9   20 Aug 89   So, my journal, I have turned forty. La quarantaine. The quarantine, as Tina said last March when she refused to celebrate her 40th and chose to spend the day alone (it was a Saturday and the kids were with Louis). But I celebrated mine. It was a month ago, my journal, but you weren’t there. I left you at home while B, D and I were on vacation out west. I had not felt like writing since I wrote about papa and Tante Clotilde, back in December. Since that time life has been going smoothly, and I have not wanted to disturb the smooth flow with too much introspection. For the winter vacations we went again to Mont-Tremblant, and the difference from the previous year was striking. D was so attentive to the girls! Of course they flirted with him, but this time he noticed, and responded, and not necessarily to the prettiest ones. And this time, when I received some flirtation, I gave myself permission to acknowledge it, even in B and D’s presence. When we came back to Montréal there was a letter (!) from George. He found an apartment and would move there in the middle of January. He made an agreement with Doris that Amy would spend weekends with him and schooldays with her. This meant of course that if we were to see each other again it would have to be weekday evenings. The way he wrote it gave the impression that he took it for granted that I would want to. I was not so sure but in view of the condition that I had given him I felt obligated, so I agreed. So far I have not regretted it. After school resumed, Betty reported some gossip. (Now that she is on the main campus of NAA, she and the other girls in Sec. III gossip about the older kids.) For a while D was dating the prettiest girl in school, with the reputation of a bitch, but then he changed to a plain-looking girl with the reputation of a dyke. Well, in Rimouski girls gossiped too, and I am sure they gossiped about me. Thérèse Fontaine found out about me and M. Daigle, and I doubt that she kept it to herself. Poor Thérèse. Not really ugly, but… well, plain. Une quelconque. No boy ever gave her a second look. But I was friendly with her, and she appreciated it. That is probably why she didn’t tell any grownups about it. In the spring there was more gossip about Daniel, but from another source: George. D was now dating Megan, the daughter of G’s cousin Phil, a very precocious girl according to G, intellectually and sexually, quite the opposite of the innocent Amy (who is 15 like Betty). I said nothing, but I have my doubts about how much the father of a teenage girl knows about her innocence. And then came our summer vacation, probably the last one that the three of us have taken together. We went to Western Canada (and the Northwest US). We rented a camper and D and I shared the driving. For the most part we camped but we stayed in hotels in Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle. My birthday celebration was in Victoria. B and D took me out for dinner, gave me presents (B a jade necklace, D a silk scarf), and we went to the theatre (Shaw’s Pygmalion, a very good production). We got back to the hotel at 11. B & D went to bed but I had another hour of birthday celebration left so I went to the bar for a drink. From my seat, as I was sipping my drink, I saw an attractive man, about thirty, at a table with a blond woman whose back was turned to me. They were talking but the man seemed bored. A few times his glance moved towards me and I saw a spark of interest. After about ten minutes they stood up and shook hands, and the woman left. As she walked out I saw that she was young and pretty, though a little plump. (Very big boobs.) The man then looked at me with undisguised interest. I smiled at him and he came over. To cut a short story even shorter, my journal: his name was Mike, he was from Seattle, and he was staying at the same hotel. It didn’t take us long to agree that we would go to his room, since mine was between B & D’s rooms, and I wanted the freedom to leave when I felt like it. And I did, after an hour and a half or so, but not before he gave me his phone number when I told him that I would be in Seattle in a few days. When we got there I was tempted to call him, but I didn’t. We had a lot of fun, visiting the Space Needle and the Pike Place Market and watching the Torchlight Parade and other events of the Seafair. As enjoyable as my birthday one-night stand was, I didn’t need another. (Tina, needless to say, thought that I should have called him, especially after I told her that he called himself, with some justice, “fastest tongue in the west.” He also thought that my 40-year-old breasts were still beautiful.) Since coming back to Montréal D and I have been doing some business errands downtown, and it is only because he is a month short of eighteen that I needed to be with him in order to authorize money transfers etc. Otherwise he could easily have handled the matter by himself. He is very adult already. I am very, very proud, my journal, of the two children that I have raised. In a little over a week he is moving to New York. He fell in love with New York the first time he went there, the way I fell in love with Montréal and the way Miki, as he told me on our