26

 

9 Feb. 92

 

Yesterday I got a call from Miki’s aunt Fela. She almost never calls me. She always sends me a card twice a year, for my birthday and for New Year’s; then I call her to thank her, and we chat for a little while. (She also sends Betty and Daniel birthday cards, each time with a check for ten dollars times their age.) So when I heard “Hello Mireille” in her unmistakable accent, only a month since our last chat, I knew that something was afoot.

Some days earlier she had received a call from a certain Maurice (she said the name in the Polish version) Rozowski. It turned out that his father was a first cousin of Leon (and therefore of Miki’s mother) so that he is Miki’s second cousin. He was born in Poland (he spoke to Fela in Polish) and educated in Argentina, and is now living in Spain. She told him about Daniel and Betty, and expects him to call Daniel.

Two weeks ago I had dinner with Greg and Marcia. Of course we talked about our kids, and I mentioned that while D was in Montréal he had gone out with an old friend from NAA, a girl named Megan Kenner. G and M looked at each other and then at me without saying a word, until Greg opened up. Megan Kenner, he said, was now a porn star named May Green. I remembered what George had told me about her (his cousin in the second degree), that she was sexually precocious, so I wasn’t shocked. I asked Greg if the matter was known in Harvey’s circle and he said he had in fact found out from Harvey. He said that Megan never was a part of Harvey’s circle but she was known as Daniel’s girlfriend around the end of Grade 12. Her movie just came out recently and Harvey gave Daniel a cassette of it.

I asked them if they had seen the movie, and they looked sheepishly at each other before Marcia said that they had. “It’s pretty hot,” she added.

“Then I’d like to see it too,” I said, and that’s when I finally told them about Bob. A good ten or fifteen minutes’ worth of information.

“And he’s kosher too,” Greg said. “Mazel tov, Mireille.”

Marcia asked if they could meet him, and I said that I would check with him, but I couldn’t see why not. So we got together last Friday. Dinner at Bob’s. He had prepared most of the food the night before, and it was fabulous: an enormous array of Middle Eastern appetizers, lamb tagine, rice, several different desserts that G & M appreciated (I haven’t got much of a sweet tooth), and Algerian wine to wash it down with. But Bob was tired, as he often is when he has to travel on business during the week. He was not his usual witty self, at times he even bordered on surly, and his English lacked its normal fluency. This would have been no problem with just Greg, whose French is pretty good, but Marcia’s is not (she is from Toronto). So I don’t know yet, my journal, what kind of impression G & M came away with. I will ask them the next time I speak with either or both of them. Am I anxious? Of course I am. This was the first time that I was with the Bermans and a man whom I openly presented as… well, I said “my friend Bob” but I had already told them about him as the new man in my life.

What Bob told me after G & M had left was that he too was feeling anxious, inquiet as he put it once we reverted to French, after waiting a year and a half to be introduced to my friends (other than Tina). Then I explained my own anxiousness, and we had what he called un échange d’inquiétudes. I didn’t stay long. I am having my period (a little prematurely) and he was tired. I will see him again next Wednesday. It will be all right, my journal.

Family

 

Megan’s reply came about a week into February. She explained her foray into porn quite logically and dispassionately. She had met Dick Somers – it was his real name – at a party. He openly told her that he was a porn actor, and when he discovered how much she liked sex – that shouldn’t be news to you, Daniel, she wrote parenthetically – he asked her if she was interested in joining him in an upcoming project. The pay’s good, he said. And she could think of no reason to say no. In fact, given her specialization in economics, she was looking forward to doing research, and perhaps even writing a thesis, on the economics of porn.

He had not quite finished reading the letter when the telephone rang.

“Is it Daniel Vilner?” a relatively high-pitched Hispanic – possibly South American – voice asked him.

“Yes,” he said.

