5   1 March 88   I know, I know, my journal. I have neglected you for almost a year. I should have confided in you sooner. But, you see, for most of that time I was torn in half, with feelings of the kind that is difficult to put on paper. George wanted to continue our relationship when he came back to Montréal in August, and so did I, but I didn’t. Like Zerlina: vorrei e non vorrei. I am not in love with George, but then I will never be in love again the way I was with Miki. But I like George. A lot. Je l’aime bien. He is fun to be with. But he is still living with Doris. He says that it’s only because of Amy. The older kids, Flora and Joel, are already out of the house. Amy was, as he put it, an afterthought. Like me, I suppose. (When I first learned the word afterthought I thought that it meant arrière-pensée and I would say “without afterthought” when I meant “without reservation.”) Amy and Betty seem to be still friends, but not as close as before. Betty’s “crowd” now is what is known as “fast.”They talk about boys incessantly, and in particular about how, once they are in Grade 9 and on the main campus, they will be surrounded by older boys, practically men. Then Betty might say something like “Yeah, like my brother” and the girls burst into giggles. I am curious about D’s reputation among the girls at NAA. Do they wonder why a good-looking guy like him is not interested in girls? But asking Betty about it would be too delicate, wouldn’t it, my journal? Betty and her friends have no inhibitions about talking when they are at my house, probably because Betty has assured them that I don’t mind, unlike some of the other mothers. But then how could I mind, having been a “fast” girl myself? And back in the 60s, which in Rimouski were still the Dark Ages? But I am digressing. Last night was G’s 48th birthday party. He was born on 29 Feb 1940 and celebrates his birthday only in leap years, probably as an excuse to make it a big bash (dixit Tina), though he says he will make an exception for his 50th and celebrate on 28 Feb 1990. And it was a big party and he came on to me stronger than ever. Doris was there but with her own little group and didn’t seem to be involved in any of G’s doings. When we sang “Happy Birthday” she only mouthed the words half-heartedly. I had to admit that what G had been saying about his marriage being dead was true. So I gave in. I would like to say that perhaps I had too much to drink but it would not be true. I was perfectly sober, unlike most of the people at the party. Anyway, my journal, the party was in a ballroom of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel. Because it was on a Monday night it was pretty much over by 11 and then G took me up to a room he had rented. “What if I had said no?” I asked him in the elevator. “Would you have taken someone else?” He laughed but when he brought me inside the room there was a bouquet of red carnations (he knows that they are my favourite flower) with Mireille written on the wrapping. But today I am feeling guilty and ashamed. I am not sure why. Perhaps because he took it for granted that I would say yes. When I told him that he denied it, he said that he just took a chance. G knows that I love opera, so he proposed taking me to the Opéra de Montréal, perhaps next month. I didn’t say no. I have not yet been to the Opéra de Montréal, but I have heard that it will be getting much better with the new director who has been named. I miss the Live from the Met television broadcasts on CBC. There haven’t been any since Daniel and I watched les Noces the Marriage of Figaro together, more than 2 years ago, but I understand that later this month there will be one of les Contes d’Hoffmann. I wonder if Daniel will watch it with me. Probably not. Speaking of Daniel: he seems even more content at NAA this year than last year. Less excited, perhaps – the novelty has worn off – but more content. He is happy to be learning German, most of all, preparing himself to read Miki’s writings in the original. He complains that he is not progressing as fast as he would want to, but his grades are excellent, so he must be doing something right. He is also concerned that, with the school not offering a third year of German that he could take in Grade 12, he will get rusty before he gets to Columbia. I tried to reassure him, telling him that if he keeps up his reading he will be all right.“I hope so,” he said. He will take French literature instead. I am glad. Perhaps he will learn that there are other poets worth reading besides Jacques Prévert. Verlaine or Apollinaire, for example. I have fond memories of them. Miki loved them, and recited their verses to me from memory. Baudelaire and Rimbaud, not so much. Band   Grade 11 became in Daniel Wilner’s later memory something like Lake Champlain, ripples seen from a train as it speeds past. There were highlights along the way, to be sure, but they were made blurry by the inexorable forward rush of the engine that led him toward adulthood. Academically, it was once again German that took up most of his interest. Every so often, when visiting Fela, he would test his progress by reading, or trying to read, the shorter articles that were in the collection called In meiner Zeit. But it took him much of the first semester to forge his way through the first one, titled Deutsche, Westdeutsche, Deutschländer, whose thrust was that there ought to be a distinct term, Deutschländer (“Germanian” in English), for those who were citizens of Germany regardless of ethnicity, while Deutsche (German) ought to refer to those of German ethnicity regardless of citizenship. It was an interesting idea. But Michael Wilner made an assertion that troubled Daniel: that people who were ethnically French but not citizens of France, like the Walloons of Belgium, the Romands of Switzerland and the Valdôtains of Italy, did not call themselves French. That may be true in Europe, Daniel thought, but French Canadians like him did not hesitate to call themselves Français. It was much easier going with the simple pieces of literature, carefully chosen for accessibility, that the class was reading. One