first date, fell in love with Hamburg. I should have told Daniel about this; he would have appreciated it. But I persist, sometimes in spite of myself, in my reticence about Miki to Daniel, and especially in reference to Hamburg. Why? And why have I not visited Hamburg on our European vacations? Because Brigitte is still there? Why should that matter? I won Miki away from her, the beautiful blonde film star, didn’t I? According to D she is an absolutely lovely person. No, it isn’t Brigitte per se. It’s the fact that Hamburg, and Germany more generally, is where Miki lived with Brigitte. But that was not my Miki, the Miki of Montréal who spoke English and French (and maybe Yiddish and Polish with Fela). The Hamburg Miki who spoke German was, as far as I was concerned, a different man. But of course it’s different for Daniel. He hardly knew my Miki any better than he knew Brigitte’s. To him it’s all one: his father. And which is the more cruel fate: to have a father one loves who disappears, or a father one hates who stays alive? I don’t know, my journal. Good night. Serendipity, NY   Settling in as a freshman at Columbia turned out to be a hurly-burly experience, and he did not feel inclined to pay much attention to girls. They were present in his classes and on campus, some pretty and some not, and his hormones were undoubtedly active. In the back of his mind was the thought that one of these days he might call Gen to let her know that he was in New York. But his mind was mostly on academic matters. On the basis of his high-school transcript and his SAT subject test, he enrolled in the second year of German. But, not having taken any in his senior year at North Am, he found himself rusty, and had to spend a lot of time catching up. For the science requirement of the core curriculum he decided to take biology, which he had not studied before; the only science classes he had taken were chemistry and physics. What little he knew of biology he had learned piecemeal from his mother. But even the introductory biology course that he enrolled in, not intended for science or pre-med students, challenged his scientific skills, especially in organic chemistry. It was fortunate that the teaching assistant in charge of his recitation section was quite helpful. Ms. Rozen, as she introduced herself, was Israeli, a doctoral student in cell and molecular biology. (“I am not yet Doctor Rozen,” she said.) She was about thirty years old, tall, very shapely and pretty in a dark, Mediterranean way. She was the first woman at Columbia who caught Daniel’s attention qua woman. One of the students in the section, a Southerner named Matt Billings with whom Daniel was becoming friendly, commented that “our TA has got herself some nice T’n’A.” Daniel agreed. From her demeanor in class and outside, it was clear to Daniel that Ms. Rozen would have no interest of a sexual nature in a young man of his age. What most struck him about her was that the door card in front of the office that she shared with other teaching assistants gave her first name as Ora. It was a name he remembered from Brigitte’s narrative. The Monday of the third week of classes happened to be his eighteenth birthday. He had no one to celebrate it with, except perhaps Gen, and he had been remiss about contacting her. He vaguely knew that there was something he had to do on that day, but couldn’t quite remember what it was. It’ll come to me, he told himself. Ça me viendra. After the biology section he approached the teaching assistant in the hallway. “Ms. Rozen,” he asked, “is Ora a common name in Israel?” “Not very common,” she said, “but not unusual. Why do you ask?” “Nothing… It’s just that my father, who is not alive, had a friend in Israel with a daughter named Ora, and she would be about your age.” “Do you know the name of your father’s friend?” “Nili.” Ora Rozen’s expression suddenly changed from amusement to astonishment. “Really? My mother’s name is Nili. What is your name? I don’t know all the names of the students yet, I’m sorry.” “Daniel Wilner.” He made a point of pronouncing it Vilner, as an Israeli would. “Wilner! I remember that my mother had a friend named Wilner, a long time ago. His name was Miki, I think. He was a writer.” By all rights, Daniel should have been stunned by what he had just heard. Had he been recounting his story he should have written He could scarcely believe his ears. Instead he said simply, “That was my father. He died in the Yom Kippur War. He was covering it as a journalist.” Why am I not astonished? Daniel asked himself as they walked together in silence until they reached the elevator, which Ora would take in order to go up to her office. While waiting for it, Ora said, “I am going to call my mother and tell her about you. Maybe you want to talk to her.” “Want to? I have to,” Daniel said. Thoughts of his father filled his mind again as he walked back to his room. Serendipity had brought him another, unexpected, chance to learn more about him! And where else but in New York? The capital of serendipity! Suddenly he remembered the obligation that he had to fulfill on that, his first day as a legal adult: to have the affidavit that Greg Berman had prepared for him, giving