14

 

15 June 90

 

Not one but two postcards from D on the same day, though with postmarks 3 days apart. And two days later a third one.

This was the first year that D missed Betty’s birthday. We had a little family party 8 days early, on 30 May, just before he went back to New York in order to be there to meet the moving van that brought his things to his new apartment. His own apartment, and he isn’t even 19!

The party with her friends, on her actual birthday, was small: four girls and two boys (Gérard and Paul Berman). Amy Kenner looked a little bit more womanly than the last time I saw her. She wore a dress rather than her usual straight jeans, and a trace of hips and buttocks was on display.

The party ended at 10, and Gérard stayed. In the morning he was gone, but at breakfast Betty looked very happy. I asked her how it had gone, and she said très bien, offering no details.

When she went out I couldn’t resist my curiosity and checked her sheets. There were some semen stains but not a trace of blood. Since we agreed that I will continue coaching her in the Justisse method, I will probably find out what happened, or did not happen. My guess is that Gérard got too nervous to be able to penetrate, but Betty enjoyed the cuddling. (It is not an uncommon experience, as I have learned in my practice, and a few times in person.)

Her period ended yesterday, and she is out with Gérard and some other friends at a rock concert. Just before she went out I gave her another Justisse lesson, and she joked about it being de justesse, so something will probably happen tonight.

George is about to go to the islands again, and wants me to join him there. (Yesterday was our last date before he leaves.) But I have different vacation plans. I plan to go with Betty to England and Scotland for a few weeks in July. We haven’t been in Europe in four years, and in Britain in nine years. We went there in the year of the Royal Wedding, when Betty was seven and Princess Diana was her idol, who inspired her to speak English. Not simply English but the English of a British princess, greatly impressing her francophone schoolmates. Only gradually did she change her speech to Montréal English.

I wonder if, when we are in Britain next month, she will speak again like Princess Di. I doubt it. There have been reports that the fairy-tale royal marriage is falling apart. But why should that matter? Diana may well be an admirable person in her own right, the way she visits AIDS victims, though on her visits to Canada she has not exactly been wildly received. She did not visit any hospitals here, for one thing.

D’s postcards are addressed to both of us, Mireille Bouchard & Betty Wilner, and contain just greetings and some basic information. The first is from Bad Harzburg (“this is where papa went to secondary school”), the second from Göttingen (“this is where papa went to university”). The third is from Hamburg but with no personal reference, only “I’m having a wonderful trip.” I suppose that he knew better than to write “this is where papa lived with Brigitte.”

Berlin

 

The next morning, at the Hamburg-Altona ticket office, Daniel had his three-week DBB railpass – which Mrs. Taylor had procured for him – validated. The ticket clerk confirmed what Daniel had calculated: the last date of validity would be at midnight twenty days hence, on the fourth of July. He also said that as of the first of July the pass would be honored in East Germany. He could now crisscross Germany, or at least – in June – West Germany, at will. All he knew that his first stop would be Celle, that from there he would go to Cologne, and that on the fourth of July he would arrive in Berlin, a day ahead of Brigitte. It had been projected that if Germany were to make to the semifinals, the match would be that evening. And he had reserved a room in a nice three-star hotel, just off the Kurfürstendamm, that Brigitte had recommended.

On the train to Celle he took out of his pack, for the first time, the Lonely Planet Central Europe guide that he had brought with him. A casual browsing of the Northern Germany section told him that he should not miss Bremen. And so he decided, on the spur of the moment, that after Celle – that is, after Bergen-Belsen – he would head northward again and visit the city of the Town Musicians before going to Cologne, where Daniel’s Rhine Journey would begin.

At the Celle station, after checking his bag at the Gepäckaufbewahrung he found out the schedule of the Bergen-Belsen buses – it turned out that he had to take first a bus either to the town of Bergen or to another town called Winsen and then another to the Gedenkstätte – and walked into town, past the castle, to have lunch. Celle proved indeed a beautiful city, replete with the kinds of colorful half-timbered houses that he had previously seen in Normandy and Brittany in the course of vacations in France with his mother. But here the houses had inscriptions, probably original if restored, going back to the sixteenth century.

The castle could be visited only at limited hours, and there was not enough time to combine such a visit with a trip to Bergen-Belsen in the course of the afternoon. And so, on getting back to the station after lunch, he got a room in a small hotel nearby and moved his bag there.

