13   15 May 90   Daniel just got back from New York. After we got home I told him, in passing, about my first sexual experience. No details, except that I was not quite sixteen (a little bit younger in fact than Betty is now) and that it happened in Montréal, not Rimouski. It came out when we were talking about Betty, and Daniel said rather emphatically that she wasn’t ready for sex. How did he presume to know that? Or was he just being the protective big brother, as my brothers would have been if they had not been out of the house by the time I was an adolescent (afterthought that I was). My father saw fit to take over that role, and he did so with a vengeance. D did not get a chance to respond to my revelation because B came into the room to tell us that she was about to go out with Gérard and some other friends. She did not say which ones, but I suspect that they are his friends. It appears that she and Gérard are getting closer to doing it. I had a frank talk with her, and she said that she wants to do it on her 16th birthday. She has calculated that she would have her period soon after the date and so they will be able to use the rhythm method. I told her not to rely simply on the calendar and taught her about the new fertility awareness method of Justisse. She likes it that it is a Canadian method. Une méthode canadienne. We had to do the teaching in English because the user’s guide, so far, is only in English. (The organization is based in Edmonton.) But when it comes to medical talk I am better in English than in French anyway. Speaking of medical talk: things have been going well with George. I see him about every other week, sometimes every week. I don’t tell Betty where I go on those evenings but I am pretty sure she knows. I wonder if Amy knows. Betty has had her over a few times, with other girlfriends, and she seems a strange girl. She is a few months older than Betty, but her body is hardly developed. Her face, on the other hand, is like that of a woman of twenty-five or more. Quite pretty, chiselled features, prominent nose, not a gram of baby fat. She takes after George more than Doris, who is on the plump side. Niels Bohr aside, I have decided to stop speculating about whether there is a future for me with George. I am who I am: a busy, independent single woman of forty with a profession and two almost grown children, one of whom is already independent. I have no need to be concerned about the future, theirs or mine. I have never lived with a man, not even Miki, and I have no intention of ever doing so. What I want is a modicum of companionship and fun. George gives me that, and I am grateful. And yes, my journal, I am also fond of saying “X is who he/she is.” But does George want more than I do from our relationship? To date he has said nothing of the sort. But in the autumn his divorce becomes final, and things may change then. What would I do then? I repeat, my journal: I will not speculate about the future.   Hamburg   In the course of his travels through Germany Daniel made a point of compulsively tracing its labyrinthine itinerary through Germany on a map; of saving used train tickets, credit-card receipts, and ticket stubs from cinemas and museums; of marking every roll of film with the dates of loading and unloading. And so he was able, once he had the proof sheets of his photos, to construct a step-by-step, day-by-day log of his trip. But he filed his log away, and his subsequent memory of that trip – except for its first and last movements, each a little over a week – was not chronological. And those two movements, the introduction and finale, echoed back to each other, across the middle movement that was musically more like a fantasia and visually a surrealistic montage. It was like a music video of Die Toten Hosen, the punk band whose song Azzurro, the anthem of the World Cup, was played endlessly that summer. Aside from moments of deep personal meaning it was the beer-soaked evenings of the soccer matches, particularly those involving Germany (it was still West Germany), that punctuated the travelogue of Daniel’s memory like flashing highlights. The supreme highlight was undoubtedly the eighth of July in Berlin, the evening of the World Cup final. But what that evening – with the subsequent night of pleasure – typically evoked in his memory was not what immediately followed it or preceded it but a comparison with another night, a month earlier, in Hamburg. It was also in Hamburg that he came as close as he ever could to his father’s physical presence. From there his memory would jump to Frankfurt, where, just before flying back to New York, he met Brigitte’s mother, his father’s piano teacher.   As they were being driven to Bad Harzburg from Göttingen on the afternoon of the day after his arrival there, Brigitte gave Daniel a running narrative about her family, with details beyond what she had written him about. He had slept like a log until almost eleven, and woke up fully recovered from the fatigue of the previous two days’ many hours of travel. The service and the food on the Singapore Airlines flight were indeed quite good, but not quite in the way that is shown in their advertising, and – perhaps because of his excitement, or perhaps because he had eaten too much – he did not sleep much. As befitted her star status, Brigitte had the services of a chauffeur-driven car – a Mercedes, no less – when she gave guest performances away from Hamburg. She did not like to drive long distances, though by North American standards the three hundred kilometers between Blankenese and Göttingen is hardly a long distance. But her eyesight was deteriorating, she said; she had always needed glasses for reading, but now her distance vision was not so good any more. And she had always preferred trains