Betty an equal share of his inheritance, notarized. He had already noticed that a stationery store on Broadway, just across from the campus, offered notary services, so that after dropping off his books he took the document with its pre-addressed envelope and his passport to the store, had his signature notarized for ten dollars, and then walked down Broadway to 112th Street, where he turned left in order to have it mailed, registered, at the Columbia post office. Along the way he noticed numerous businesses for which he might find some use in the future: dry cleaners, a travel agency, Chinese restaurants, coffeehouses… He was now eighteen. Had he been in Montreal, then a week hence he would have been able to cast his first vote in the provincial elections. But of course he would have voted for Robert Bourassa, who was not only running for reelection as premier but was also the representative of their Saint-Laurent riding in the provincial parliament. And Bourassa was sure to win even without Daniel Wilner’s vote. His mail on that day and during the next few days brought a small shower of birthday cards. The one from Fela included a money order for 180 US dollars. He wondered if his great-aunt knew that he was now wealthy in his own right, heir to a portion of Leon’s hard-earned fortune. In the course of the week Daniel sent postcards to all those who had sent him birthday cards, and eventually to all of his Montreal friends.   The following week, on Quebec election day, Ora found Daniel in the lecture hall – just before the professor showed up – and gave him a slip of paper. “I spoke to my mother,” she said, “and she would like you to call her. Here is her number. The best time to call is about eight to ten in the evening, so that’s one to three here.” The professor came in, and Ora left. The class would end at two, so that he could go back to his dorm room immediately and call Nili from there, using his calling card. “Hello,” he began after hearing Shalom, “I am Daniel Wilner…” “Daniel!” she exclaimed, accenting the last syllable, as in French. “Ora told me about you. Your father… I … I loved your father.” She sounded on the verge of crying. “I don’t know too much about him,” he said, not quite truthfully. “What can you tell me?” Nili laughed. “In the telephone? Not much. I would have to talk with you in… in the body. I mean,” she corrected herself, “in person.” She laughed again. “I have winter vacation in January. I could fly out to Israel.” “To Israel? No. Better if we meet in Cyprus. I like to go to Cyprus. I used to meet with your father there. It was too dangerous for him in Israel.” She sighed deeply. “You used to meet with him? When was that?” “When? One thousand nine hundred and seventy, seventy-one, seventy-two, the last time seventy-three.” She sighed again. “He told me that he has a son in Canada.” “Did you know… that he was married to my mother?” She laughed. “Yes and no,” she said. What did she mean? “We must talk about this in person. Can you go to Cyprus? There is an Arab company, I think it is called Gulf, that goes from New York to Cyprus.” “Yes, of course I will come to Cyprus. Is the first part of January all right with you?” “Let me see… Yes. Call me again when you make reservations.” He remembered the travel agency on Broadway that he had passed on his walk, a week earlier, from the notary to the post office. He now went there and found out that an airline called Gulf Air did in fact fly from New York and to Larnaca, but not directly from New York to Larnaca. The travel agent – a blond middle-aged woman with a European accent that he couldn’t place – suggested instead that he take Olympic to Athens and then Cyprus Airways. Daniel picked a week, Monday to Monday – he thought that he might as well do some sightseeing while in Cyprus, perhaps even ski in the Troodos Mountains – so that he would get back on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, since spring classes would begin the next day. He postponed reserving a hotel until he had checked with Nili. He wondered where it was that she and his father had their trysts when he was a baby. Or were they trysts? He needed to find out. The travel agent – who was called Mrs. Taylor, a name that gave no indication of her origin – urged Daniel to let her make the hotel reservation once he had a place in mind, since she could get him a much better rate than he would get on his own. When he told Ora Rozen about his travel arrangements, she smiled. “You will like Cyprus,” she said. “My mother sometimes took me there. She sometimes goes there on business.” “What kind of business?” “She is a lawyer, and her specialty is divorce. Cyprus is the closest country to Israel that has civil marriage and divorce, and so Israelis who don’t want to do the religious stuff go there. Especially if they belong to different religions. I got married there – my husband was an Israeli Greek – and I got divorced there.” “That’s interesting,” he said. “Your mother told me that she used to meet my father there.” Ora laughed. “Not only your father, believe me,” she said. “My parents got divorced when I was little, so you can imagine…” Daniel felt uncomfortable. Nili had obviously made less of an effort to hide her personal life from her offspring than Mireille had, except for the time in the Magdalen Islands. “Do you know where she stays when she goes to Cyprus?” he asked. “Usually in a hotel in Larnaca, on the beach, between the airport and the center – I don’t remember what it’s called. But before, I think, nineteen seventy-four she used to go to Nicosia. Then there was a war, and the Turks destroyed the airport of Nicosia.”   