Alighting from the Celle bus number 11 at the entrance to the memorial, he began walking toward the site of the camp, past the recently expanded documentation center (Dokumentenhaus), which he decided to skip until after seeing the camp. When he got there he was at first put off by the parklike serenity of the place, with the expanse of green vegetation of the Lüneburg Heath marked only by markers showing the number of dead bodies in each of the mass graves that it covered. Even the monuments – the Jewish memorial shaped like a giant tombstone, the obelisk, the wooden cross – were of the kind that could be found in a park. But as he walked along the paths on the clear, calm late-spring afternoon, in the breeze he began hearing voices, as though the souls of the long-decomposed bodies under his feet were calling out to be remembered.

The camp, according to the signs, was made up of several sections, and he had no idea which one his father had been in. He wondered if he would find his name in the documentation center.

And yes, it was there: Wilner, M.

 

After Bergen-Belsen, Daniel’s memory of the trip became diffuse until almost three weeks later, when he visited another Befreiungsort: Buchenwald, near Weimar, where his great-uncle Leon – whom he had never known – had been liberated. He could document his journey chronologically, but he didn’t think of it that way. The movie in his mind was a jumble of trains, museums, hotels and hostels, castles, churches, cafés, postcard-writing, bars, sausage, girls, beer and soccer matches. The themes were so intertwined that, as regards beer and girls, he could not really put Gen’s theory about drink and sex to the test. But it was the soccer, and in particular Germany’s progress from the group round-robin through the knockout round to the quarterfinals and semifinals, that formed the leitmotif that punctuated the soundtrack with an almost steady crescendo, moderated only by the one-one tie with Colombia.

When he would later look at the trace of his itinerary on the map, it didn’t look as crazily capricious as it had felt at the time. From Cologne to Constance it was a moderately meandering journey up the Rhine valley, and then a sharply zigzagging one east-northeastward into Bavaria. The hotel where he stayed in Munich was on a street called Dachauer Strasse, but he chose not to visit Dachau. He was not interested in what his father – in one of his early articles, which he read while browsing in his study – sardonically called Kazett-Tourismus, or concentration-camp tourism. His visit to Bergen-Belsen, and his prospective one to Buchenwald, had personal motives.

Some of the speech – Swabian and Bavarian – that he heard in the south of Germany reminded him of the Yiddish that he sometimes heard spoken at Fela’s, as when people said a bissel for ‘a little’ in place of the standard ein Bisschen. He wondered if, the next time he visited Fela, he would understand what her friends were saying in their old-country language.

His last stop in West Germany was Nuremberg, were, in a packed Kneipe in the middle of the old city, he saw the great Lothar Matthäus score the penalty kick that defeated Czechoslovakia and put Germany in the semifinals. Later that evening England beat Cameroon in extra time, with Gary Lineker scoring penalty kicks on very questionable calls, and so it would be England and Germany facing each other in Turin.

The next day’s journey from Nuremberg to Weimar was an arduous one. Trains between east and west were still scarce, and three changes and six hours were required before he got to the city of Goethe and Schiller, Liszt and the Bauhaus, the Republic and Buchenwald.

The effect of Buchenwald on Daniel was vastly different from that of Bergen-Belsen. It was to remind him, as a cold blast of wind reminds one of winter after one has been in a warm house, that this was still – if perhaps in its last throes – the German Democratic Republic.

To begin with, the memorial was not simply a Gedenkstätte but a nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte. The verb mahnen, as he had recently learned from Dr. Klostermann, means not simply ‘remind’ but also ‘warn’ and ‘admonish.’ And the reminder, warning and admonition were national, that is, aimed at nationals of the GDR, who, as loyal citizens of a socialist state, had miraculously – through the triumph of Communism – overcome their Nazi past, a feat reminiscent of the Immaculate Conception. The recurrent motto was durch Sterben und Kämpfen zum Sieg (“through death and struggle to victory”), engraved on the relief steles that lined the stairway leading down to the burial places

After passing mass graves surrounded by Roman-style ring walls, he walked along the pylon-lined Allee der Nationen. According to the signs (in German and Russian), the descent and the graves were intended to symbolize the “Night of Fascism,” while the “Avenue of the Nations” represented militant international solidarity. Once he had crossed the third ring grave, he ascended the “Stairway of Freedom” to the sculpture of the liberated inmates and the “Tower of Freedom.” Here the good East German was to become aware of the inmates’ “self-liberation” and of the “liberated part of Germany,” i.e. the GDR, as his native country and his antifascist fatherland. He was to emerge convinced of the historical necessity of the triumph of Communism and conscious of the fact that this form of government had not yet taken hold everywhere and he must therefore remain alert and militant.

