3   12 Feb. 87   Daniel has been talking to me, very slowly, since getting back from New York. He seems to have a hard time telling me what he learned from Brigitte. Knowing that he was meeting Brigitte brought back the memory of what Miki told me, with a laugh, the first time that we met: that I was not the first French Canadian girl in his life. (Tu n’es pas la première Canadienne française dans ma vie.) The first time that he came to Montréal, when he was 19, he met a girl from Québec aboard the ship coming over. They danced and flirted together, and when they landed in Halifax they spent the night in the same hotel but not together, because he was faithful to Brigitte, not knowing that she was already cheating on him, and would continue to do so, with all her leading men, until she told him a few months before we met. That is why he was getting a divorce. I am curious if she told Daniel that part of their story. But I will not interrogate him. Let him tell me when he is ready. By on the other hand he had no difficulty in telling me that he fell in love with New York. I understand that: I had already told him that I fell in love with Montréal the first time that I came here when I was 15, just as D is now. It was in the spring of 1965, the first year of secularized education in Québec. I was in Secondary IV. It was on a class trip with M. Daigle. Some day I will perhaps also tell him, and Betty also, what happened on that trip to Montréal. I believe that it will be easier with Betty. At 12½ she is beginning to look and sound like a young woman. In fact she seems to be developing faster than I did. It may be a little more difficult informing Daniel that Mireille Bouchard is not only his mother and the widow of his father but a woman with a past and a present and a future. But there was something new that he learned from me. He has decided that he wants to go to Columbia, and he wondered if we could afford his studies there. That is when I told him about the fortune that Miki left us, and mentioned that there was no provision for Betty. He joked that it was like an English novel, with the poor younger sister, but immediately, without hesitation and with no prompting on my part he volunteered to let Betty have one half of his share when he is 18. I was so moved that I could hardly speak. I said a banality: “you will be richer in your heart” or something like that. Of course I won’t tell Betty about it yet. She is only 12. But she will be 15 when D is 18. So it fits. When D is 18 he will already be at Columbia! And NAA is the right secondary school for him. It seems to have been conceived for those, Canadian or not, who are not in Québec permanently. No surprise: it was founded by American expatriates who, like Sam Zucker, had escaped the Vietnam draft but, contr unlike him, decided to stay in Montréal. Daniel tells me that the main campus, for Grades 9 (Sec. III) and up, is run just like an American high school that one sees in films and on television. In addition to the normal secondary grades of Québec there is a pre-University year that serves as Grade 12 for those kids who will go to university outside Québec. About half of the students stay for that year, and the rest go to cégep. Laura Casey, one of the English teachers, is American and serves as counsellor for those interested in going to university in the States. I have talked with her, and she seems quite competent. The kids who stay for Grade 12 but then decide to stay in Québec can usually go into the second year of an English cégep. Strangely enough, Laura told me, McGill and Concordia admit students from Grade 12 outside Québec but not from here. I told her that it is not so strange. Québec is different. N’est-ce pas, mon journal?   Lake Champlain   After packing and cleaning up after himself he left Sam a note thanking him for his hospitality, took a bus to Grand Central, had breakfast in a luncheonette and boarded the Adirondack. After a couple of hours he became bored with the near-desolate December landscape of the Hudson Valley. He set his mind to synthesizing what he had learned from Brigitte with what he already knew about his father. Aside from the little that his mother had told him – and she really, as she admitted, didn’t know her husband very well – what he had learned over time from Fela was that Miki Wilner and Leon Rozowski were Holocaust survivors and each other’s only surviving relatives. Miki lost, among the rest of his family, his parents and his little sister. (Daniel now knew that Axel Hemme was the villain in that chapter of his father’s story.) He was liberated at Bergen-Belsen at the age of ten; a short time later Leon, who had been liberated at Buchenwald and was in very poor health, came to West Germany and became a substitute father for his nephew. He had planned to move, with Miki, to Israel when his health permitted it, and pending his recovery he sent Miki to live in a kibbutz. In the meantime Leon met Fela and, having found that his health was too precarious for the rigors