With each meeting Daniel became more aware of what an attractive woman Ora Rozen was, and thoughts of sex were now encroaching on his mind. He felt ready to call Gen. When she answered and he began to tell her who he was, she interrupted him and told him, sotto voce, that she would call him back. She barely gave him enough time to give her his number. “Carlos is in town,” she said when she called him the next day. “He’s sailing in a week. I’ll call you when he’s gone.” But in the course of the week – during which he tried to call Nili several times but got no answer – he began to be interested in a fellow freshman, a redheaded Barnard girl named Audrey Seligman who was in his Contemporary Civilization discussion section. Though her home was in Westchester, she came across as a quintessential New Yorker: brash, opinionated and very funny. With Audrey, for the first time, Daniel encountered resistance to his advances, which she deflected with jokes, as though not taking them seriously. After a while he gave up. He calculated that by that time Carlos should be well at sea, so that he called Gen again. She was available, and he started taking afternoon trips by subway to Greenwich Village a few times a week. Staying overnight was out, because during the school year Gen was an early riser; she had a long commute to her school on Staten Island. One afternoon, while walking along Broadway to the subway, he ran into Audrey, going the same way. Under her raincoat – it was a drizzly mid-October day – she was wearing a dress or a skirt instead of the jeans that she usually wore to class, and medium-heeled ankle boots. Her calves were shapely. She was wearing a wool hat, and droplets were falling gently on the smooth red tresses that the hat left uncovered. “I won my bet,” she said to him after they greeted each other. “What bet?” “I bet Madeleine” – a friend of hers who was also in their section – “that you didn’t mean it when you were, like, hitting on me.” “And what makes you think you won?” “Because you stopped.” “Because I got frustrated,” Daniel said. “I meant it.” “You did?” “Hell, yes. I can prove it.” “How?” “Come to my room with me.” “Aren’t you going somewhere?” “I was. Aren’t you?” “I was,” she said in a suddenly soft voice, and smiled at him shyly. Hand in gloved hand, they walked back to the dorm. He would have to find an opportunity, he thought, to call Gen and let her know that he wasn’t going to see her, but somehow he knew that he would find one. When they got to his room he noticed that his answering machine was blinking, but he ignored it. Audrey took off her hat and coat, and turned out to be wearing a surprisingly low-cut dress. He thought of asking her where she had been going, but he didn’t want her to ask him the same question in return, so he said, “You look good in a dress.” Audrey, indeed, was at that moment infinitely more attractive than Gen, and he could easily transfer his lust for one to the other, in spades. “I hope I look good out of it, too,” she said. “Let’s see.” “Let me use your bathroom first,” she said. “It isn’t exactly my bathroom,” he said. “It’s shared with a double room next door, and it’s off the hallway.” “That’s okay,” Audrey said. She took her raincoat with her. Meanwhile he checked the answering machine. The message was from Gen, saying that she would be late getting home. He called her and left a message on her machine, telling her that something had come up and he couldn’t make it. He then unplugged the telephone. Audrey came back wearing nothing but her raincoat – as a robe, but buttoned – and her boots, with the rest of her clothes folded in a neat pile that she carried on her forearm and put on a chair. She slowly unbuttoned her raincoat, languidly slipped it off her before dropping it on the floor, and lay down on the bed, on her back with her legs spread, as though expecting him to mount her immediately. She seemed quite surprised that he delayed doing so for twenty minutes, during which she had two orgasms. When he felt ready and pulled a condom package from under his pillow, she said, in a breathy voice, “You don’t need this.” “Are you sure?” “I’ve been on the pill since I was fifteen, for irregular periods.” She paused. “Come on in,” she said, sounding very much like Angie when she uttered those very words in front of her apartment house.   The next day the news of Honecker’s resignation in the face of protests in East Germany began to spread. Daniel began to follow the quickly developing events in Germany with fascination, but his attempts to share it with Audrey were met with indifference. In November, when the fall of the Berlin Wall filled him with rejoicing, she greeted it with something verging on hostility. “Why does a Jewish guy like you care so much about Germany?” she asked. “What makes you think I’m Jewish?” he asked in return. “Daniel Wilner?” She gave the name a mock-Yiddish pronunciation. “My father was Jewish, but I didn’t know him. He died when I was two.” “I’m sorry. So what are you?” “French Canadian.” “You mean Catholic?” “No. My mother’s family is Catholic, but she’s not and I’m not.” “So all this time I’ve been dating a goy? Oy vey, what would my bobeh say?”   