10

 

1 Jan 90

 

I have made a New Year’s resolution: I will write more faithfully. No more than 2 months between entries.

I am no longer seeing George Kenner. Our last date was a week after the horrible killings at the Ecole Polytechnique. I was still in shock, and so overcome with grief that I could not respond to him sexually. That got him upset. “But it’s been two weeks,” he whined, “and after this weekend you won’t have time for me because Daniel is coming.” Actually D wasn’t coming till the end of the following week, but I didn’t want to argue. I felt disgusted with George. Did he not understand what the massacre meant to me? Not only in human terms, but specifically, since these young women were singled out because they were engineering students, to French Canadian professional women like me? I left his place as quickly as I could, and didn’t even bother saying that I didn’t want to see him again. I wonder if he will call me again. And I wonder what I will say if he does.

Daniel never ceases to surprise me. When I wished him a happy new year this morning he announced out of the blue that in a week he is going to Cyprus. I immediately thought of Miki – I once got a postcard from him from Cyprus, when Daniel was a baby. And in fact it has something to do with Miki, or rather a woman named Nili, who was Miki’s girlfriend in Israel when he was 16. How in the world did he ever get in touch with her? He said it was complicated, and he would explain it to me some time. So here he is, a world traveller at 18. Luckily he can afford it.

So there was yet another Miki, the one in Israel who spoke Hebrew and did whatever he did with Nili.

Yet another Miki who was not my Miki. Of course he told me that he spent his 17th and part of his 18th year (my 3rd, more or less) on a kibbutz in Israel (which is where he became fluent in the Hebrew that was so valuable to him in his journalism). But he gave me very few details and certainly did not mention a girlfriend. To me, “a year in Israel” was never more than an item on the checklist of what I “knew” about my husband. Born in Poland, check. Lost his family in the War, check. (Don’t call it the Holocaust, he said.) Survived a concentration camp in Germany, check. Reunited with his uncle Leon, check. Lived in Israel for a year, check. Returned to Germany for Leon and Fela’s wedding, check. Decided to stay there with Brigitte, check. Left her after 18 years when she confessed her infidelities, check. Came to Montréal for a visit. The beginning of reality. My reality. My reality with Miki, which, as short-lived as it was, was more real than anything else I ever experienced. Except of course motherhood, which is its extension. By being the mother of Miki’s children I have kept that reality alive.

But have I done so? Or is it my fantasy? Was “my” Miki real? Was he the real Miki Wilner? The brilliant, witty lecturer who could compare Québec with Palestine? Of course that was real, and not only my reality. The wonderful lover who was as gentle as he was insatiable? Was he like that with other women? Brigitte? Nili? I have never allowed myself to ask those questions. No, my journal, I have taken a small piece of Miki and constructed a whole man out of it.

But don’t we all do it? Do we ever really know the person that we fall in love with? Of course not. We select the parts that we like and create out of them a person, suppressing the other parts. And when some of the suppressed parts emerge above the level of suppression, disappointment sets in, leading possibly to the loss of love. It’s what happened to Tina, and it made her a cynic. Not me, my journal. I will keep my Miki as my reality.

 

Larnaca

 

The weather in New York, after Daniel got back there from Montreal, seemed almost balmy in comparison, though on the day of his outbound flight it snowed. But he was not prepared for the clear blue sky and warm sun of Cyprus in January. After settling in his hotel room he took a long walk on the McKenzie Beach and took deep breaths of the fresh Mediterranean air.

The desk clerk told him that not enough snow had fallen on Troodos that year to make skiing possible. It was Tuesday, and he had only two whole days before Nili’s arrival on Friday morning. He decided to stay in Larnaca. He found out that there was enough to keep him busy as a tourist in the area – archeological sites, Byzantine churches and monasteries – and he felt reluctant to rent a car. Though he now had a permanent driver’s license, he did not feel that he had enough experience to drive on the left. And he wasn’t sure if they rented cars to eighteen-year-olds.