of Israel, decided to move to Montreal, where Fela had relatives. When Miki came back to Germany for Leon and Fela’s wedding, he was reunited with his high-school sweetheart Brigitte, the daughter of his piano teacher, and decided to remain in Germany; it was Fela who helped overcome Leon’s objections to Miki’s change of plans. Eventually Miki and Brigitte married. After graduating from Göttingen with a doctorate in philosophy, Miki became a journalist. Brigitte, a beautiful blue-eyed blonde (Fela liked to call her Aryan, but Daniel knew that the true Aryans were the dark-haired, dark-eyed people of Greater Iran), became a famous stage, film and television actress. They had no children, but seemed very happy together. They came to visit Leon and Fela in Montreal once, in the summer of 1962 (Daniel wondered if their happy stay at the Plaza was a part of that trip). Miki had visited them there once before, alone, in 1954, and he met Leon in London in 1958. He was also with them in Israel in 1966 when Leon died. It was a curious coincidence, Daniel thought, that the years when his father saw Leon were precisely those of the World Cup. In 1970 he came to Montreal once again, alone, and told Fela that he and Brigitte had separated. Fela did not know why. Daniel wondered if he should tell her what he now knew. It’s complicated, he might say, but I know why papa and Brigitte broke up. And Fela, European lady that she was, would not pry. When Miki came back later that year, in December, it was to give an invited series of lectures – at McGill and Université de Montréal in their respective languages – in which he compared the situations of Quebec and Palestine. Though by then his specialty had become the Middle East, specifically Israel and Palestine, he had an abiding interest in Quebec politics (he had once interviewed Jean Lesage). The twenty-one-year-old Mireille Bouchard was fascinated by the topic, and even more so by the handsome man who spoke about it bilingually.   The scenery outside became interesting again when the train reached Lake Champlain. Gazing at the lake, its rippling waves lit by the setting sun and skimmed by a flock of southbound cormorants, Daniel felt a sense of completion and reflected on the chance event that led to his meeting Brigitte. Shortly after school started he happened to be reading the Toronto Star in the school library and found out that a film starring the “now mature but still beautiful” Brigitte Wilner had been shown at the Toronto Film Festival. Excited, he called the Festival administration for information and found out that the film, like all her other films, had not been picked up for North American distribution. But somehow he got the address of the production company in Hamburg and eventually managed to get a letter, with a photograph of himself enclosed, through to Brigitte herself. Her reply came in due time. It was almost dark when the train reached the border. Daniel had his Canadian passport ready for showing, but neither the American nor the Canadian agents bothered to look at it. And so there would be no American stamps in addition to the British, Belgian, Dutch, French and Canadian ones that it had received on the European vacations he had taken with his mother and sister.   His curiosity about his father began growing, like a gnawing hole inside him, when he turned fourteen. Until then, the vagueness of his knowledge about him had not given him much concern. For Quebeckers born after the Quiet Revolution, being raised in a fatherless household was no longer out of the ordinary. But as he felt himself becoming a man it became important to him to know more about the man from whom he sprang. Mireille did not remarry, and though undoubtedly she had relationships with men, she hid them behind her busy residency and medical practice, and her equally busy social life with friends and colleagues. Daniel grew up without what is known as a male role model. That hole was now filled, like a dental cavity, and as a result of the filling he no longer felt its presence. But when the train stopped at Saint-Lambert, with half an hour to go before Montreal, another cavity of curiosity began to open. What, he wondered, did my father do during the three or four months between leaving Brigitte and meeting my mother? He traveled, of course. But did he now, freed from the bond of unreciprocated physical fidelity, begin to capitalize on his attractiveness to women and embark on a string of sexual adventures, of which the one that led to Daniel’s conception was only one? And if so, were there other children? Probably not, Daniel thought, or at least not as far as his father knew. The fact that he came back to Montreal, as soon as he learned of his mother’s pregnancy and his divorce was final, to legitimate the union showed that he took fatherhood seriously. Besides, in places where sexual liberation was further advanced than in French Canada, in all likelihood by 1970 young women already took precautions. The pill had, after all, been around for a decade, but in Canada it was only in the preceding year that birth control was fully legalized.   