It became clear that, however much they enjoyed each other’s company, in bed and out of it, Daniel was no more in love with Audrey than with any of his previous girlfriends, nor she with him. It was Audrey, in fact, who first said, “We’re not the least bit in love with each other,” and he agreed: he had experienced no emotion that he would identify as being in love. By December, with the end of the semester approaching, it was understood by both of them that their attachment would not survive the monthlong winter break, when he would first go to Montreal and then to Cyprus. On the last day of biology recitation section, Ora Rozen opened with a bit of news. “Do you remember,” she asked the class, “what the professor said about the possibility of getting DNA information from dead bones?” Daniel did, in fact, remember. “Well, I just read a paper in Nature that it was done in England with skeletons that are hundreds of years old, some even thousands.” She went on to explain how it was done, with the help of something called PCR, the invention of an eccentric California scientist named Mullis. He finally managed to reach Nili, who had been out of town. After telling him that she could fly out to Cyprus on Friday and back to Israel on Sunday, she told him that the Larnaca hotel where she usually stayed was called Flamingo Beach. He felt tempted to ask her where she stayed in Nicosia in the years when she met Miki there, but he didn’t feel comfortable doing so over the telephone. He immediately called Mrs. Taylor. The Flamingo Beach, she said, was in her book, and she would fax the reservation request immediately. An hour later she called him with the confirmation.   Of the friends to whom he had send postcards in September, the only one who answered quickly was Megan. She wrote that she was no longer at North Am but at an anglophone CEGEP, since she had decided to stay in Montreal for university, either McGill or (more likely) Concordia. They kept up their correspondence, about a card a month. In November she wrote about her new boyfriend – a second-year CEGEP student – but hinted unambiguously that she and Daniel could still get together when he was back in Montreal for Christmas. And in fact they did so, several times, including New Year’s Eve, when some of Megan’s CEGEP friends gave a party, which the new boyfriend – Keith – had to miss because of a case of the flu. The party was relatively somber, with much drinking but little laughter. The city, and especially its young people, was still reeling from the shock of the École Polytechnique massacre. Megan somehow seemed less affected by the horrible event than other young people. “Shit happens” was the gist of her reaction. On New Year’s Day Daniel, after sleeping off the effects of the party, was lounging in bed and trying to decide when to go back to New York. It suddenly dawned on him that he had not told his mother about his upcoming trip to Cyprus. He got up and walked into the kitchen, where Mireille was sitting at the table in her robe and slippers, drinking coffee and reading Le Devoir. “Happy New Year, maman,” he said and kissed her on the cheek. “Bonne année, chéri,” she said. “What plans do you have for the rest of your vacation?” It was an opportune question. “I’ll be going back to New York in two or three days,” he said. “So soon?” “I’m going to Cyprus next week. A week from today, in fact.” “Cyprus? Chypre? Pour quoi diable faire? What on earth for?” “I’m going to meet with Nili.” “Who is Nili?” It struck him like a thunderclap that in the three years since the meeting with Brigitte he had never come around to telling his mother about it. “She was papa’s girlfriend, in Israel, when he was sixteen, and then… then they became friends again a little bit before you met him. It’s… it’s pretty complicated, maman. But they met a few times in Cyprus, and by a very strange coincidence I managed to connect with her, and we’re going to meet in Cyprus.” “I remember getting a postcard from him from Cyprus, a little bit after you were born.” Mireille frowned, and for the first time her son noticed wrinkles on her face. “He didn’t mention anything about a Nili.” “Of course not,” Daniel said. “So you’re still going after your father, the hero?” Mireille made no attempt to hide a sardonic tone in her voice. “Are you being sarcastic?” “Moi? Sarcastique? Bien sûr que non.” Mireille laughed. “Of course not,” she added. Was she mocking him? he wondered. And why was she repeating herself, in French and English? “Okay,” he said, “I’m still trying to find out what I can about papa. Is that a problem?” Mireille’s face softened. “No,” she said gently. “Good luck!” Instead of the bonne chance that he expected her to say she gave him a warm kiss on the cheek. “Send me a postcard from Cyprus!” she added with a laugh.