In the evening he went to a taverna in order to hear some Greek music. When he entered he noticed, at one of the tables, two thirtyish Englishwomen whom he had noticed on the plane coming in from Athens. They were drinking beer. He asked if he could join them, and they seemed pleased. They introduced themselves. Their names were Sally and Kathleen, and they called each other Sal and Kath.

“Are you really Canadian, or are you an American pretending to be one?” Sally asked while Kathleen giggled.

“We shan’t tell, I promise,” Kathleen added amid more giggles.

“And what are you pretending to be?” he asked. “I’m not sure that the English are very popular here in Cyprus.”

“Australian, of course!” Sally exclaimed, and with an attempted Australian accent – not very different from her normal speech – she shouted to the waiter, “Hey, mate, another jug, please!”

“By the way,” Kathleen said to him, “where are you staying?” Before he had a chance to reply, Sally added, “The place where we’re staying is a bloody dump. We’re going to kill that travel agent of ours when we get back.”

He told them the name of his hotel and described it to them. “I wonder if they’ve got any rooms,” Sally said.

“Probably,” he said. “They didn’t seem that busy. I have their card on me, so I could call and ask.”

“Wouldn’t that be lovely,” Kathleen said. “Thanks loads,” Sally added.

He asked the bartender to use the taverna’s telephone, and the bartender said, “Certainly, sir.” It turned out that the hotel did have rooms, and he handed the phone to Sally, who made a reservation for the next day.

 

He spent a good part of the day exploring Larnaca, on foot and by bus. Back at the hotel, he didn’t see Kathleen and Sally all afternoon or evening. Around nine-thirty, when, feeling a mild case of jet lag, he was settling in for the night, there was a knock on his door. He opened it, wearing only shorts and an undershirt, and there was Sally, wearing a low-cut blue dress and high heels as though dressed for going out.

“Hi, Sally,” he said. “What…”

“May I come in?” she asked, and entered his room before he replied. As she was closing the door behind her she said, “I just wanted to show you our appreciation for getting us into this hotel.” She stood very close to him, and her perfume was overpowering. She closed the remaining gap between them, put her arms around him and kissed him, pressing her oversized breasts into him. Though he had not felt attracted to her, his eighteen-year-old penis responded autonomously and directed his actions. He felt for a zipper in the back of her dress, found it and opened it, unsnapping her bra along the way. The rest followed very quickly, including a deft sheathing of his penis by Sally with a condom that she had brought.

She stayed in his room for about three quarters of an hour. Obviously they could not have spent the night together in his single bed even if he had desired to do so, which he did not. “See you at breakfast!” were her last words.

 

He spent another day of touring in Larnaca, and in the evening, shortly after he came back to the hotel after a late and copious dinner, a knock came around the same time as on the previous one. This time it was Kathleen. “It’s my turn,” she said with a giggle.

The next morning he took a walk along the beach after breakfast, while his room was being made. He was back at ten-thirty, and a little after eleven the telephone rang. “Mister Wilner?” the desk clerk said. “Miss Rozen is here.” He immediately went down to the lobby, where she was standing beside the desk.

Nili Rozen may well have looked like her daughter Ora – tall, dark, slim, very pretty – when she was younger. She was still tall and dark-complexioned. But she was stout, with a puffy, heavily made-up face, and her hair was dyed a zebra blond. He wondered if men her age found her attractive.

“Daniel!” she said as she put her arms around him. “It is amazing how you look like your father! It’s like I am seeing him again!” She sounded on the verge of tears, and then she laughed.

“Today,” she announced, “we will talk. Tomorrow my friend Stavros from Nicosia will come, and he will take us in his car around the island, and Sunday also, before I go back in the evening. Is that all right?”