At the Montreal Central Station – which Amtrak had recently begun using in place of the old Windsor Station – his mother and sister were there to meet him. It was dinnertime, he was hungry, and they went out to eat at a Chinese restaurant near the station before going home. Over dinner Daniel tried to give an account of his trip, but he was tired and the effort was disjointed, dashing between images of New York, descriptions of Brigitte and discoveries about his father. He could not hold either his mother’s or his sister’s attention. After Zoë retired to her room, Daniel told his mother about his new plan for the future. “That’s wonderful, darling.” Mireille said, with a modicum of enthusiasm. “But Columbia’s expensive compared to Canadian universities,” he said. “Can we afford it?” “We are quite well off. Haven’t you noticed that we live very comfortably? That we have a nice big house and appliances and a nice car? That we take nice vacations, that… que ta maman s’habille très bien?” Indeed Mireille dressed very well, and probably expensively. It was something he had taken for granted without giving it any thought. “Yes, but you’re a doctor…” “A Canadian doctor,” she said with a laugh. “Yes, that covers a part of it. But your father left us well provided for, between the royalties from his book and, more importantly, the money that he inherited from Leon. Also, the money has been well managed, and it’s grown quite a bit since your father died.” “Really!” Daniel said, surprised that he was hearing about their wealth for the first time. “Actually, I’m glad that you brought it up, because there’s a problem.” “Yes?” “The last time that your father was here, he wrote a will, in which he left one-third to me and two-thirds to you, to be administered by me until you turn eighteen. He insisted on eighteen, not older.” “So I’m going to be a rich student. Is that the problem?” “No. The problem is that at the time none of us knew that Betty would come along, and so there is no provision for her.” “Like in an English novel, where the first-born son inherits the estate and the poor sister has to find a husband.” “Precisely. Greg Berman – he was your father’s lawyer, you know…” “No, I didn’t know.” “And before that he was in the firm that worked for Leon.” “I know that, of course.” “Greg faults himself for not anticipating the possibility of another child, but he has researched the law, and there’s nothing that can be done, unless you relinquish a part of your share when you’re eighteen.” “Of course I will. She can have half of my share, so we each get one-third.” “Are you sure?” “Of course.” “You will still be a rich student. Not quite so rich in money, but richer in your heart,” she said as she kissed him on the forehead. As she approached him he found himself involuntarily sniffing for the kind of sweet womanly smell that the beautiful Brigitte Wilner exuded. The beautiful Mireille Bouchard, as far as her son could tell, did not. Somehow he felt relieved. He did not try again that evening to talk to his mother about his discoveries. The time will come, he told himself. Le temps viendra. It was an altogether different experience telling about his trip to Fela Rozowski, when he visited her during Hanukkah, which that year came right after Christmas. Fela served him huge latkes while she listed with great interest to his tale about meeting Brigitte and his plans for the future. Fela remembered Brigitte with great fondness. She reminded Daniel again that she was the one who got Leon to agree to let Miki and Brigitte stay together in Germany. “They were so in love!” she never tired of saying. She also remembered her as an already famous actress during their visit to Montreal in 1962, and, for the last time, in 1966 in Paris, where she and Leon stopped over on their way to Israel, where Leon was supposed to get a miracle cure for his cancer. “She was such a beautiful girl,” Fela told Daniel for the umpteenth time, but now he knew at first hand that it was true. “But so is your mother,” she added once again. “I was so happy when he found someone right here in Montreal. Tell me, Danik, did you find out why they broke up?” She had long since stopped asking if he minded being called Danik. “Not exactly,” he lied. “So you’re going to be a journalist like your father! Wonderful! But promise me that you won’t go to report about wars!’ “I can’t promise you that,” he answered with a laugh, “only that I’ll try to be careful.” “That’s what he said too. I told him that he should be careful and he said that he will try. You are Miki Wilner’s son.”   