“I am Mauricio Rozowski.” It sounded more like Rososki, but Daniel had no doubt that the reference was to Fela’s married name, which was the maiden name of his paternal grandmother. “Are you grandson of Daniel Vilner that was married with Sonia Rozowski?”

“Yes.” It occurred to Daniel that he ought to help Mauricio by switching the conversation to Spanish.

“Then we are familiars.” It was obviously an attempt to translate somos familiares.

Si quieres, podemos hablar en español,” Daniel said.

¿Hablas castellano? ¡Estupendo!” The accent was undoubtedly Argentine, what with the singsong and the aspiration of the s sounds, though Mauricio said hablas, with the stress on the first syllable, and not hablás as Argentines would say it to one another.

Mauricio went on to explain that he was calling from Miami, where he was attending a symposium of the Hispano-American Psychiatric Association. He had grown up in Argentina, but was now living and practicing psychiatry in Barcelona. He had been born in Poland.

As Mauricio launched his narration, Daniel’s mind began to not only translate it into English, but reword it in the form of a journalistic account – the way he might write a class paper or perhaps, in the future, a New Yorker article – in which Mauricio’s references to himself and his family members (yo, mi papá, mi mamá, mi hermana) were replaced by the corresponding names.

His father, Oscar (Oskar?) Rozowski, was a first cousin to Leon and Sonia, but had never known them. Oscar was born in Łódź. His father, Motek (originally Mordechai), had become estranged from his family because of his far-left anti-Zionist sympathies – he was a member of the Bund – and moved to Łódź, where he worked in the textile industry and tried to unionize Jewish workers. (“¿Sabes lo que es el Bund?” Mauricio asked. “Sí,” Daniel said; he had heard about the organization from Fela and her friends.)

As an adolescent before the war, Oscar had done his father one better by becoming a Young Communist. During the war he survived the Łódź ghetto and various concentration camps. He was, as far as he knew, the only one of his family to survive the war, which ended when he was nineteen. After the war he enthusiastically returned to Communist Poland, where he studied psychology at the university and married a non-Jewish fellow student, Maria. In 1950 they had a daughter whom they named Anna, and in 1956 a son whom they named Maurycy. But in the 1960s, when the Soviet bloc took the Arab side in the Middle East conflict, anti-Zionism became official policy, and in Poland this quickly reverted to anti-Semitism, directed even at people like Oscar Rozowski who were themselves anti-Zionist and had nothing to do with the Jewish community. Oscar, who was now a professor of psychology, was passed over for the promotions for which his research qualified him. His doctoral students were taken away from him. His foreign travel was restricted. But he had been invited, some years before, to spend a semester lecturing at a university in Argentina; like a typical Polish Jew, he knew many languages, and Spanish was among them. That invitation had already been approved, and to cancel it might have provoked a diplomatic incident with Argentina. Oscar managed to get his wife and son out of the country and they began a new life in Argentina. Anna, who was already eighteen and was about to enter the university, chose to stay in Poland. (“También había un chico del que estaba enamorada,” Mauricio added with a laugh. Daniel wondered why Mauricio – his second cousin once removed, as he calculated it – found it funny that his sister was in love, but didn’t ask.) Maria took repeated trips back to Poland to visit her daughter and, eventually, grandchildren, but Oscar could not bring himself to return to the country that, he felt, had betrayed him.

The twelve-year-old Maurycy quickly became Mauricio, a typical Argentine boy interested in soccer, music and girls. At the university he chose to study medicine, but knew from the beginning that his interest was in psychiatry. And, just as he was beginning his clinical studies, the Dirty War began. (“¿Sabes lo que fue la Guerra Sucia?” he asked Daniel. Yes, Daniel knew about it; he knew about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo – he had heard U2’s Mothers of the Disappeared – and had seen La historia oficial. It occurred to him that he now had a topic for the term paper in the modern Latin American history class that he was taking.)