“It’s fine with me,” he said. Two bags were on the floor beside her, a middle-sized suitcase and a small carry-on. When she picked up the carry-on and put its strap on her shoulder, he picked up the suitcase and followed her to her room. He noticed that on the baggage tag her name was written as N. Rosen.

As he placed the bag beside the door while she was unlocking it, he said, “I see you spell your name with an ess, and Ora spells it with a zed.”

Nili laughed. “When Ora got her passport after the military service, she decided to write it in English with a zed so that people would not pronounce it like it’s German. Her father was from Germany. But that happens a lot in Israel. We have a minister in the government named Weizman, with one en, but his uncle was the first President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, with two ens.”

She was already inside the room. “Shall I put your suitcase here?” he asked, pointing at the luggage rack with his free hand. “Yes,” she said, “thank you very much. I will see you in one hour – okay?”

“Okay,” he said.

They met in the lobby, and Nili suggested lunch, which they ate in the hotel’s restaurant, talking very little. At length she said, “Would you like to take a walk?”

“Sure,” he said. It was only when were walking on the seaside boulevard, beside the sandy beach, that Nili began to talk.

“First of all, let me tell you about the kibbutz. It is called Refadim, and it is in the south, almost in the Negev. It is very warm and dry, except for two months in the winter when it’s a little cold and there is a little rain. I moved there with my parents when I was six. Before that we lived in Tel Aviv, but my mother needed that kind of climate for her health. Also, my parents were very left, and the kibbutz was very left…”

“Leftist,” he said.

“Yes, leftist, in the old fashion of the years twenty and thirty.” She evidently meant the twenties and thirties, and he saw no point in correcting her. “Very progressive. In class ten – I mean grade ten – in the high school we had biology, and a part of the class, in the winter, was about sex. Then, in the spring, it was accepted that we practice it. The older kids, more experienced, were supposed to teach the younger ones who just finished the class, the boys with the girls and the girls with the boys. Nobody told us to do it; it was just… understood. And if some kids didn’t want to do it, it was all right. We didn’t talk about it with any adults, except the biology teacher, the psychologist and the nurse. From the nurse we could always get condoms, but we also learned about the method of Ogino-Knaus.”

“The what?”

“The method of… you know, the calendar…”

“Oh, the rhythm method!”

“Yes.” She smiled. “Also, there was a rule that it was not allowed to be couples, boyfriend and girlfriend, except if one was from a different kibbutz.”

“That’s like exogamy,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right. You know about that! All that progressive ideology, a lot of it was really very primitive.” Nili paused. “Now let me tell you about me. I am not modest, but I also don’t boast, so I will tell you a simple fact: I was the most beautiful girl, not only in the kibbutz but in the whole district. You know my daughter Ora: she is beautiful, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Honestly I was more beautiful. Of course all the boys wanted me. Some of them I liked and others not. But there was one special boy who wanted me, and I could not stand him. He worked in the pool of fish…”

“The fishpond.”

“Yes, thank you. At the fishpond, cleaning it and feeding the fish. And he always smelled like fish. Most of the other girls also didn’t like him.”

“Was his name Tzvi?”

“Yes. How did you know?”

“I heard about him from Brigitte.”

“Oh, Brigitte.” Nili smiled again. “So now let me tell you about the boy who came to our kibbutz from Germany, in the spring of grade ten, when the class for sex was already finished. He was very handsome and sexy – what we call in Hebrew khatikh – and also he was already experienced, because he had the beautiful blond girlfriend in Germany. Do you know how we found out? Tzvi told us about her. Tzvi and Miki became friends very quickly. Maybe Tzvi thought that if he was a friend of Miki, it would make it easier to catch girls.”

“Did it?”

“No. But Miki liked me, and I liked him, and we went out together a lot. We called it going out, because we went out to the fields and under the olive trees.”

“That sounds biblical.”