The guide at the information center apologized for the anachronistic signage, especially after Daniel told her that his Jewish father’s uncle had been a prisoner there. She said that for some time now the commission in charge had been discussing changing the nature of the memorial, in particular to commemorate the Jews and Gypsies who had suffered there only because of their race. After reunification, she said, the change would happen very quickly. She urged him to come back in two years.

The visit left Daniel disconcerted. That evening’s nail-biting semifinal between Italy and Argentina, which he watched in the lounge of his hotel, was a welcome distraction. The game ended with a one-one tie, there was no further scoring in extra time, and Argentina won the penalty shootout. Were Germany to win the next evening’s semifinal, the final would be a rematch of 1986.

 

When he arrived at the East Berlin central station (Hauptbahnhof), he was exhausted. He discovered that the east-west S-Bahn lines had been reopened just two days before, and so he was able to take an elevated train from east to west through the Friedrichstrasse station on the border to Savignyplatz, from where he could walk to his hotel. After dinner in an Italian restaurant nearby he curled up on the bed in his room and watched the Germany-England semifinal in solitude.

It was another nerve-racking match. It was scoreless until Andreas Brehme scored fifteen minutes into the second half, but ten minutes later Lineker evened the score, and nothing more happened in extra time. So it came to a penalty shootout again. Once again England made good on three, but Germany made four. This meant that Germany would once again be in the final against Argentina. And the final match in Rome, as he found out the next morning from the Berliner Morgenpost that was served along with breakfast, would be shown on a giant television screen beside the Brandenburg Gate.

Brigitte arrived later that morning. She called Daniel from the five-star hotel where she normally stayed in Berlin, and they met for lunch before going sightseeing.

Among the sights she showed him on that day was the theater – now converted to a cinema – where she had performed in Kiss Me Kate some twenty-six or twenty-seven years earlier. Another day of sightseeing, again mainly in West Berlin, followed. On Saturday morning she had to fly to Frankfurt for a television appearance that evening and to spend the weekend with her mother. He stayed behind so that on Sunday he could join the throng of Berliners, east and west, who would gather beside the Brandenburg Gate to watch the final. He would join her in Frankfurt on Monday

By the time she left Berlin he felt familiar enough with the city to explore it on his own, and he did so both Saturday and Sunday, with ventures into East Berlin.

Saturday evening, rather than watch the talk show in which Brigitte was a participant, he watched the Three Tenors concert, also broadcast from Rome, on the television of his hotel room. Domingo, of course, was wonderful. Carreras was very good. Pavarotti, it seemed to him, was condescending, acting the gracious host – the concert, after all, was in his country – as long as everyone knew that he was the greatest. Unlike the two Spaniards, he seemed incapable of smiling while singing, even when the song’s text called for a smile. After a while, whenever he was featured on the screen Daniel would close his eyes and listen to that beautiful voice undisturbed by the strange head – with its almost sharklike mouth – that produced it.

 

In the course of their Berlin meanderings Brigitte told Daniel of an incident related to the World Cup that Miki had related to her. It happened in Venice in 1970, when she was making a film there, and on the night of the semifinal between Italy and West Germany in the Mexico World Cup of that year, she was very tired and Miki went out to a bar to watch it on television. When Daniel told her that he knew about the match, she seemed surprised. He told her that every soccer fan knew about it – it’s been called the match of the century. But it was Daniel’s turn to be surprised by what Miki had told Brigitte about his experience: when Germany scored the tying goal late in the second half, the Italians in the bar applauded, saying that it was well deserved! È ben meritato!

He had never heard of such sportsmanship, and it was not what the Germans gathered in Berlin on that evening exhibited. True, the Argentines played very rough, as the two red cards showed. Still, the penalty kick given to Germany in the 86th minute seemed to him completely unjustified. But when Brehme kicked it in, the Berliners celebrated as though the Wall had fallen once again, and fell into an orgy of indiscriminate hugging of strangers and acquaintances alike. Daniel was attacked by a big blond girl who held him in her arms, with the pressure of her breasts against his chest having the expected physiological effect, until the final whistle. Then she drew back, looked at him, said “Ich bin Inge” and kissed him hard.