of them was a romantic novella titled Germelshausen by a writer that no one had ever heard of, Friedrich Gerstäcker. Daniel remembered that in New York he had seen, among the posters for Brigitte’s films, one with that very title. He asked her about it in the letter that he wrote in reply to hers. She wrote back telling him that the idea of making the film had come from his father. A famous American musical called Brigadoon was based on the story and Brigitte was in a stage production of it about the same time that she made the film. Because of the Brigadoon tie-in, the film was chosen as the German entry for the Best Foreign Film Oscar. It was not among the final five, but Brigitte went to Hollywood for the Oscars anyway, partly because Miki’s book had just come out in America and he began his book tour at the same time in Los Angeles. Daniel had read his father’s book in English and French, but now he wanted to read it in the original. Fela didn’t have it in her house, but he found out that a copy of Der lange siebte Tag was at the McGill library. Since he could not check out books from the university library, he went there with Mireille’s copy of the English edition, which he would consult – instead of a dictionary – whenever he had trouble with the German. The experience was frustrating. The book, he was now discovering, seemed to be written in two different styles: vivid, anecdote-packed journalistic reporting of the situation in Israel and Palestine around the time of the Six-Day War – this was the part that he remembered from his reading of the book a couple of years before – and lengthy, convoluted philosophic-historical-linguistic reflections, rife with obscure literary references (explained in endnotes) and with metaphors whose English versions were far from literal translations of the originals. As an Anglo-French bilingual Daniel was, of course, familiar with this. When his mother described her falling in love with his father as un coup de foudre, she would certainly not have said a stroke of lightning in English. It would have been interesting, he thought, to use the French edition of the book as an alternative, but Mireille’s copy was especially precious to her, and she would not have given him permission to take it out of the house. It was autographed – à Mireille, affectueusement, Miki – on the date of their first meeting, and Daniel called it le livre de ma conception, though of course he didn’t know if he was conceived on that very date. Nonetheless, he found it enlightening to be reading his father’s book just as the Intifada in the Occupied Territories was beginning. In the book Michael Wilner had predicted, two decades before, that something like it would happen sooner or later.   In the Current Affairs class taught by Mr. Klein, an American expatriate who was a naturalized Canadian, a discussion of the Intifada took place as it unfolded in mid-December, after Glasnost and Perestroika in the USSR, the Iran-Contra Affair in the USA, the Meech Lake Accords in Canada and the violence in Northern Ireland had been covered. In the course of the discussion Daniel mentioned The Long Seventh Day. It turned out that Mr. Klein remembered the book from his days as a graduate student in political science at Northwestern. “So you’re Michael Wilner’s son!” he said to Daniel after class. “I remember when he came to Chicago on his book tour.” “Did you meet him?” Daniel asked, suddenly feeling agitated by the possibility of an eyewitness account of his father. “No, but I remember a silly newspaper article about him. I remember it because it had nothing to do with the book and was all about his views on marriage and stuff like that. He called himself an old-fashioned romantic in the German sense. Wasn’t he married to a German movie star or someone like that?” “That’s right. But he divorced her after he met my mother.” Daniel laughed, and Mr. Klein joined him. “Do you think,” Daniel asked, “it might be possible to find that article?” “Well, I’m sure the paper – probably the Sun-Times, not the Tribune – has it in its archives, and if you were to go to Chicago they might dig it up for you. But by the time you’re a journalist” – Mr. Klein knew of Daniel’s career plans – “such archives will probably be all computerized. You might as well wait.” Mr. Klein paused, as if trying to remember something, before going on. “But there was a line there that’s stuck with me. He said he was a fanatic against fanaticism.” That was just the kind of aphorism that Michael Wilner would say, Daniel thought.   Extracurricular activities, social and individual, kept him busy after school. He played soccer, of course, in autumn and spring. The moves that he and Harvey had practiced since childhood made them into a formidable combination on the school team, and though there were other boys who individually were better players, the Berman-Wilner duo set up far more than its share of goals. On a rainy October day in the cafeteria, when Daniel and Harvey were discussing over lunch their project of forming a band, Leslie Twigg joined them. “How about a string band,” she said. “I could play fiddle.” “What kind of music do you have in mind?” Harvey asked. “Canadian and American, I guess. There’s Cape Breton, Quebec, Acadian, Ontario old-time, bluegrass, Cajun… “ “For Cajun you need accordion,” Daniel said. “Do you know anyone who plays accordion?” Harvey and Leslie looked at each other blankly. “Scrap that,” Harvey said. “If we stick to strings,” Leslie said, “there’s Ellen and Alex.” Ellen Morelli and Alex Crawford, who were a dating couple, played banjo and mandolin respectively, occasionally performing at school assemblies as a duo. Alex was also one of Daniel’s friends. “I guess we’ve got our band,” Harvey said. From the beginning of the school year Daniel also took driving classes so that, once he got his learner’s license, he could eight months later – according to Quebec law – get a probationary driver’s license in time for his formal completion of secondary school. Mireille had agreed that at that time he could buy himself a car, and he decided that there was no point in getting a new car – he would most probably get rid of it when he moved to New York – but that the car that he got would be German. He wondered what make of car his father drove, and he wrote Brigitte to ask her, explaining his reason. She wrote back telling him that he was partial to Opel, but that he hated BMW and, indeed, anything Bavarian, probably because Axel Hemme had spoken with a Bavarian accent. She listed all the cars that Miki had driven, and in addition – as part of her ongoing account of her life with him – described the two apartments where they lived in Hamburg before moving to the house in Blankenese, including an unexpected fact that gave Daniel a start: his father, after moving out of the house in Blankenese and taking an apartment in Hamburg, never had time to move his library there, so that his study was still intact. He decided to honor his father’s prejudice in car matters and on that basis ruled out Audi as well. A used Opel would have been very hard to find in Montreal, but the Volkswagen Jetta had by then been on the market for several years and a good used one would probably not be hard to find. Once again, he did not tell his mother the reason for his choice of make.   The topics that had been discussed in Current Affairs kept their relevance through the winter and spring, but a new one arose: the Presidential campaign in the United States, especially the race for the Democratic nomination, which Michael Dukakis won just as the school year was ending (to the great disappointment of Mr. Klein, who had favored Jesse Jackson). Another winner about the same time was a singer named Céline Dion, a francophone Montreal girl representing Switzerland – of all places! – at the Eurovision Song Contest. A few months before these victories, at the beginning of spring, the North American String Band suddenly became popular, not only at their school but at several others, anglophone and francophone. The kind of music that they played seemed to be in, and they were asked to play at some school dances and private parties. The unexpected success, coupled with the end-of-school stress, proved too much for their teenage egos, and dissension set in. The apple of discord was an original song for which Ellen had composed the tune and Alex had written the first stanza of lyrics:   Lady, I now must leave you, I don’t deceive you When I say that I’m a man Who just does the best he can, And the love that I had for you Was always true. The words referred to the breakup of Alex and Ellen, who wanted to stay friends. Each of the other band members was expected to contribute an additional stanza, but bitter disagreement arose over the order in which they would be sung. By the end of the school year the band broke up, and Daniel put his guitar away, at least for the time being. His contribution to the song, which he had intended as the last stanza, was unwittingly prophetic:   Nothing endures forever. We’re not so clever That we can control our fate, And we don’t appreciate How the gifts that we get from life May lead to strife. His bandmates, especially the girls, ribbed him for being unromantic. He accepted the ribbing self-deprecatingly, but inwardly he chafed. Me, unromantic? The son of an old-fashioned German romantic? Just give me time! What they really meant, he thought, was that he was unsentimental, and he would readily admit to that. His favorite poet was the thoroughly unsentimental Jacques Prévert. But weren’t Prévert’s wonderful screenplays – Le Quai des brumes, Les Enfants du Paradis – quintessentially romantic? C’est tellement simple l’amour, as Garance said. Garance! Garance!   No longer occupied with folk-style music, Daniel went back to practicing classical guitar pieces, including a set of variations on La ci darem la mano. When Mireille heard him playing she asked if he wanted to see Don Giovanni with her at the Opéra de Montréal; the (unnamed) friend with whom she was to see it had to cancel. A couple of years earlier he had watched with her a television broadcast of Le nozze di Figaro, from the Metropolitan Opera of New York, and enjoyed it immensely. It was, to Mireille’s chagrin, the last program of the Live from the Met series, except for a performance of Les Contes d’Hoffmann which had been aired recently, and which he did not watch with her. “Sure,” he said, and prepared for it by reading the libretto of Don Giovanni in Italian, with an English translation beside it. The preparation helped him enjoy the live performance even more than he had the telecast. He could watch the action on the stage with only minimal glances at the supertitles. Moreover, since the title page of the libretto called it a comic drama (dramma giocoso), he treated it as a comedy, and found it very funny. His favorite character was Leporello, sung by a visiting American bass with a great knack for physical comedy But he also laughed at the scenes that were meant to be serious or even frightening, such as the one between Don Giovanni and the statue. Mireille at first seemed uncomfortable with his behavior, but by the second act she joined him in his enjoyment.   Shortly after getting his probationary license, Daniel found a three-year-old Jetta for a little under four thousand dollars, most of which he expected to recoup when he sold it before going to New York. He spent much of the summer taking camping trips, some alone and some with friends, to various parts of Quebec. The last trip, to the Gaspé Peninsula, was ten days long. On the way there and back he made a point of bypassing Rimouski. During that time Mireille made a two-week getaway to the Magdalen Islands with Betty. The rest of her free time she was at home, supervising the installation of a new, energy-efficient water heater. Meanwhile, Ms. Casey had helped him arrange some informal interviews with the admissions office and with some faculty members at Columbia, particularly in the German Department, during the orientation week just before the Labor Day weekend. This would be the occasion for his second trip to New York. It was on this trip, three weeks before Daniel turned seventeen, that sex came to him with the proverbial bang.