“Yes, primitive like the Bible. Let me jump to the next year, when we were in grade eleven. There was a new group of boys and girls in grade ten who just finished sex class. Miki didn’t want to do the teaching of the virgins. He didn’t want to make pain for anybody. I tried to tell him, Miki, somebody has to do it, maybe it hurts a little bit and then it’s all right, it’s worth it. Did you ever do it with a virgin?”

“Yes. She is… she does sports, and she had no pain at all.”

“Your father… finally he tried to do it with one girl, but he was so nervous that he couldn’t do it. But then one girl wanted Miki – only Miki – to be the first one. She was Ruti, the sister of Tzvi. So Miki agreed, but Ruti had a lot of blood and pain, and she had to get treatment. She was all right, and she wanted to be with Miki again, but he refused absolutely. Then everybody, except me, turned against Miki, and especially Tzvi, his best friend. After that Miki and I went out only with each other, like a couple. I didn’t care that it was against the rules, because I already knew that I was going to leave the kibbutz. And then Miki got the news that his uncle was getting married, so he went back to Germany for the summer. The last time that we went out, I knew that I was safe by the calendar, so we did not use a condom.”

“I see,” Daniel said, suddenly aware that Nili was talking about the era before the pill.

“When the news came that Miki was not coming back to Israel but staying in Germany with Brigitte, the first kid who knew about it was Tzvi, and he told me about it. He thought that it would make me like him, but it made me hate him still more. Tzvi always liked to be a kind of spy. I was stupid, and I told him that the last time we did not use a condom. He asked if I was not afraid to be pregnant, and I said that it was not his business. Then I found an excuse for leaving the kibbutz: I entered to a beauty contest, and so I had to move to Tel Aviv, and my parents agreed.”

“How did you do?”

“In the beauty contest? It was a joke. I did not know how to do makeup and how to walk in shoes with high heels. But I got out of the kibbutz. I lived with my mother’s sister and her husband, I finished the high school in Tel Aviv, I did the military service, I studied law, I got married with… to another lawyer, I had Ora, and I got divorced. My parents stayed in the kibbutz for a few years more, so I visited the kibbutz to see them, but when I got pregnant they moved back to Tel Aviv, in an apartment with air-conditioning, so it was all right for my mother. The only person in the kibbutz that I stayed in contact was a teacher named Hanna.”

“Brigitte told me about her too,” he said.

“Good. That’s all the old history, from the years fifty.” She fell silent, as if to gather more memories.

They were at the end of the beach and the beginning of the fishing harbor. She pointed at a restaurant with a sign reading Psarolimano Fish Tavern. “This is a very good restaurant,” she said. “We should eat dinner there. Now let’s go back.”

They turned around, and Nili was silent for another while before resuming her account. “For the next ten-fifteen years, nothing more.” she began. “Then in the year sixty-nine your father’s book came out in Hebrew, and the establishment of Israel didn’t like it. Michael Wilner was like a public enemy. So now let’s come to the year seventy.

“One day in the middle of August – it was a Saturday so that I was at home – I get a telephone call from Hanna in Hamburg. She tells me that she has been visiting Miki and Brigitte, and that there has been some strange business about some girl who says that she is my daughter, seventeen years old, and Miki is her father. Hanna also tells me that Miki is flying to Israel to investigate what is going on, but she doesn’t know when. I start to think. Tzvi’s father was one of the first people in the Mossad, and Tzvi, after the military service, also went into the Mossad. As I told you, I told Tzvi about my last time going out with your father without a condom, so probably he made up the story to embarrass him.

“A few days later, in the evening, I get a call. He doesn’t say his name but of course I recognize him. The next morning he comes to my office. He has blond hair and a beard and sunglasses. I start to laugh. He takes off his beard and I recognize Miki. He explains that he is in Israel in disguise, posing as a German tourist named Etzel Andergast, doing an investigation for Interpol. Then he tells me the long complicated story: this girl not only says that she is my daughter, but she hired a Bulgarian to kill a Nazi named Hemme, but it was not the right Hemme, and the Bulgarian said that Miki hired him but then admitted that it was the girl. It becomes clear that the Mossad is involved, and specifically Tzvi. So Miki decides to find Tzvi. He says good-bye, and I don’t hear from him again for a month.”