or planes for any trip over a hundred kilometers. In 1956, she told him as the Mercedes began to hum along the autobahn, all three Bechmeyer women were married: she to Miki; her older sister Renate to her longtime boyfriend Jürgen, with whom she had already been living in Frankfurt; and their widowed mother Helga to her old friend Bruno Kranz, a violinist. Helga and Bruno continued to live in the house where Brigitte and Renate had spent their adolescence until 1982, when Bruno, who was considerably older than Helga, died peacefully. It then became apparent to Brigitte that her mother was showing symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, though it took over a year before Renate – who, after the birth of her first daughter, had become a devout Christian – accepted the diagnosis. When the decision was taken to move Helga to an old-age home, the sisters agreed that Frankfurt would be preferable to Hamburg. Renate, unlike Brigitte, did not travel much, and her now grownup daughters, Lisa (whose formal name was Elisabeth, just like Betty’s) and Ursula, also lived in Frankfurt and were devoted to their grandmother. Brigitte told Daniel further, with a melancholy sigh, that she and Renate had grown apart after Renate left home. The rift grew deeper after Renate’s religious epiphany, for it now seemed to Brigitte that her sister could not tolerate having a Jew – that is, a non-Christian rather than a non-Aryan – as a brother-in-law. They would see each other only when their mother was also there, whether in health or in sickness. Fortunately Lisa and Ursula were independent young women who did not follow in their parents’ religious footsteps and were on good terms with their famous aunt, especially since the aunt was able to get them jobs in television production. After the chauffeur parked the car and went into a nearby bar, they explored Bad Harzburg on foot. It turned out to be a very pretty and picturesque resort town at the foot of the Harz Mountains. They had lunch at a pleasant little restaurant on the main street, now pedestrianized but not, Brigitte told Daniel, in her day. The high school where she met Miki was now called the Werner von Siemens Gymnasium, but in their day it was called simply Oberschule. The house where they had lived now housed doctors’ offices. The road trip took an hour each way. They got back in time for an early dinner, and Brigitte had to go to the theater for makeup and costume. That evening he saw her perform. Daniel had learned in French class at school that the saying le mieux est l’ennemi du bien (“the best is the enemy of the good”) is not original to Voltaire but is a translation of an Italian proverb. But that doesn’t make it any less valid, and never did he see its validity demonstrated more than at that performance of Die Möwe. For Brigitte Wilner was so overwhelmingly the best that the generally good rest of the cast seemed to be acting in a different play, even the veteran actor who played Trigorin. (Daniel imagined that she had had her “experience” with him many years before.) She could express emotion not only with her facial expressions but even with slight movements of her hands while keeping her face frozen in a smile. On the morning of the next day, a Friday, he explored the university campus on his own. He had been warned not to expect anything resembling the university where his father had studied thirty to thirty-five years before, but the contrast with Columbia, which had been on Morningside Heights for almost a century without much change, was startling. It was interesting to learn that both universities had been founded, in some sense, by King George II. At lunch Brigitte told Daniel about hikes she had taken with Miki in the Harz Mountains, back in the days when Soviet soldiers guarded the East-West border. “We got a little too close to the border,” she said, “and I was very frightened when I saw them, because I had a very traumatic experience with Soviet soldiers when I was younger. But your father spoke with them in Polish, and they spoke in Russian, and they understood one another.” Now, with the impending reunification, there were no more border guards, and one could even hike up to the Brocken, the famous mountain of the Walpurgisnacht or Witches’ Sabbath, which is just over the border. The prospect of such a hike excited Daniel. Some day, he thought, he would ask her about the traumatic experience, though he could well imagine what it might have been. After making a phone call to get the necessary information, Brigitte told Daniel that what he would need to do was take a train from Göttingen to Bad Harzburg – Miki had taken many trips on this line – and from there a bus to a place called Torfhaus, where he could spend the night. The weather on top of the Brocken was likely to be cold and foggy, so that the best time for the hike, which was eight kilometers long and about three hours each way, would be in the middle of the day: start around nine, after a hearty breakfast, to get there at noon. To get back after the descent he could, instead of retracing his steps, take the same bus away from Bad Harzburg to a mountain resort town called Braunlage and get back to Göttingen by another bus-train combination, either that same evening or the next day, Sunday, which would be the day of Brigitte’s last performance. That evening Germany’s first appearance in the World Cup, against Yugoslavia, would take place. On Monday they would go to Hanover, and then to Hamburg. The hike was indeed arduous and chilly. The scenery was beautiful in a desolate sort of way, but, except for some effigies of witches that hung from the gables of some farmhouses along the way, it did not project any sense of witchcraft or magic. The crowning glory of the Brocken was a