, wearing jeans and the same huge earrings, though different tops. Each time, she vanished after his talk. Who could she be? When he asked his hosts and others who had attended the meetings, no one had any idea. They proposed conjectures, about which they argued among themselves. A reporter? No, because then she would have paid some attention to what he said. A spy? Very unlikely, because her appearance was far too striking, but if she were one, then for whom? For Israel? For West Germany? For America? For the Soviets? Back in Hamburg, when he told Brigitte about the girl, she had a solution of her own to the mystery. “That’s quite simple,” she said. “She is a fan of yours! I often see people who come to see me in the same play time after time, and they leave right at the final curtain. They don’t stay to applaud, because they believe – and other actors have told me this – that they have a special relationship with me, not merely as members of an audience. I’ve told you that you are a star!” “But she barely paid attention to me!” “It doesn’t matter. She just wants to be in your presence. It’s like some sort of primitive magic.” Brigitte’s thirty-fifth birthday was a few days later. They had a small party, and afterwards, in the course of hanging a diamond-amethyst-pearl necklace – which he had bought for her from Kleinberg for eight hundred dollars (“one thousand five hundred in New York”) – on her lovely neck, he told her about his coming millionaire status. “At last you’re richer than I am,” she said as she kissed him back. But she asked him no further questions. In the bedroom that night, she wore nothing but the new necklace and the earrings from three years before. *      *     * He was among the first passengers to disembark in Zurich, and, as he walked to the gate – no bus was needed – he longed for the feeling of safety that a Swiss policeman’s presence would give him. But, as he lingered near the gate, no one in a non-airline uniform was in sight. Other passengers kept arriving and going on towards passport control. He glanced at them sideways, having removed the by now thoroughly superfluous sunglasses, looking for the girl, but she was nowhere to be seen either. Finally the gate closed, and he was left all alone in the gate area. It dawned on him that she was going on to London. Perhaps she was not, after all, pursuing him. He remembered her story about her summer in London. Perhaps she was based there. Or perhaps she was not that girl at all, only someone who, from behind, looked amazingly, uncannily like her. Still, no policeman was coming. He was becoming anxious. He wondered if he had, to paraphrase John Le Carré, been left out in the cold. He imagined himself spending the rest of his life, or at least the next few days – until the matter was cleared up – wandering around, in his disguise, as Etzel Andergast. He had no choice but to walk in the direction of passport control, joining a small crowd of passengers who had arrived on another flight at a neighboring gate. And then he remembered: in Switzerland it is the canton police, not a federal agency as in West Germany or the USA, that handles passport control at airports. When he came close enough to see the agent checking passports behind the counter, he saw that the uniform and badge were indeed those of a Zurich policeman. He got into the line and, sure enough, when it was his turn and the policeman saw the passport in the name of Etzel Andergast, he said to Miki, “Please wait a moment,” and made a quick telephone call in Swiss German. After five minutes another policeman came, said to Miki, “Come with me please,” and together, without a word exchanged between them, they walked to the airport police station. Miki was told to sit in the waiting room, and after another fifteen minutes – it was now almost five o’clock – a man in civilian clothes came in, gave Miki a handshake and, with a smile, said, “Good day, Doctor Wilner, I am Inspector Ränkli. I am a liaison officer with Interpol, and you can now be yourself again. Come into this office with me.” After Miki surrendered the false passport and driver’s license, Ränkli gave him all the documents and keys that he had left behind in Stuttgart, and Miki gave the inspector his account just as he had rehearsed it. He did not include an addendum about possibly seeing the Mossad’s Ora at Lod airport. Inspector Ränkli took notes, and in the end seemed pleased. “All right, Doctor Wilner,” he said, “we are satisfied. Have you, perhaps, forgotten something?” When Miki looked puzzled, the inspector pointed at his chin. Suddenly enlightened, Miki ripped off the beard – the stinging pain on his skin felt