“Did you say Etzel Andergast? He’s a character in a novel that we’re going to be reading in German class next semester.”

“I know the novel – really it’s three novels (how do you say, a trilogy?) – from Hanna. You will like it. Etzel Andergast is a young man who looks for the truth about his father, but not a good truth, a bad truth.”

“What happened after a month?”

“He calls me from Germany and says that he wants to meet me in Cyprus. We agree to meet in the beginning of October, when it’s Rosh Hashanah and a long weekend, what we call a bridge.”

“We also say that in French, faire le pont.”

“We meet in Nicosia, and he tells me first of all that he is separated from Brigitte. You know about that?”

“Yes, she told me.”

“Good. Then he tells me that he found Tzvi by the fishpond, and they got into a fight, and he knocked Tzvi into the pool… I mean the fishpond, and maybe Tzvi was dead, or maybe not. And then we were together again like when we were sixteen, seventeen.” The expression on Nili’s face turned dreamy for a moment. “We said good-bye, and we agreed that we would meet again, some time. When I went back to Israel I tried to find out what happened to Tzvi, but I had no contacts at Refadim any more. I asked Hanna, but she also said that she lost contact and didn’t know. But I am not sure I believed her. I thought that maybe she was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Retaliation.” She did not elaborate.

“Is Hanna still alive?”

“No, she died three years ago. I went to her funeral in Jerusalem, with my father, and there was not one person from Refadim. Not one!”

“Did you ever find out about Tzvi?”

“No. After all these years, I never found out.”

“When did you see my father again?”

“In January he called me and said that maybe we could meet in April, but in March he called me and said that he was getting married and was going to be a father, probably in September.”

“I was born September eighteenth, and my mother tells me that my father was there.”

“Yes. He told me about it when he came a month later. He told me that he married your mother for you, but it was not a real marriage. He was not in love with her. He said that he could never again be in love with another woman after Brigitte.” It was rather tactless of Nili to tell him this, but then Daniel didn’t expect Israelis to be tactful – he had met a number of them at Fela’s house – and he didn’t react outwardly, though he felt a churning in his stomach.

Nili sighed. “We met again the next year,” she went on, “also in October. The year after that was seventy-three, and he finally came to Israel again, as a journalist covering the Yom Kippur War. We were together for one evening when he came to Tel Aviv, and then he went to the Golan Heights. I think you know what happened.”

“Yes,” he said.

They walked back to the hotel in silence. Nili had said all she needed to say, and shown no curiosity about Daniel. He didn’t really care for her as a person, he decided.

When they met for dinner, she was wearing a black cocktail dress and high heels. They took a taxi to the Psarolimano, since the walk would not have been comfortable for her in those shoes. The very friendly young waiter, who remembered Nili from previous visits, explained that the name of the restaurant meant ‘fish harbor’ and recommended the freshest fish, which was indeed delicious.

 

The nine-thirty knock came as it had the previous two nights. This time it was Sally again – it seemed that they had agreed to take turns with him – and her manner was more deliberate than the first time. She undressed herself, slowly, and when her breasts were bare she pointed at them, saying, “Like these? Cost me eight hundred quid, they did!”

“Well worth it,” he said, unable to think of anything else to say, since he didn’t really like them. He briefly wondered if Gen’s very large breasts, which he had enjoyed very much, were natural.

 

In the morning Nili met him in the breakfast room wearing wedge sandals and a revealing white sundress; what it revealed was uncomfortably reminiscent of Sally. They talked about matters unrelated to his father: Cyprus, Ora, Nili’s law practice. She asked Daniel a few perfunctory questions about his studies, and seemed surprised when he told her that his major was in German.