blocklike Communist-style building with a huge television transmitter on its roof. He opted for getting back to Göttingen the same evening, since he wanted to see the Italy-Austria match in the comfort of his hotel room, and he didn’t know what kind of accommodation he might find in Braunlage, without a reservation, on a Saturday night in June. He had gone to Torfhaus without knowing whether he would see the opening match, between Argentina and Cameroon, but he didn’t care, since it didn’t promise much excitement; Argentina was, after all, the reigning world champion. But he did manage to see it, and it was one of the most exciting matches he had ever seen. It was just beginning when he got to the Torfhaus lodge, with a small crowd in front of a television set in the lobby. The Cameroon goalie, Nkono, was able to block the best that Maradona and company had to offer, and in the second half, with the Cameroon team reduced to ten men, Omam-Biyik scored with a perfect header. Later on yet another Cameroon player was sent off, but Cameroon held on for the win. The German crowd, which in the meantime had grown quite large, cheered for Cameroon, or rather against Argentina, who had beaten Germany in the final four years before.   Brigitte and Daniel arrived in Hamburg in a first-class train compartment from Hanover, where she showed him around for half a day, including a visit to the music and drama school where she had studied and where Ulrike Klostermann – who was on vacation – was teaching. Daniel asked Brigitte if she remembered where Leon and Fela had lived when they were there. “I visited them here once,” she told him, “but I don’t remember the exact location, and anyway the building, which was quite old, has been torn down for new buildings.” Before boarding the train Brigitte telephoned her housekeeper, Frau Schmidt, to prepare dinner not only for her and Daniel but also for Helmut, Margot and Rita. Frau Schmidt, a sturdy lady of about seventy, met them at the Hamburg-Altona station and drove them to the house in her Volkswagen Golf, which was very much like Daniel’s Jetta. Brigitte had told Daniel that Frau Schmidt had been both widowed and divorced, and both of her husbands – she had a son with one and a daughter with the other – had been surnamed Schmidt. Helmut, Margot and Rita – who was indeed lovely – arrived at the house about two hours after Brigitte and Daniel’s arrival, after he had been shown to his guestroom and had time to shower and relax. He would have liked to explore his father’s study, but Brigitte urged him to save it for the next day, when he would have unlimited time. Most of the conversation at the dinner table was in English, as it had been with Brigitte despite their exchange of letters in German. When Daniel said something in German he would be complemented, but the talk promptly reverted to what they thought was his language; evidently they had been told that he was Canadian but not French Canadian. For Helmut and Margot speaking English was an effort, but Rita’s – she had spent an exchange year in England – was absolutely fluent. What Helmut and Margot talked about the most was The Beatles. Not only were they, as Brigitte had told Daniel, great fans, but they had been so since the band’s beginnings in the clubs of St. Pauli – the Indra Club, the Kaiserkeller, the Top Ten Club and the Star-Club. They talked about the length of time it had taken them to persuade Brigitte and Miki to go hear The Beatles with them, at the Star-Club, after the other clubs had closed. Margot also talked about Miki as a journalist, his quirky writing style, his humorous, often ironic point of view. Helmut talked about him as a fellow sports fan. Rita talked very little. When Helmut and Margot took their leave, to Daniel’s surprise Rita stayed behind. “Why don’t you young people go to relax on the sofa,” Brigitte said as she and Frau Schmidt began to clear the table. “Can’t I help you?” he asked, but Rita said, “No, come here!” as she sat down on the sofa. It was only then that he noticed that the dining area was a part of the very long living room, not a separate room as it was in their house in Montreal. He sat down beside her, about a foot away, but Rita quickly closed the gap until their hips were touching. “Tell me about your school,” she said. “I go to Columbia University,” he said. “I just finished the first year.” “Really? I am still in high school, in the last year. I have another month to go.” “But in Germany you have thirteen grades, isn’t that right?” “Yes.” “In Quebec it’s a little like that,” he began, but he quickly saw that Rita was not very interested in a comparative analysis of educational systems, and so did not go on to explain about CEGEP and the like. As soon as the table was cleared and Brigitte and Frau Schmidt were no longer in the room, she said, “Let’s kiss.” Rita’s appetite for kissing seemed insatiable. It was a good half-hour before she drew back and said matter-of-factly, “So, let’s go upstairs.” She evidently knew the house well, since she led him into his room without hesitation. Sex with Rita reminded him of Vivian. Rita, too, gave the impression of believing that her beauty alone was enough to give a man pleasure, and that penetrating her was like an homage, like entering a shrine that was dedicated to her loveliness. When he woke up Rita was gone without a trace. Her name did not come up at breakfast with Brigitte, who shortly thereafter drove to the television studio in central Hamburg. He was free to explore his father’s study. The impression that it gave him was that of an institutional library, impersonal and neat. There were shelves and shelves of books, arranged by language: German, English, French, Spanish, Hebrew and Arabic. In the German part – by far the largest – there was a shelf that held several copies of each of Michael Wilner’s books. There was some free wall space, but no pictures hung on it. One shelf held a compact stereo system, and next to it a small stack of cassettes, all classical. On the desk was an electric typewriter that seemed to date from the sixties. Next to it was the only unusual object in the room: a large antique leather-covered box with a brass hasp but no padlock. When he opened it he saw that it was half-filled with clippings of his father’s articles. As he leafed through them he found that they were all from before 1965, and they were the very ones that had been reprinted in In meiner Zeit (which, Brigitte told Daniel, had been compiled and edited by Margot as a surprise present for Miki’s thirtieth birthday). He wondered what had happened to the more recent ones. He spent a few hours browsing through the books, finding many of them interesting but not one that would absorb him. A little after noon Frau Schmidt knocked on the door and asked if he wanted lunch. “Ja, bitte,” he said. After lunch he went for a walk around Blankenese, taking his camera. It was a beautiful place, quite hilly, and from some places there were spectacular views of the Elbe and beyond. There were neighborhoods with villas far more magnificent than Brigitte’s house, and there was a picturesque old neighborhood, crisscrossed by stepped streets, that must have once been a fishing village. He took at least a dozen photographs. When Brigitte came home in the afternoon he told her about his explorations. It was then that she showed him some of Miki’s photo albums, which she kept in her bedroom. There was a slim one devoted to Blankenese scenes, some of them almost identical to the ones that Daniel had shot, but mostly in black and white. There was a fat one with photographs of Norderney, about half of them with Brigitte in various stages of dress and undress (though none nude). There was one with candid portraits of people in Israel, mostly Jerusalem: Arabs in robes and kaffiyehs, traditionally dressed Jews of both Eastern European and Middle Eastern origin, Greek Orthodox priests like the ones he had seen in Cyprus, Catholic monks and nuns like the ones in Quebec. And there was one of photographs that seemed to have no common thread. One of them was a snapshot of a pretty, dark-complexioned, full-bosomed girl of about twenty, wearing very large earrings. “Is this the mysterious Ora?” Daniel asked. “Yes,” Brigitte said. At dinner he asked her about the clippings of his father’s articles from 1965 and later. “So you peeked!” she said with a laugh. “I was going to surprise you. They are in the script department at my television studio, and they are being photocopied so that they can be put in a… how do you say Ringmappe?” “A ring binder,” he said. “I will have it for you when I see you off in Frankfurt.” “Thank you.” “I will also bring you copies of Miki’s books. By the way, this breast of veal that we’re having, do you like it?” “Yes, it’s delicious.” “That’s your father’s recipe. He was a very good cook. Do you like to cook?” “Yes, I love to cook.” “He made it the last time that we had a dinner party at this house, on the fifteenth of August, nineteen seventy.” The precision of the date surprised him. “Who was at the party? Helmut and Margot?” Brigitte laughed. “Yes, of course. That was when Margot told me that she was pregnant… with Rita.” Brigitte smiled slyly. “And also Hanna – it was the evening before she was to go back to Israel – and Max Schwab.” “Who’s that?” “I didn’t tell you about him? He was an editor who helped your father write, and also sell, his book. I didn’t like him very much. He was… grob… you know what I mean. But he and Miki were good friends.” “Where is he now?” “I don’t know. Many years ago he went back to America – he had lived there before, and he had a wife living there – and I never heard from him. Anyway, what I am driving at is that at that party Max and Margot tried to get Miki to write a cookbook. Perhaps he would have written one.” The following day Daniel toured central Hamburg, taking the S-Bahn train on his own. He met Brigitte and Margot for lunch, and afterwards Margot took him for a visit to a large brick building called Pressehaus, where several publications had their headquarters: both the Hamburger Morgenpost and Die Zeit, where Miki had worked, and also Der Spiegel, where she was now a high-ranking editor. She showed him the office that had been Miki’s, and introduced him to the very few remaining people who remembered him. Her daughter’s name didn’t come up in their conversation until the final handshake, when she said, “By the way, Rita likes you.” “I like her too,” he lied. That evening he told Brigitte that he would be leaving Hamburg the next day, and that he would like to visit the Bergen-Belsen memorial site. “Very good,” Brigitte said. “The day that your father left me, the twenty-fifth of August nineteen seventy, he later telephoned me and told me that the first place where he stopped was Bergen-Belsen. It was his liberation place,” she added with a smile. “Sein Befreiungsort?” Daniel asked, once again struck by the precise date. “Ja, genau.” It was the first time that he had heard Brigitte refer to their separation as Miki’s having left her. The chronological precision started an inquisitive turn in his mind, but he did not act on it then. “How do I go there?” he asked. “First you must go to Celle,” she said. “It’s a very pretty old town. You take a bus from there. You can check your baggage at the station, or you can spend a night there. A little after ten in the morning there is an InterCity train that goes direct from Altona to Celle, with no need to change. I can take you to the Altona station on my way to the studio.”