delicious – and pulled the wig from his head, and gave them to Ränkli. The inspector placed them, along with his notes, in an attaché case, out of which he took an envelope that he handed to Miki. “Here is the ticket for your flight to Hamburg. It leaves at half past five, so you must hurry. The policeman who brought you here will take you directly to the aircraft. Your gracious wife will be informed of your flight by Hamburg police.” The policeman came in and said to Miki, exactly as he had before, “Come with me please.” This time, however, Miki was led to a car, and after two minutes he was dropped off on the tarmac, in front of the Swissair plane that was about to leave for Hamburg, its propellers already turning. Only two hours more, and he would be with Brigitte. And then, once he relaxed in his seat with all thoughts of Ora having left him, the vague memory that was evoked during the previous night’s walk suddenly became clear. The funny incident in the dimly lit bar was the one with the Russian sailor! Only he was not a Russian sailor, but a Bulgarian gangster named Petrov, and he really did pose for a photograph that was taken by someone with a camera equipped with a fast shutter and using, probably, high-speed film that did not require flash. It was too bad that the photograph of him and Petrov was not shown to him; he would have recognized it immediately. *      *     * After Miki’s return to Hamburg, it did not take long for violent confrontation between Israel and its neighbors to resume. In November, Egyptian frogmen from Aqaba sabotaged two Israeli ships in the harbor of Eilat. In December, an airlifted IDF unit penetrated deep into Egyptian territory and removed an advanced Soviet radar installation. In January, Israeli planes began attacking targets deep in Egyptian territory. In February, Egyptian frogmen sank two Israeli navy boats in the harbor of Eilat. Shortly thereafter, and a few days before his thirty-fifth birthday, something happened that shook Miki up in a way that he had vaguely anticipated, but only in his direst nightmares. It was enough to make him ask Brigitte to cancel any plans she might have made for a birthday party for him. She had indeed made such plans, but after what had happened she was, like him, in no mood to celebrate, and everyone she had invited was in full sympathy with the cancellation. She had, however, already bought him a present, which was delivered to their house, as scheduled, on his birthday. It was a Bianchi ten-speed bicycle. The dreadful event happened right in West Germany: Arab terrorists, apparently from the PFLP, attacked El Al passengers on a bus at the Munich airport, with one Israeli killed and eleven others injured, including the actress Hanna Meron, one of whose legs was filled with grenade fragments. Initial reports had suggested that her leg might be saved, but once she was sent back to Israel, surgeons there determined that amputation was necessary after all. Munich, of all places! he thought. He had written what seemed like a clear warning to the Bavarian authorities to step up their security arrangements in preparation for the Olympics. He had spoken about it on the most popular news show in West Germany. Surely the elders of Munich would have heard him, as the king of Nineveh had listened to Jonah and averted disaster. But no; they probably said to one another, “What does that Hamburg Jew know about security?” Miki had met Hanna Meron. She was the leading actress of the Kameri Theater, where Hanoch Levin was going to have a play produced, and she had come to Miki’s talk on Hanoch’s invitation. When she told him that she would be in Germany – where she was born – early in the next year, he invited her to come to Hamburg to meet his wife, of whom she of course had heard, and she said that she would try, though her schedule was tight. The Kameri was the Tel Aviv equivalent of the Kammerspiele – a small theater playing modern repertory – and Hanna had played some of the same roles as Brigitte: Eliza in Pygmalion, Laura in The Glass Menagerie. Surely the two actresses would find plenty to talk about, particularly since Hanna had not forgotten her German. He sent a telegram expressing his deepest sympathy and best wishes in care of the Kameri. He received a reply from Hanoch Levin, telling him that Hanna was in great spirits and was looking forward to returning to the stage, and inviting him to visit Israel, if possible with his beautiful wife, in April or May, when Hanoch’s piece – a cabaret-style show called Bathtub Queen – would be performed. The next day a registered letter came addressed to Dr. Michael Wilner, bearing Canadian stamps and the