They were just finishing breakfast when a big, paunchy but otherwise well-built man with graying hair, wearing a navy-blue blazer over a white open-necked shirt, entered the breakfast room and approached their table. He looked like a mature version of the waiter at the Psarolimano. Daniel stood up to greet him and the man reached out a large hand to Daniel. “I am Stavros,” he said, and immediately looked down at Nili, who seemed to be blushing, and specifically at her cleavage. That look dispelled any doubts Daniel might have felt about Nili’s abiding attractiveness.

As soon as she had finished her last sip of coffee Nili stood up, took Stavros by the hand and said to Daniel, “We will see you in a little while.” They were almost running as they walked into the lobby and turned in the direction of Nili’s room.

Daniel felt that he had an inner censor that prevented him from imagining sexual activity by people who were his mother’s age or older. When it came to imagining Brigitte’s “experiences,” in his mind he saw the twenty-six-year-old Brigitte of La Grande Paix, suitably colorized. He resolutely rejected any hint of a fantasy about his mother and George Kenner. And the image of Nili and Stavros coupling was replaced in his mind by that of Ora and the waiter at the Psarolimano. But the fantasy led him to a feeling of his own, one that he had repressed for a semester: he had the hots for Ora Rozen.

 

On Saturday and Sunday Stavros took Nili and Daniel on lengthy tours of Cyprus. On Saturday it was along the southern coast to Limassol and Paphos. Stavros, who turned out to be a lawyer like Nili – and it seemed that her being an accomplished, educated woman was a large part of her appeal to him – talked incessantly, telling the detailed story of each place that they visited. Daniel surmised that Nili had already heard the narration, but she maintained a lively interest throughout the tour.

They had dinner on the way back, and returned to the hotel about nine. Daniel was tired, and was looking forward to a good night’s sleep, when the nine-thirty knock happened again. As he had expected, it was Kathleen. She sensed his fatigue, and they made do with a quickie.

On Sunday it was to Nicosia – where, as Stavros quite nonchalantly mentioned along the way, he lived with his wife – with a return trip through the Troodos Mountains, where the snow in fact was quite scant.

This time they were back at the hotel at six. Nili packed her bags and put them in the trunk of Stavros’ Mercedes. Stavros then took them out to the Psarolimano for a farewell dinner, which ended around eight. After their good-byes he drove Nili to the airport for her nine-fifteen flight to Tel Aviv. Daniel’s flight to Athens would be exactly twelve hours later.

He walked back to the hotel, intending to go to bed early in order to get a good night’s sleep, and hoping that Kathleen and Sally had tired of their show of appreciation – as he had tired of it – since they knew that he was leaving the next morning.

He was in the middle of packing when the knock came. This time it was both of them.

“We thought you might fancy a tag shag,” Kathleen announced. He had not heard the term before, but what they had in mind was clear to him. And what they proceeded to do with him seemed to have been learned by watching a porn movie. There were moments, in fact, when he believed that there was a video camera overhead, filming their orgy. And the enjoyment that he got from it was far more from an awareness of the pornographic nature of what they were doing than from the almost negligible physical pleasure.

“Wasn’t that good?” Kathleen asked as they were dressing.

“Aren’t we good?” Sally seconded. “We didn’t tell you that we’re hookers, did we?”

“Happy hookers on holiday, you lucky bloke!” Kathleen finished. The kissed him together, one on each cheek, and left his room with their arms about each other.

He suddenly felt queasy. He had unwittingly had sex with two prostitutes! True, it was not, technically, unprotected – the women’s profession explained their skill with a condom – but Gen had warned him about other STDs, such as herpes, that were not condom-proof.

His first class on Tuesday would be at ten o’clock. Student Health Services would open at nine, and he would be there on the dot.

When the reception called to wake him at six-thirty, he had probably slept for not much more than an hour the whole night..

 


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