In time, as being Miki Wilner’s son became less of an abstraction and more of a reality for him, Daniel came to appreciate the significance of Lake Champlain in representing the satisfaction, at least partial, of his curiosity about his father. What had felt like a stormy sea inside him was now more like a gently rippling lake. His father no longer seemed like a mysterious, disembodied presence. The disparate images that he had formed of him – from his mother, from Fela, from the photographs that were scattered about the house (in the living room, in Mireille’s bedroom and study, in Daniel’s room) as well as a few at Fela’s house – now coalesced in his mind into a being of flesh and blood. The pictures that showed him with his son at the ages of one and two, both with and without Mireille’s presence, formed themselves into a mental movie in two parts, and for the second part Daniel could even supply bilingual dialogue, since at the age of two he already spoke French and English fluently. Brigitte’s revelations were an integral part, indeed the skeleton, of this Miki Wilner, his father, whom Daniel now felt that he knew at last. Some additional revelations were to come in the course of the correspondence that they now embarked on, at the rate of three to five letters or cards a year (greeting cards and vacation postcards included), but they served only to flesh out some details of the almost fully formed image in his mind. The first card that arrived was a New Year’s card with a panoramic picture of Hamburg. It did not look like Montreal at all: in the foreground there was a lake, and in the background half a dozen steeples. It was the lake – the caption on the card called it the Alster – that suggested to him the symbolism of Lake Champlain. What remained in his mind of that visit in New York, far more than the meeting with Brigitte, was the memory of the trip itself, so pleasurable in all its aspects that he resolved that when he went there again it would be the same way, southbound by overnight bus and northbound by train, though by now he knew that, should he choose to fly, the cost would not be a problem.   As the vacation ran its course and the winter semester approached, Daniel, for the first time in his life, found the beginning of school exhilarating. Not only was North Am the right school for a kid planning to go to Columbia – Ms. Casey had told him the school had an excellent acceptance rate at Ivy League schools – but its ethnic variety was heady stuff for one who, for years, had been the only kid in most of his classes with a non-French surname. At North Am there were not only the Canadian-born children of American draft dodgers but also anglophone Canadians with all kinds of backgrounds – European, Asian, African – as well as Americans and other foreigners. There were even a few French Canadians who, like him, had somehow managed to get out of the francophone system. The ethnic variety was matched by variety in clothing, hairstyles, and demeanor. For the first time he saw girls paying overt attention to boys. Most of the boys who received it were older, but he found some of it directed at him. By and large, he ignored it. When Brigitte told Daniel that women would like him, he knew what she meant, and he knew that she, a woman of great experience and many “experiences,” knew what she was talking about. But he was in no hurry to put that knowledge to the test. He had always known that he was good-looking. When he was little he steadily overheard Qu’est ce qu’il est mignon, What a cute little boy, Vos far a sheyn yingele. It seemed to him to be just something that people said, and it was of no importance to him. His father, in his photographs, was a very handsome man. Mireille was a very beautiful woman, as were most of her female friends, as far as he could tell (she rarely had them over to the house). It seemed to him that women tend to keep company with other women who are more or less their peers in looks. His sister Betty/Zoë was a very pretty girl (who hung out with other pretty girls), growing into a beautiful woman. He thought that growing up amid feminine beauty had perhaps made him blasé about it. The girls at North Am, especially the prettier ones, seemed to him to be playing a game of who could get the most attention in return. He had no interest in playing along and had no inclination for the sport known as dating. He was busy with his studies, and when he was not studying or reading on his own, he practiced the guitar or played soccer. He did make friends with some girls, but they were among the less pretty but more studious or talented, and therefore, to Daniel, more interesting. One of them was Leslie Twigg, who could be called almost-but-not-quite pretty. She was American-born, plumpish and with wavy blond hair, and played violin in the school orchestra. She spoke French – and Quebec French at that, even Joual – surprisingly well, and was good at making up risqué Anglo-French puns. Another was Roxane Vanier, who was a native bilingual (anglophone mother, francophone father). She was a medium-distance and long-distance runner, with an athlete’s body and short-cropped black hair. She planned to go to university in British Columbia, where the outdoor track season is longer than in Quebec. During the long Montreal winter she kept in shape with cross-country skiing. Daniel preferred downhill.