By virtue of his background – foreign, Jewish and Communist – Oscar Rozowski was an obvious target for persecution by the military dictatorship, but he was too prominent to be targeted directly. And so, eventually, the decision was made to go after his son. One evening the secret military police raided his apartment. He happened to be out, but his girlfriend Lucía was there, and she was arrested. Mauricio, when he heard about the raid, went into hiding and, with the help of friends, managed to get out of Argentina and eventually made his way to Barcelona, where he got a chance to continue with his residency.

Meanwhile it turned out that, unbeknownst to Mauricio, Lucía was carrying his baby. She was sent to a special facility for pregnant women. She was not tortured, but was kept there – with no news of her whereabouts – until her time came, when the baby was taken away from her before she was released. (Shades of La historia official, Daniel thought.)

When democracy was restored Mauricio, now a licensed psychiatrist, came back to Argentina, but could not restore his relationship with Lucía, whether out of her resentment over his abandoning her or his own guilt about it. Maria, moreover, had decided to return to Poland for good. Shortly after her departure Oscar had a heart attack, from which he recovered, but his health was never the same again, and he died a few years later, at the age of sixty-five. Mauricio then moved back to Barcelona, partly in order to be closer to his mother and sister. He now found himself the only surviving Rozowski, until he found out by accident that a woman named Fela Rozowski was living in Montreal. After some inquiries, including a call to Fela, he figured out the family connection: Daniel was his sobrino tercero. From Fela he got Daniel’s telephone number. “Allá estamos, pues,” he concluded.

Daniel thought it interesting that a second cousin once removed was called a third nephew in Spanish, but what he asked Mauricio was if there was any possibility of their getting together. Not at this time, Mauricio replied; he was returning to Spain the next day. Could Daniel visit him during Easter vacation?

Daniel thumbed through the calendar hanging above his desk, and saw that Easter was late that year, a month after spring recess. He explained that his spring vacation would be in the third week of March. “¡Estupendo!” Mauricio said again. “Entonces podremos ir a Valencia a ver las fallas.”

What could Mauricio have meant? Falla, as far as Daniel knew, meant ‘fault’ or ‘defect.’ But why would one go to Valencia to see them? He expected another inquiry as to whether he knew what the word meant, but there was none. Instead, Mauricio, seemingly exhausted by his long narration, proceeded to give Daniel his address – which turned out to be not in Barcelona but in a nearby beach town named Sitges – and telephone number, and after an almost perfunctory Hasta luego he hung up.

Daniel felt perplexed. After sitting in his chair for another minute he got up and got his Collins Spanish-English, English-Spanish Dictionary, second edition, from the bookcase. He learned that another meaning of falla was ‘huge ornate cardboard figure burnt in Valencia at the Fallas.’ Fallas, in turn, meant ‘Valencian celebration of the feast of St Joseph.’ That feast, Daniel knew, was March 19; Canadian Catholics celebrate St. Joseph’s Day as the feast of the patron saint of Canada.

The thought of watching huge ornate cardboard figures burned in Valencia was exciting, But the perplexity remained. It had been a strange phone call. Mauricio never stopped to ask Daniel about himself. Was he, as a practicing psychiatrist, obliged to ask people about themselves as part of his work, and did he feel dispensed of the obligation in a private conversation? Perhaps. Perhaps Fela had already told him some things about Daniel. Not that there was much to tell. He was, in several ways, like Mauricio: son of a Jewish father and a nominally Catholic mother; a sister as the only sibling; fond of music, soccer and girls. But of course he had not lived through the experiences – of exile and persecution – that Mauricio had; the adventure of his life, the many-leveled search for his father, was still in the future.

But what about Miki Wilner? Now there was someone who had lived, no less than his second cousin Oscar Rozowski. And yet Mauricio asked no questions about him either. Had Fela also told him all about Miki? Daniel had to know. He called Fela.

“Daniel! I’m so happy to hear from you. You know, someone just called me yesterday…”

“I know. He just called me. Did you know anything about him?”

