The last entry
(verbatim): 7 juin 74.
C’est une fille. 2850 g. Elisabeth Zoé Wilner.
Je l’appellerai Betty.
I am alone in
my office. As usual, I am early. It’s 7:15. Staff won’t be coming for another
half hour, and the centre won’t open for another 45 minutes.
I am early
because, as I have been doing since for two months, I drove Daniel and
Betty to the Du Collège station before coming here to the clinic. But it was
the last time. On Monday, when the Côte-Vertu station will opens, they
will have a walk of only ten minutes from home before taking the metro to their
new school: North American Academy, an anglophone secondary school. It is
in the Plateau, a good 15 km from our house. But it’s less than half an hour
away on the Orange Line, which now runs to and from Saint-Laurent. With
Côte-Vertu open, D and B will be able to go to school independently of me and
even of each other, since their schedules are different.
Tonight I will
drive them to parties with their respective friends from the school. Then I
will go to a party at Tina’s.
It was Tina’s
suggestion that I write this journal. The same thing happened to her as to me,
only in reverse: her girls decided to be francophone, like their father, though
they live with her, and are with him only weekends. So she began to keep a
journal in French in order to force herself to think in French. She also
explained to me the difference (in English) between a journal and a diary: one
writes every day in a diary, but not necessarily in a journal.
I don’t plan
to write every day. I am a busy woman and, frankly, I am not very
introspective, except in mom not very frequent moments of introspection.
Daniel and
Betty are as bilingual as anyone can be. Since I transferred to McGill after my
preparatory year at UdeM, at least three fourths of my friends and colleagues
have been anglophones. Our neighbourhood, here in Saint-Laurent, is mixed. D
and B have played with anglophone kids since they were little, and I made a
point of hiring only bilingual nannies and babysitters for them. Daniel went to
anglophone preschool and kindergarten.
But in our
dear Québec people are not recognized as bilingual. If one is not aboriginal,
then one is either anglophone or francophone. Since I am French, and a single
mother, then according to Bill 101 (la
Charte de la langue française!) we are a francophone family, and the children must
attend French school. Which is anyway what I wanted for them, it is after all
their maternal mother tongue.
They seemed
content in French primary school. But Daniel seemed to be less so in secondary
school. He never complained openly, but he joked (I think) that he was tired of
being the only kid in his class with a W in his name. I answered by joking
joked back that he could change it to V, since that was how his father said it,
but he just glared at me, as if changing the spelling would be a treason to
the memory of his father betrayal of his father’s memory. (Arrête de
traduire, Mireille! Stop translating! Think in English!)
Betty, on the
other hand, not on was not only never bothered by her name and surname,
decidedly not French, but the distinction gave her pleasure.
Last April
Daniel announced that he wanted to learn German, so that he could read Miki’s
writings (other than The Long Seventh Day). Not only there was there no
German class in his school, but also in no other French secondary school,
public or private, in Montréal. Then Harvey told him that his school, NAA,
offers German. I checked with Greg, and he confirmed it. Good lawyer that is,
he also found a loophole (Daniel’s year in an anglophone kindergarten just
before the entry into Bill 101 went into effect) that made D eligible to
receive instruction in English, and Betty too, if she wanted.
And she did.
As soon as she heard that her brother would be going to an English school she
declared that she too was anglophone. Just before leaving for our vacation in
France she began to talk with D and me in English only, and she continued to do
it so while we were there. She amused herself by being taken for an
anglophone before surprising the people of local people by speaking
perfect French, even saying tu and du as the French do, not the
Québec way.
She also
decided that her name would not be Betty but Zoë, with a dieresis and not an
acute accent. The reason for the change? Well, there is a new French film, 37°2 le matin, with a pers character named Betty.
Of course my Betty did not see it (it is rated 16+), but when I told her about
the film and the character she decided that she did not like her and did not
want to share her name.
I call her Zoë
to her face, but not when I speak with others, and not with you, my journal.
Now, with the
changed schedule, will I still be coming here early? Probably not. Isn’t it
funny that I am beginning this journal on the very last day when I have this
space of free time?
But I will
find time for you, my journal, for you will be my confidante, even more than
Tina. Tina gives me what is called feedback, whether I want it or not. And I
don’t always want it. Sometimes I just want to express my thoughts and my
feelings. Some, perhaps, that I have not even told Tina. And it will be to you.
In English!
Mireille
“It’s for you, darling,” she said as she reached over with
the handset to his end of the sofa, where he was reading a German grammar book
(Deutsche Sprachlehere für Ausländer). The clanking of Betty’s
after-dinner cleanup could be heard from the kitchen.
The
endearment jarred his ears. Had she said C’est pour toi, chéri, it would
have been perfectly natural. But an English-speaking woman of Mireille
Bouchard’s generation would not normally call her teenage son “darling.”