Ich bin Ossi,” she said after letting go, identifying herself as East German with the West German slang term. “Und du?

Kanadier,” he said. “Ich heisse Daniel.”

Inge went back to the hotel with Daniel. Though she had made day visits to West Berlin since the fall of the Wall, she had never spent a night in the West, and his modest though very pleasant hotel might as well have been Charlottenburg Palace for Inge. The hotel’s Bountiful Breakfast Buffet, as it was described in the English text of its brochure, so excited her that after breakfast she insisted on going back to his room for another bout on the bed, though she would be late for work. She said that it didn’t matter any more.

After Inge left – without showering – he showered, dressed, packed, checked out and took the shuttle bus to Tempelhof Airport. His Lufthansa flight to Frankfurt would be one that Miki would take when he and Brigitte lived in Berlin and he covered the Frankfurt Auschwitz Trials.

The memory of the evening by the Brandenburg Gate and of the night of unadulterated animal pleasure with the far-from-pretty Inge remained vividly etched in his mind. It invariably evoked a contrast with the joyless night, a month earlier in Hamburg, with the lovely Rita.

 

Frankfurt, where he spent the succeeding two and a half days, was distinctively unmemorable, except for two shining personal moments.

One was a visit to the restored medieval city-hall complex, including the Löwenstein House, where Miki and Brigitte were married in 1956, and the main building, the Römer, where the first Auschwitz trial – which Miki covered from 1963 to 1965 – began before being moved to another location. The other was a visit to the old-age home where Helga, Brigitte’s mother, lived. When she first saw Daniel, her eyes suddenly brightened and she called out “Miki!” before sinking back into forgetfulness. He could see tears forming in Brigitte’s bright blue eyes.

For their farewell dinner Daniel was Brigitte’s guest in the dining room of her five-star hotel. In his jeans, cleanly washed though they were, he felt woefully underdressed for the place, but Brigitte matched him by also wearing jeans – high-fashion ones of course – with her high-heeled shoes and silk blouse. She looked spectacular.

She brought him, as she had promised, a small cord-handled paper bag that held a copy of each of Miki’s books and a ring binder with very professionally made copies of all his articles and essays written after In meiner Zeit. It also included a small album with a selection of photographs that Miki had taken of her over the years.

The dining room’s service was obsequious, as befitted its habitual clientele, and it seemed to Daniel that the waiters didn’t quite know what to make of the two of them – the middle-aged movie star who was known to be childless and the very young man who, theoretically, could be her grandson. The cuisine was blandly pseudo-French, distinguished only by the absurdly high prices of what, behind their misspelled French listings, were quite ordinary dishes.

Brigitte had ordered a whole bottle of wine for them, and he drank more than he was used to, so that he waxed talkative. He talked of his varied impressions of Germany, of his joy over having come so close to his father’s physical presence, and of his appreciation of Brigitte. Her responses were discreet, but his gushing evidently touched something deep inside her.

Brigitte, in turn, told Daniel more about Miki, and specifically about how his feelings toward Israel had changed, while he was there in 1966 with the dying Leon, from those of an indifferent observer to those of a passionate peace advocate. So much so that when in 1965 he had an assignment there and she wanted to go with him, he insisted on going with her to Cyprus instead, but in May of 1970 he enthusiastically took her to Israel in spite of recent terrorist attacks.

Eventually, as the dinner and the conversation wound down he remembered that he had two questions left for her, and he told her so. Just then the waiter brought them each a glass of cognac, compliments of the house.

“Shoot,” she said as she raised her glass and put it down.

“Did Lisa and Ursula ever think of my father as their uncle?”

Brigitte reflected in silence for a while. “I don’t think so,” she said. “They almost never saw him. The last time was… in nineteen sixty-six, when they were eight and four. Renate never talked about him, as far as I know. And they have never asked me about him in the years since.” She took a tiny sip of cognac and gestured for him to do the same.

“The other question,” he said after taking a sip, “is more like a request. I noticed that you remember the precise dates of some of the things that happened during that August of nineteen seventy. Can you give me a full chronology?”