“Not about him. But many years ago Leon mentioned an uncle Motek that moved away and lost touch with the family. Or maybe the family cut him off.”

“Like me and my mother’s family,” Daniel said with a laugh. Family estrangement: something else he had in common with Mauricio.

Fela did not respond. “And this Maurycy…” she went on. Daniel was about to correct her as to the name when it occurred to him that Mauricio had probably spoken to her in Polish. But Fela paused anyway.

“Did you tell him much about my father?”

“No, not very much, just that he disappeared in Israel.”

Disappeared! What a word to use with someone who had lived through the Dirty War! But maybe it sounded different in Polish.

“Did you speak with him in Polish?”

“Yes. His English is not very good.”

“I know. I spoke with him in Spanish. He lives in Spain, you know, and I plan to visit him during spring break.”

“When is that?”

“The third week of March.”

“So you won’t be coming to Montreal?” Fela laughed. “That’s when Purim is, so you won’t get my homentashn.”

“Save me some for when I get back,” Daniel said, laughing along with her.

 

It was time to take Claire up on her offer to show him how to book travel with his computer. She seemed surprised to hear from him only three days after their last date, but eagerly agreed to come over. Before they went to bed he had mastered the use of O.A.G., Eaasy Sabre and Travelshopper, and used the last-named to book a round-trip flight to Barcelona on TWA. “I wish I could go with you,” Claire said. He answered her with a kiss.

The next day he found in his mailbox a thick envelope bearing the Jewish Agency return address, with K. Litov handwritten above it. He called her number immediately, but a message told him that she was in Israel and would be back in her office on March 23. That would be just after his return from Barcelona.

 

The landing at Barcelona airport at nine in the morning, after a stop in Madrid and a decent airline breakfast, was smooth. Daniel had sent Mauricio a photograph of himself and, sure enough, as soon he came out of the customs area into the terminal he saw that a smiling brown-haired man, holding hands with a very shapely ash-blond young woman, was walking in his direction while waving his free hand at Daniel. The man was dressed casually in jeans and a dark pullover, but the woman wore a white bolero jacket over a knee-length navy-blue dress and high heels, a surprising getup for a Saturday-morning trip to the airport. Perhaps, Daniel speculated, they had gone out on the town the night before and she had spent the night at his place without bringing a change of clothing. Another sign of that possibility was the ponytail into which her matte, wavy hair was casually, perhaps even hastily, pulled back.

As they came nearer, Daniel saw that the man looked to be in his mid-thirties, as Mauricio was, but the woman was considerably younger, more like someone that he would call a girl – probably not much older than Daniel. She was quite pretty, with a tawny complexion betraying a not-quite-faded suntan and an oval face that reminded him of Greta Scacchi, though without Greta Scacchi’s sculptured movie-star features. But he thought that if he were to tell his friends in New York that his cousin in Barcelona has a girlfriend who looks like Greta Scacchi, he would not be too far off.

Hola Daniel,” Mauricio said and opened his arms. Daniel let go of his bag and the cousins embraced. After two seconds Mauricio stepped back and, pointing at the girl, said, “te presento a mi amiga Victoria.” From the handholding, Daniel would have guessed that she would be a novia or compañera, not a mere amiga.

“You can call me Vicky,” the girl said in a pure RP accent. She reached both hands out to him, and when he took them she bent over to kiss him on both cheeks. He reciprocated, and the sensation reminded him of his meeting with Brigitte.

Es medio inglesa,” Mauricio remarked.

“Half English, half Spanish, but all Catalan,” Vicky said. And, addressing Mauricio, she repeated herself in Catalan: “Mig anglesa, mig espanyola, però tota catalana.” Then, turning once again to Daniel, she said, “he doesn’t speak Catalan, and refuses to learn it.”

“Why I need it?” Mauricio said, picking up Daniel’s bag. “Everybody espeak Espanish.”