return address of a law firm in Montreal. It informed Dr. Wilner that an investment account in the Bank of Montreal, with a balance at the time of writing of Can$1,005,633.05, would be at his disposal as soon as the enclosed signature form, to be signed by him and notarized, was received at the bank. Upon receipt of said form he would be sent a checkbook and further instructions. He was now a millionaire, and in German marks a multimillionaire. Brigitte was at the time involved in a film project based on Schnitzler’s story Casanova’s Homecoming. Studio work in Hamburg would end in early May, and then there would be a break of some ten days before location work would begin in Venice. Since the precise dates had not yet been set, they had not made their vacation plans yet. They decided that they would at last go to Israel together. The day after they made the decision, and only eleven days after the Munich incident, a Swissair plane exploded on its way from Zurich to Tel Aviv. All forty-seven people aboard, fifteen of them Israeli, were killed. Once again, the PFLP claimed responsibility. “Let’s fly Swissair,” Brigitte said. “You know what they say in English: lightning never strikes twice in the same place.” “I wish that were true,” Miki answered, “but when it comes to terrorists, you have a point. Unlike you actors, they don’t like to do repeat performances. Besides, I like Swissair.” For himself, Miki decided that, given the performance of his Canadian account, he would put the bulk of his book earnings into it, out of the German savings account, where the money was earning only a modest interest. If I’m rich, he said to himself, I might as well get richer. Richer than my wife the film star! And he laughed at himself inwardly. *      *     * She was waiting for him just outside the gate. She was dressed in jeans and a simple black top, but her hair was styled in the permanent that she still called her incognito hairdo, and that he still called the Minna von Barnhelm coiffure. He guessed that perhaps the role for which she was rehearsing, in that secret television series, called for it. Perhaps it was set in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. They had, on previous occasions, been apart for more than the five days that this separation had lasted, but never had the separation felt so long. The lack of telephone contact was one thing that made it so; they were in the habit of calling each other daily. But for him there was also the extent and nature of the adventure he had lived through, and for her the anxiety that she felt for him. As soon as they were near each other, he dropped his duffel bag to the ground and they fell into a tight embrace punctuated by greedy kisses. No words were exchanged except murmurings of each other’s names. Both were keenly aware of their own and the other’s surging desire. There was no time to be wasted. They turned away from each other and, with their arms tightly around each other’s torsos, he picked up the bag and they began to walk, as fast as they could, to the garage. Once they were seated in her car, there was another deep kiss, and then she started the motor. During the half-hour drive from the airport to Blankenese, he told her about the preceding days’ events in sporadic fashion. “You were wrong about the girl,” he began. “You mean she was not a fan of yours?” “That’s right. She is a Mossad agent. And the person she works for… Do you remember my friend Tzvi, in the kibbutz, that I told you about?” “The one whose sister you thought you had raped?” “Yes, he’s the one. He and some other people cooked up a scheme to frame me for killing the wrong Hemme, or at least for hiring the killer, who was a Bulgarian gangster who lived in Israel. Actually it was the girl who hired him. They set it up when I was in Israel last year; they got a photograph of me and him in a bar in Tel Aviv. Then they sent the girl to follow me and get me off my guard.” “Slow down, sweetheart. You’re losing me. I’m supposed to be able to follow complicated plots, it’s my profession, but… Who are ‘they’?” “The Mossad. Whether they did this on their own, perhaps as a personal operation by Tzvi, or on orders from above, I don’t know, and I probably never will. You see, Tzvi is dead. I think I killed him.” Brigitte took her right hand off the wheel and touched Miki’s forehead with it. “I don’t feel any fever,” she said, “but you seem to be hallucinating.” “I probably am,” he said. “I’m imagining that I’m being driven by an incredibly beautiful woman to her luxurious house, where she’s going to feed me delicious food and drink, and we’re going to have a tempestuous night of love together. That