To
Mireille, however, it was the call itself that was jarring. “Someone’s asking
for Mister Wilner,” she added. “It… ça m’a fait sursauter.”
It
must have been the Mister reference to her fifteen-year-old son that
startled her, not the call itself. He had been expecting it – and of course he
had told her about it – ever since receiving, some three weeks earlier,
Brigitte Wilner’s letter, written in her own hand and telling him that she
would be in New York near the middle of December. There would be a
retrospective of her films at the Goethe Institute, and she would love to meet
him if he could make it to New York. She would be staying at the Plaza Hotel, a
place where she had “fond memories,” and she would be happy to tell him as much
about his father as he wanted to know, time permitting. If he gave her his
telephone number, she would call him once she was in New York to make specific
arrangements.
The
caller’s voice was female and German-accented, but it was not Brigitte’s. She
identified herself as Helga of the Goethe Institute, and informed Daniel that
he was to meet Frau Wilner – it was this reference that now sounded strange to
him, especially since the name was pronounced Vilner and he was being addressed
as Mister Vilner – in the lobby of the Plaza, at ten o’clock on the
following Saturday morning. Before this time he had heard that pronunciation
only from his great-aunt Fela and some of her immigrant friends.
When Daniel first told his mother about the letter and his
desire to go to New York, she reminded him that she had a friend there, a
medical-school classmate named Sam Zucker, who had fled to Canada to avoid the
Vietnam War draft but returned to New York after Carter’s pardon and was now
practicing and living there, not far from the Plaza; Mireille had visited him
there. (Sam, it so happened, had assisted at Betty’s birth when he and Mireille
were residents.) She would arrange for Daniel to stay with him.
Now
Daniel told her that he wanted to take the bus on Friday – for which he would
need her permission to skip school – and return by train on Sunday. She wrote
the permission slip on one of her prescription blanks. Under MIREILLE BOUCHARD,
MDCM she wrote the date on the right and crossed out the Rx
on the left. Underneath she wrote PERMISSION, and then I grant
permission to my son, Daniel Wilner, on Friday, 12 December, for family reasons.
The wording was clumsy – it was the first such note that Mireille had written
in English – and was no doubt influenced by permission meaning ‘leave’
in French.
But
the next day at school Daniel found out that there would be an important test
on that Friday (in German, it so happened) and so he would need to take the
overnight Greyhound bus that would get him to New York at 7:15 on Saturday
morning. (The overnight train, the Montrealer, had lately been the subject of
notorious delays.) Mireille called Sam and learned that he would be away for
the weekend, but the building superintendent (the super, as they were known in
New York) would let Daniel in. He could go there by subway – the E train – from
the Port Authority Bus Terminal, freshen up, have breakfast and walk to the
Plaza.
During
the rest of the week Daniel sublimated his mounting excitement over meeting
Brigitte Wilner, the famous German actress who had been his father’s first
wife, by conjugating German verbs and declining German nouns in his head. The
excitement was transmuted into a determination to ace that test.
He
decided to keep the now unnecessary permission slip as a memento of the
beginning of the quest that he was undertaking.
The desire to learn German arose in him one day in the
preceding spring when he was visiting Fela Rozowski, the widow of his father’s
maternal uncle Leon, at her large house in Westmount. As he was idly scanning
the bookshelves of what had been Leon’s study, he noticed two books with Michael
Wilner on the spine. Both were in German. One of them, published in 1960,
bore a long title starting with Die menschliche Freiheit and was
evidently, to judge from the title page, his doctoral dissertation. The other,
from 1965, was titled In meiner Zeit and appeared to be a collection of
essays and articles published in periodicals called Hamburger Morgenpost,
Die Zeit and Merkur.
Daniel
already knew that Michael Wilner, even before the publication of his
international bestseller about the Six-Day War and its aftermath, The Long
Seventh Day, had been a prominent journalist in Germany and that,
especially after his separation from Brigitte, he spent much of his time
traveling around the world. On a visit to Montreal he met Mireille when she was
a medical student at McGill. She had attended some lectures he had given – in
both English and French – and fell in love at first sight. They spent time
together during the rest of his stay, after which he went back to Germany. When
she informed him that she was pregnant, he immediately finalized his already
pending divorce from Brigitte and came back to Montreal to marry Mireille. They
never lived together – Mireille told her children many times that she could
never live with a man – but he came back again several times, including the
occasions of Daniel’s birth and of his first and second birthdays. It was on
this last occasion, when he spent most of September in Montreal, that Betty was
conceived. Shortly thereafter he went to Israel to cover the Yom Kippur War –
he was in the process of writing his second book on the Arab-Israeli wars – and
disappeared. After the cease-fire Mireille was informed that his mutilated body
had been found, alone, in a car that had run over a mine or been hit by a bomb
near a battle site in the Golan Heights. Eventually it was sent back to
Montreal, with a death certificate issued by Israeli military authorities, and
buried at the Baron de Hirsch Cemetery. Daniel’s first memory related to his
father was the unveiling ceremony for the gravestone, a few weeks after his
third birthday and a year after Michael Wilner’s putative death.