Daniel took his bag from Mauricio, pulled out its handle and began to roll it as the three of them began to walk out of the terminal toward the parking lot, with Daniel following Mauricio and Vicky. This time they did not hold hands.

After some bilingual banter – trilingual if one included Vicky’s occasional Catalan asides to Mauricio, seemingly half-malicious in intent as if to point out his ignorance of the language – they reached Mauricio’s car. Daniel put his bag in the trunk and seated himself on the driver’s side in the backseat. To his surprise, Vicky joined him in the back.

As they drove out of the airport, passing through what seemed to be an industrial park, Mauricio turned in the direction opposite to Barcelona. They were evidently taking the road to Sitges. The industrial park was now on the left, while on the right there were lush fields of artichokes and strawberries, ready for picking.

“Do you also live in Sitges?” Daniel asked Vicky.

“I do weekends, yes,” she answered. “My mum and dad live there, and I live with them, and my younger brothers. During the week, when I’m at university, I live in Barcelona.” She paused. “My mum and dad, by the way, own the hotel where you’ll be staying,” she added with a laugh. “I hope you like it.”

“What are you studying?” Daniel asked.

“Linguistics,” she said.

Cuéntale tu otra carrera,” Mauricio said.

“What other career?” Daniel asked.

Vicky laughed. “Carrera means not just a career but a program of studies. And I got a certificate in tourism. It’s a two-year program, but I did it in one because I already knew the languages.”

Es muy buena guía turística,” Mauricio said with a laugh,

“Which languages?” Daniel asked Vicky

“English, French and German. My French is pretty good, and I had enough German to pass the exam.”

“Really? German is my major, with a history minor.” He wasn’t sure if Vicky was familiar with the North American concepts of major and minor, but she did not stop to inquire, so he went on. “Et j’suis Canadien français, tu sais.

C’est vrai? Sans blague! But you speak English like an Anglo-American!”

“Well, I’m bilingual, like you. Or I should say trilingual, in your case.”

“That’s right. Catalan really was my first language. My mum’s from Valencia, but she was brought up speaking Spanish. When she moved to Barcelona, she took a class in Catalan, and that’s where she met my English dad, who was a journalist doing a report on Orwell – you know, Homage to Catalonia and all that. It was during the last years of Franco, and by then Catalan classes were allowed, as long as they were private. And so my parents have always spoken Catalan with each other and with us kids.”

“Your dad’s a journalist?”

“Was.”

“That’s what I want to be. By the way,” he went on, “are you on vacation this week?”

“No, of course not; our spring holiday is always during Holy Week. But if you’re wondering if I’ll be going to the Fallas, of course I am. I wouldn’t miss them for the world. My uncle Alberto, my mum’s brother, always goes away at this time – he can’t stand the noise – so we can stay at his flat.”

The road was now bordered by fields on both sides, but soon reached what seemed to be a beach resort; it was lined with hotels, mostly on the seaward side, Daniel’s left, where gazing through the side streets he could see the sea a few blocks away. Was this Sitges? Probably not; Mauricio gave no sign of slowing down.

In fact they passed through the town. To the right, in the background, were scrub-covered hills with a few scattered houses. Vicky was now facing forward, and in profile she was even more reminiscent of Greta Scacchi. Her jacket was open, and her breasts, while not large, jutted out proudly under the tightness of her scoop-necked dress. What a lovely girl, he thought. He wondered if Mauricio, by dating someone so much younger, was exhibiting the beginnings of Trudeau syndrome. But he quickly remembered that Miki Wilner and Mireille Bouchard, when they made him, were almost exactly the same ages as Mauricio and Vicky.

They next passed through a large beach town whose name, as he could tell from the signs, was Castelldefels, and then a village with a beach and a fishing port. Now the road ran directly beside some cliffs going down to the sea, shimmering in the hazy sunshine. It then came to yet another village with a beach and nondescript houses except for a remarkable structure standing beside the road. It was built of gray stone, probably granite, and would have looked like a small Medieval castle were it not for the quirky modern architecture, with asymmetric gables and arches, a wrought-iron gate looking like a fishing net, odd-shaped battlements and turrets built like multi-leveled bird’s nests.

