2   12 Dec. 86   Hello, my journal. It’s nice to see you again after 6 weeks. I no longer have that morning half-hour alone at the office. So we will meet in the evenings, just before bedtime. The news: Daniel made a lightning trip to New York for the weekend. It was in order to meet Brigitte. Brigitte Wilner, the German film star, Miki’s first wife. He expects to learn more about his father from her than he ever could from me. He is right. He will be staying at Sam Zucker’s apartment, though Sam will be out of town. Perhaps it’s just as well that he will not meet Sam, who was my first lover after Miki. After assisting at Betty’s delivery, and the tubal ligation that followed, he told me that I had the most perfect pubis he had ever seen. How could a girl (and though I was a widow of 25 with two children, I was still a girl) resist that? But if it so happened that he met Sam at the same time as Brigitte, there would be a kind of tragicomic symmetry: old flames of his father and his mother. Speaking of flames, I have been getting friendly (perhaps more than friendly) telephone calls from George Kenner. I met George years ago, when a patient of mine was taken to ER at MGH and he was attending. In September I met him again, at the meeting for parents of new pupils at NAA, with his wife Doris. And again at Tina’s party, without Doris. Yes, my journal, I am attracted to him, as I haven’t been to anyone since it ended with RG. What else do you want to know? Did I flirt? Probably. Tina once told me that I am like La maman et la putain (that interminable French film that we saw together a dozen years ago, when we were residents, and I was “chaperoning” her first date with Louis) but in one body. When I am with the kids I am the mother and nothing else. When I am without away from them I am, well, of course not a whore but certainly a flirt. I told her that my father did in fact call me a whore. T’es une petite pute, he once said. It was when he saw me talking with M. Daigle, the history teacher. Le prof d’histoire. C’était bien une histoire. Ça ne peut pas se dire en anglais. Dommage. Ou plutôt tant mieux. Tina understands. I have told her about M. Daigle and me. My father also calls Daniel (whom he has never met) le petit bâtard juif. The last time I heard him say it was when we went with Betty to Rimouski, Betty and I, in the spring of 83. It was for the funeral of Tante Clotilde, my maiden aunt, the only one in the family who didn’t just love me but approved of me and my choices. (Daniel stayed in Montréal with the Bermans.) Betty told Daniel about it, and he found it funny. He said that since I, his mother, was married when he was born and not Jewish, he is neither a bastard nor a Jew. So much for his grandfather’s wisdom. Some day I will tell him what my father called me, to give him a perspective. When I am ready to talk with him about my intimate private life. And when will that be? Well, certainly not before he has one of his own. I wonder: if Daniel had met Sam, would he have sensed something? No, probably not yet. He’s mature in many ways, but I have not yet seen that he an interest in girls or anything related to sex. He is fifteen already. We will see what happens when he is sixteen. Tina, by the way, is a pretty good mother but not as maternal with her kids as I am with mine. She decided, when she and Louis were separated, that she would not compete with him for their affection and just try to do a good job as a mother. “They are your kids, not your patients,” I told her at the time. But she is who she is. She is my best friend, and I love her. Brigitte   He was in the Plaza lobby well before ten, feeling rested and refreshed after his cleanup and breakfast at Sam’s small but well-appointed apartment. He was distracting himself with the New York Times crossword puzzle when he heard “Hello, Daniel” from a melodious mezzo-soprano voice behind him. Startled, he turned around and stood up to greet Brigitte Wilner. They shook hands and exchanged kisses on the cheek. “Hello, Brigitte,” he said, pronouncing the name as though it were French. She laughed. “My name is Brigitte,” she said, saying it in the German way. “But when I was young, people would flatter me by comparing me with Brigitte Bardot.” “You are much more beautiful than Bardot,” he blurted out. And indeed she was a very beautiful woman, even at fifty-something. Daniel was used to beautiful women – his mother was one – but in Brigitte’s presence he suddenly understood the meaning of sensual. There was about her an aura that invaded all of his senses besides the visual: her voice when she greeted him and laughed, her touch when they shook hands, her smell when he got near her to kiss her cheek, the taste of her skin when he did so. He was filled with a feeling of excitement that he had never experienced before. He felt himself blushing. Brigitte sat down, and he followed suit. “You are very sweet,” she said. “Women will like you, I can assure you. You are a lot like your father. You are fifteen, yes?” He nodded. “That’s how old Miki… Do you mind if I call him Miki, not ‘your father’?” “No, of course not.” “That’s how old we were when we became lovers.” Lovers? Did she really mean lovers in the grownup sense, he wondered, or sweethearts? “Really?” he said, not knowing what else to say. “Yes, really. I was four months older than he and I was also, shall we say, precocious. It happened on the sixth of August, nineteen hundred fifty. And we were lovers for twenty years, except for the time that he spent in Israel. But after he came back we were together for eighteen years. I called myself Brigitte Wilner even before were married. I liked the name much better