Riding the metro home from school on Friday Daniel felt
elation mounting inside him. He knew that he had done well on the test. It was
his first semester at the North American Academy, a private anglophone
secondary school in which, after a decade in francophone public schools, he was
now enrolled because it was the only easily accessible school that offered
German.
North
American Academy was officially (for example in the school’s brochure)
abbreviated as NAA, but among its students it was colloquially called North Am
by some and Northam by others. These others included those who thought of
themselves as the in-group and who like the name Northam because it sounded
like that of an English public school or an American prep school.
Besides
being anglophone and offering German, North Am was also the school where
Daniel’s oldest friend, Harvey Berman, had been going for the past year. Before
being split apart for primary school – Daniel to francophone public, Harvey to
anglophone Jewish – they had gone to an anglophone preschool and kindergarten
together. Their friendship continued despite the separation. For several years
now they had practiced soccer moves together. They had played together in the
Saint-Laurent youth leagues. Now they were on the school team, having played in
September and October, with play to resume in the spring. Harvey’s father,
Greg, was a lawyer who advised Mireille on money matters. He and his wife
Marcia were also close friends of hers.
It felt good to get home after the cold, windy
walk from the Côte-Vertu station, which had recently been opened and was only a
ten-minute walk from their house. His sister, who was also going to North Am
but attended – as did Harvey’s younger brother Paul – the separate campus that
housed Grades 7 and 8 (Secondary I and II, in Quebec-speak), was already home,
and had turned the heat on. Daniel heard the clanking noise of the old furnace
– Mireille had long been talking about replacing it – even before he opened the
door.
“Let’s
cook dinner for maman,” he said to her.
Though
English was now the family’s dominant language, Daniel and Betty (now Zoë)
continued to refer to their mother as maman.
“But
it’s Friday!” Zoë said. True, on Friday evenings Mireille often had dinner out
with friends, and then Daniel and his sister would cook together for the two of
them.
“I’m
going to New York tonight,” he reminded her. “Maman told me that she wants
to stay home, and it’s too cold to go out to eat.”
“What
are we going to make?”
“I
don’t know. We’ll decide when it’s time. I’ve got to do homework for Monday.”
Mireille Bouchard was from Rimouski, of purely French
ancestry, but she was estranged from her conservative Catholic family, whom the
Quiet Revolution seemed to have passed by. Daniel did not meet any of them till
he was in his twenties, and he never got to meet his mother’s father, who had
referred to him – within Mireille’s earshot – as le petit bâtard juif,
since he was circumcised and had been conceived, if not born, out of wedlock.
The elder Bouchards seemed to have accepted Betty somewhat more graciously than
Daniel, since she was conceived legitimately and, with the auburn hair that she
got from her mother, looked more like one of them. On the rare occasions that
Mireille went back to Rimouski for a family emergency, she sometimes took
Betty, but never Daniel.
Daniel
and Betty Wilner could not recall a time when they were not completely bilingual.
At Fela’s house, where Daniel – but not Betty – went to visit fairly often, the
company was predominantly East European Jewish and therefore English-speaking,
with some Yiddish sprinkled in. Leon, however, had preferred French, which he
had studied as a youth in Poland, and most of the clientele of his very
successful coffee import business (the brand name was Café du Lion) was
francophone. Fela often told Daniel how sad it was that Leon didn’t live to
know him.
Legally,
however, Mireille Bouchard’s household was francophone, and under Bill 101
Daniel and Betty could attend only French-language schools. But Greg Berman
showed her that the law provided an exception for children who had received
instruction in English before its coming into effect, as well as their
siblings. Daniel’s anglophone kindergarten year was just before that fateful
date – 26 August 1977 – enshrined in the Charter of the French Language,
Section 73(4). The intention of the provision was that such children could
continue their schooling in English, but the language of the law did not say
so. Greg drew up the application, and Daniel and Betty were accepted.
He made salmon with a tarragon cream sauce and rice, and
Zoë made mixed vegetables. For dessert they had ice cream, which Mireille had
bought earlier in the week.
After
dinner Mireille drove Daniel to the Central Bus Station. What little he said to
her about the purpose of the trip got only a muted response from her. She
boarded the bus with him for a farewell hug and said, “Bonne chance, chéri,”
before stepping off. The seat beside him was free, so he sprawled out
comfortably. From the seat in front of him he heard a gruff male voice say,
“Beautiful lady.” He ignored the comment and promptly fell asleep. He was
awakened at the border crossing but immediately went back to sleep.