“Yes, of course. Would you like to write it down?”

“No, I think I’ll remember. I have a good head for dates.”

“Like your father.” She took a deep breath and another sip of cognac. “Okay. As I have told you, the day when I read the news item about Hemme was the sixth. The next day we went back to Hamburg, and the day after that, which was Saturday, the girl called Ora came to visit, and also Miki opened his mail and found a letter from Hanna saying that she would arrive on the eleventh, which was Tuesday. She stayed till Sunday, and Miki was planning to go with her to Israel, but on… on Thursday the travel agent told him that he could not leave Germany, and the next day, Friday, Miki met with a detective from Stuttgart and surrendered his passport. That evening we went clubbing in Sankt Pauli, and the clubs were full of people speaking English. Miki figured out that they were fans of the The Beatles, who had just broken up, making something like a pilgrimage to their shrines. And Miki made some very funny jokes about it.”

“What kind of jokes?”

“Well, you know, Sankt Pauli is named for Saint Paul, like Paul McCartney, so Miki said that it should also be named for Saint John, Saint George and Saint Ringo, but he said it Latin, Sankt Ringonis!”

Daniel was glad to hear an example of Miki’s humor, and appreciated it. “Ringonis!” he said as he laughed heartily. “That’s great!”

“The next night,” Brigitte went on, “was the dinner party that I have already told you about. On Sunday, after Hanna left, we went to a village named Haselau, where I had filmed Germelshausen, and at the restaurant where we ate lunch Miki made more jokes. Because Haselau is in Holstein, he ordered Schnitzel à la Holstein, though it has nothing to with the region of Holstein – it’s named for a diplomat by the name of von Holstein – and when they didn’t have it he ordered beef but it had to be from Holstein cattle, which also has nothing to do with Holstein and which is milk cattle, not meat cattle. At first the host thought that Miki was serious, but then he got the joke.”

“It is subtle humor,” Daniel said, “the kind that I like.”

“Me too. That evening, Sunday, Miki took the night train to Stuttgart. He came back for one day, on Wednesday, and told me that he had been cleared of all charges and that he and the Stuttgart police had made a plan for him to go to Israel undercover.”

“I know about that,” he said. “Nili told me.”

“Yes. So he left for Israel on Thursday, the twentieth, he did what he had to do, and he came back four days later, on Monday, the twenty-fourth. The next day I told him what I had to tell him. He had to go to Göttingen that day and I had to go to Frankfurt before going on to Paris for two weeks to film a television series about the French Revolution – I played Marie-Antoinette. We were going to take the train together, but instead he took his car. When I came back from Paris he had already moved out, except that in his flat he did not have room for his library so he left it in the house. And he was not in Hamburg. We did not see each other again till November, to start the divorce process. It was… fairly tense between us. But then he was back in January, for more paperwork, and then it was very friendly,” she finished with a smile that told Daniel that the meeting may have been friendly in more than one way.

“Do you remember what I told you about our birthday pact?” she asked him as she took another sip.

“Yes,” he said, remembering that when they were nineteen they had agreed to celebrate only those birthdays whose numbers were a multiple of five.

“Well, in February he was going to be thirty-six, and he had told me that in Jewish folklore the number thirty-six has a mystical meaning, so I asked him if he was going to celebrate this birthday. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘in Montreal.’ Then I remembered that Leon and Fela had always remembered his birthdays, so I said, ‘With Fela?’ and he said, ‘Yes, but there is someone else.’”

“I see,” Daniel said.

“On his birthday I called Fela, thinking that he would be there, but he wasn’t, so I left a message for him. He called me back and said, ‘Thank you, I am having a very happy birthday.’ And then I knew.”

“And after that?” he asked. Brigitte had already told Daniel that she had seen Miki a few times after their breakup, but no specifics.

“He came in May, to finish the divorce, before going to Montreal to marry your mother.” She smiled. “And he always came back to Hamburg, every few months. It was his home. I wasn’t always there, but when I was, it was always friendly.”

The cognac was finished, and it was late. Brigitte stood up, and no more words were said between them except for Daniel’s whispered “Aufwiedersehen, Brigitte,” which she echoed. As it had three and a half years before, her sensual essence filled him and remained with him during the walk to his hotel. He understood why Miki stayed with that amazing woman, faithfully, for all those years.


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