sort of thing doesn’t happen in real life. But people do kill other people all the time, especially angry men.” *      *     * The Wilners’ ten-day stay in Israel was not a quiet one. On the day they arrived, a Sunday, an IDF unit killed 21 Palestinian infiltrators in the Jordan Valley. Two days later, Katyusha rockets were fired from Lebanon on the town of Kiryat Shmona. A few days after that, Israeli forces crossed into Lebanon and destroyed some Fatah camps. But by far the greatest source of unrest among Israelis at the time was the tempest that had erupted around Bathtub Queen. After a whirlwind tour of the country in which they visited Rehovot, Jerusalem, Haifa and Acre, Miki and Brigitte returned to Tel Aviv on the following Sunday, which happened to coincide with the Remembrance Day that precedes Israeli Independence Day. That afternoon, the ceremonies were shown on television, including a melodramatic performance of the hero-worshiping song Ballad for a Medic by the actor-singer Yoram Gaon, the star of the musical Kazablan. The song and the patriotic speechmaking, by the likes of Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan, were an appropriate preparation for Bathtub Queen, which they went to see that evening and in which all such patriotism, self-sacrifice and hero worship were mercilessly – and sometimes, Miki had to admit, tastelessly – ripped apart. He was kept busy during the brief breaks between the skits explaining them to Brigitte in English – on her request, since she did not want to draw attention with German whispering – and while she, skilled as she was in reading stage gestures, managed to get much of the meaning on her own, some of the details needed translating. Such was the proclamation by the Golda Meir figure, “For seventy-one years I have been examining myself and I discover in me such righteousness that God only help me. And every day it surprises me anew. I’m right, right, right and right again.” And the declaration by the “war hero with a pure soul”: “I envelop myself in a hard shell only to cover up my inner soft-heartedness and my gentleness.” And the core of the plot, the fate of the exploited Palestinian worker Samatokha, of whom the couple that employs him says, “He is our Arab. He knows how to stand on two legs, just like us. Only at home he walks on all fours. But that’s not because he wants to – it’s just because of the height of the ceiling.” And later, “We are not smashing his head in because we are cultured people.” They complain to him: “Where will it all end, Samatokha? Yesterday a bomb in the supermarket, this morning in the offices of the Kameri. Where will it end?” When the wife points out to her husband that Samatokha didn’t have anything to do with the terrorist attacks, the husband replies: “Of course, I know that, but if I were a primitive guy, I wouldn’t distinguish between an Arab who puts bombs and an Arab who doesn’t put bombs. An Arab is an Arab.” Samatokha is finally rescued by a noble-hearted Israeli woman. “As the mother of three children, one of whom is a combat soldier, and as the daughter of Shoah survivors, I am hereby authorized to declare: Don’t hurt Arabs. My husband is a contractor and he needs working hands in order to build you two-, two-and-a-half-, three-, and four-room apartments, with central heating and fittings for a telephone.” A good part of the audience seemed to have been composed of people who had gone with the express purpose of whistling and booing. But those same people could be seen laughing, in spite of themselves, and trying to hide their laughter. The next day they had lunch with Hanoch Levin, Hanna Meron and a few other members of the Kameri ensemble. Two days later they flew to Rome. Once there, Brigitte found out that the filming in Venice would be delayed, because of rain, until the following Monday. Instead of taking the connecting flight to Venice, therefore, they stayed in Rome for two nights. On Friday they took a train to Florence, where that evening they attended a concert conducted by Claudio Abbado, with Gundula Janowitz – whose marvelous voice they had previously heard at the Hamburg Opera – singing in Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater and in Verdi’s Four Sacred Pieces. Before they left Hamburg, Billung had made reservations for them for the concert – it would have been a side trip from Venice if the filming had begun as scheduled – and for a room in the Hotel Cavour. It was a memorable night. By the time they arrived in Venice on Sunday afternoon after an overnight stopover in Milan, where they went to hear the Ambrosian Pentecost high mass in the Duomo, Brigitte’s period had begun.