than Bechmeyer. And we were true to each other. At least spiritually.” “Spiritually?” Daniel wondered if this was a mistranslation from the German, though her English had so far been almost flawless. “I will explain that later,” she said with a mysterious smile. “At the kibbutz where Miki lived it was expected that teenage boys and girls would have sexual relations with one another. He told me about it when he came back, and I wrote an essay in high school comparing it with what Margaret Mead had observed in Samoa. He also told me that there was only one girl that he liked, who was called Nili. I am telling you because she is important in the story.” He made a mental note to himself to tell her, at some later moment, that Margaret Mead’s findings had recently been refuted by a New Zealand anthropologist named Freeman, but said nothing. “There were two other people who are important. One was a boy named Tzvi, who at first was Miki’s best friend and later became his enemy for a reason that we don’t need to talk about. The other was a teacher named Hanna, who was originally from Hamburg. She helped Miki with his German, so that he could write letters to me. He wrote beautiful German. I have all his letters and all the essays and articles that he wrote. Do you know any German?” “I’ve just started studying it. Ich habe… angefangen…” he stammered. “Sehr gut. I will make you photocopies of everything that your father wrote, so that you can read it when you have learned German. And when you come to Hamburg I will show you photographs that he took, especially on Norderney, an island in the North Sea where we often went on vacation. He was a wonderful photographer.” “Did he have any other hobbies?” “Football – he was a big fan.” She meant soccer, of course. “And of course there was music. He played the piano beautifully. Do you play music?” “Guitar,” Daniel said. “I took classical lessons for a year, but now I just play around.” “Miki played classical music – my mother was his teacher…” “I know.” “… and he also accompanied me when I sang show tunes. I played in American musicals, you know, especially Kiss Me Kate. My special song was True to you in my fashion.” Brigitte smiled. “What did you mean by spiritually?” Daniel asked. She smiled again. “I thought that you would ask. Miki was faithful to me physically, as far as I know, till the end.” He waited for her to go on, and she did. “For me it was different. I am an actress, and in most of the roles that I play, even now that I am older, I am, how do I say, romantically involved with a man.” She paused again before going on. “I discovered early on that I cannot play the role convincingly if I haven’t had a sexual experience with him, just to get to know him. Not an affair, just an experience. It was a kind of permission that I had given myself. Do you understand?” “I think so,” he said uncertainly. “Did my father know?” “Your father was a brilliant man, an intellectual, a philosopher, a linguist, a historian. He could make amazing predictions about political events that usually came true. But understanding individual human beings was not his strong point.” “So, you’re saying that he didn’t know,” he ventured. “But…” he added after some hesitation, “but you were a celebrity, and… and I guess your leading men were too, at least some of them.” “Yes,” she said with a smile and a nod. “So… so wouldn’t there have been gossip that he might have heard, or read?” “Another good question. Perhaps there wasn’t so much celebrity gossip then, before the seventies, or perhaps we were all discreet. Any way, the answer is no, he didn’t know, till the end, August nineteen hundred seventy. I must tell you what happened in that month.” Another pause. “But before, there is something else that’s important. I could never have children.” “Did you want to?” “You ask good questions, Daniel. No, very frankly, I didn’t want to. I was very happy with my career and my marriage.” “What about my father?” “Another good question. He never said that he wanted children, but I always had a feeling that he did, and that deep down he resented my… my infertility. Is that how you say it? “Yes.” “And when he called me half a year after we separated to tell me that he was going to be a father – your father – I knew, even before he said it, what he was going to say. And he sounded so happy that I felt happy for him, though of course I missed him.” “You really do understand people,” he said. “It’s my profession.” She smiled. “So now let’s go back to August nineteen hundred seventy. We were on vacation on Norderney, our favorite vacation resort, as I told you. It was where I had my first acting job, while Miki was in Israel, and I was there again in the next summer when he came back to Germany. I did not know that he was coming back, but when he came to meet me backstage, very strangely I did not feel surprised; it was as if he had never gone away. I was having an affair with my leading man, but I stopped it immediately. And I never had another affair.” “Only experiences,” Daniel said, smiling. “Exactly. You understand. So now let’s get back to August… No, there is something else. In the year before, when his book The Long Seventh Day came out in Israel, he went there to talk about it, and he noticed that at every talk there was a young woman, or girl, with big earrings, but she always disappeared before the end. He told me about her, and we joked about it. “So now here we are, at last, on the sixth of August nineteen hundred seventy, the exact twentieth anniversary of our first time together. I was reading the newspaper, and I noticed a… a news…” “A news item,” he suggested. “Yes, a news item about a man named Axel Hemme who had been murdered in a village near Stuttgart. Now, Axel Hemme was the name of the SS officer who had sent Miki’s mother and little sister away to be deported, and he shot Miki’s father right in front of him. But when Miki saw the picture in the paper he said that it was not the same man. Even if he had received plastic surgery – and later there was a report that he had received it – Miki was absolutely sure. “A few days later, when we were back in Hamburg and I was working in the television studio, the Israeli girl with the big earrings came to our house. She told Miki that her name was Ora, and she told him a story that she was Nili’s daughter and Miki was her father. If that had been true then she would have been seventeen, but to Miki she looked at least twenty, so he didn’t quite believe her. By a strange coincidence, a few days later his old teacher Hanna came to Hamburg for a visit. She had written him a letter about it, but she sent it in care of the publisher, and it was a month before he got it, just a few days before Hanna’s visit. “It turned out that she had been in touch with Nili, and Ora’s story was a complete fabrication. Nili in fact had a daughter named Ora, but she was only ten. I suggested to Miki that he should go to Israel to investigate, and he agreed, but meanwhile the police in Stuttgart blocked his passport and summoned him to go there to be questioned. It turned out that they found the killer, a Bulgarian convict, who claimed that Miki had hired him to kill Hemme, but he quickly admitted that he had been hired by a young woman who was probably the same as our Ora.” “This is becoming like a mystery novel,” Daniel said. “It gets better. As they say in American slang, you ain’t heard nothin’ yet. Miki made an arrangement with the police that he would go Israel in disguise, under a false name, to clear this up. He met Nili, and she told him that most probably the person behind the plot – the two connected plots, Ora and Hemme – was his former friend Tzvi, who was a high official in the Mossad, though he still lived in the same kibbutz where he took care of the fishpond. So Miki drove to the kibbutz, on a Saturday when Tzvi would be probably at home, and he found him at the fishpond. At one point Tzvi said something that got Miki so angry that he punched him. Tzvi was so surprised, since Miki was not a violent person, that he lost his balance and fell into the pond, face down. Perhaps he drowned, perhaps not. Miki didn’t wait to find out but escaped.” “Wow!” was all that Daniel could think of saying. “So you see, Daniel, your intellectual father suddenly became a man of action when it was necessary. And when he came back home and told me about his experiences, I told him.” “About your experiences?” “Yes. I knew that I was taking a risk, but I felt obliged to give him his freedom. Freedom was very important to him, intellectually. He wrote his dissertation about it. But this was personal freedom. He needed it. And that’s why you are here.” ”Thank you, Brigitte,” Daniel said, welled up with emotions he had never felt before. “I am very happy that I met you. By the way, I once stayed here at the Plaza with your father, and we were very happy. A singer named Kitty Kallen was performing in the Persian Room, and from her I learned True to you in my fashion.” She glanced at her watch, which, to Daniel’s surprise, looked like a man’s. “I could go on for a long time,” she said, “but I have to go now – I am having a very busy time – but come see the film that’s being shown tonight.” “Is it subtitled?” he asked. “No, but for you that won’t be a problem. It’s called La Grande Paix and it’s in French. Actually some parts are in German and they are subtitled in French. It’s a German-French coproduction. I made it when I was twenty-six, exactly half of my age now.” She laughed. “For you, twenty-six is old, but for me…” She stood up, and once again they shook hands and exchanged kisses on the cheek.   The weather in New York on that afternoon was crisp and cold, but not so bone-chilling as it had been in Montreal. Daniel walked for miles in both directions, downtown as far as Greenwich Village – where he had some delicious pizza for lunch – and uptown as far as Columbia University. His meeting with Brigitte Wilner had so aroused his senses that he promptly fell in love with the city, with its sights and sounds and smells and tastes and textures. When he got back to Sam’s apartment his future, at least for the next decade or so, seemed set: after finishing secondary school, including the pre-University year, he would go to Columbia College with a major in German and a minor in history, and then to the Graduate School of Journalism. In the evening he went to see La Grande Paix. He found it somewhat mawkish and old-fashioned, quite unlike the Nouvelle Vague films that had been made in France at the same time, but he found Brigitte – playing a German woman married to a Frenchman living in Lorraine during World War I (which the French called La Grande Guerre) – fascinating. After the showing she managed to spare a few minutes for him. She invited him to visit her some day in Hamburg, in the house that she had shared with his father for two years. It was, she told him, in a beautiful suburb called Blankenese. That night he dreamt that he was in Hamburg, though it was only a slightly distorted version of Montreal. He was looking for the suburb where his father had lived, but in the course of asking for directions he forgot its name. He managed to speak some German, but on waking up he knew immediately that he had it all wrong, that what he had been speaking in his dream was a hodgepodge of English and French.