¿Qué edificio es éste?” he asked, addressing Mauricio, who had not participated much in the conversation.

Es de Gaudí,” Mauricio answered. “Las bodegas Güell.”

¿Bodegas?” Daniel asked, thinking of the New York meaning of bodega, a neighborhood grocery store of the kind that in Quebec is called dépanneur, even by anglophones.

“It’s a winery,” Vicky explained, “or rather it was. Have you heard of Gaudí?”

“Vaguely,” Daniel said.

As the road began to wind along the hillsides overlooking the sea, Vicky lived up the reputation of good tour guide that Mauricio had proclaimed for her. By turn humorous and serious, she told Daniel about the life and works of the architect Antoni Gaudí. About the Güell family who had been his patrons and whose wealth came from the slave trade. About the artistic movement called modernisme that, strangely enough, was called Art nouveau in English and Modern style in French. About the buildings by Gaudí and other modernista masters that she would show him when they would be in Barcelona, Monday and Tuesday.

Every so often a train could be seen running on the tracks that stretched below the road. “That’s the train that we’ll take to go to Barcelona,” she said.

The road began to crisscross over the tracks and soon entered an urban zone. “Estamos en Sitges,” Mauricio announced. Vicky’s commentary now smoothly switched from Barcelona to Sitges – its history, its monuments, the brackishness of its tap water and its status as a gay resort. This was something that Daniel already knew: when he mentioned to Roger Lehmann that he would be visiting a relative who lives in Sitges, Roger commented, “I don’t know about the people who live there, but in the summer it’s full of guys like me.”

After a turn on a roundabout and several more turns on one-way streets, the sea came into view once again. On a palm-lined street with buildings on one side – some weathered and some freshly painted – facing a small beach, Mauricio stopped in front of one of the freshly painted ones, in a warm yellow. The sign read Hotel Marisol. “Here we are,” Vicky said.

A dark-haired, sturdy-looking middle-aged man came out and opened the rear passenger door, letting Vicky jump out and give him a kiss on the cheek. “Hola, papá,” she said. The man reached into the car to shake Daniel’s hand. “Hello, I’m John Renshaw,” he said; his accent was more regional – Midlands, perhaps – than Vicky’s RP. Daniel got out through the right door, and Vicky went around the front to the driver’s window to give Mauricio – who released the trunk latch with the remote control – a perfunctory kiss. John Renshaw got Daniel’s suitcase and placed in on the sidewalk, and once Vicky and Daniel were there as well, Mauricio drove off. “He’s just going back to his place and will join us later for lunch,” Vicky explained while her father shouted, “Marisol, ja han arribat!” as he wheeled the suitcase inside.

Vicky noticed Daniel’s bemusement over the identity of the hotel’s name and that of the person John Renshaw was calling. “My mum is called Marisol,” she said. “They spent their first weekend as lovers here, because of the name. Years later, long after they were married and I was born – in that order, but just barely – they were getting tired of their professions – my mum was a dance teacher – and when they found out the place was for sale, they bought it and became hotelkeepers. My brothers were born here.”

“How old are they?”

“Twelve and ten. David and Oscar. My parents picked names for us that would work in English or Spanish or Catalan – Victoria, David and Oscar.”

“Oscar – that was Mauricio’s father’s name.”

“Really? He never told me.” Well, Daniel thought, there was no particular reason why he should have told her. It was different with him, of course: Oscar was the first cousin of Daniel’s maternal grandmother.

“How long have you known him?”

“About a month. We met when he came to the hotel to book a room for you. We started talking about organizing your visit, and got to like each other.” She laughed. “That’s your room up there,” she said as she pointed to a window on the floor below the highest one, “right under mine. Our flat’s up there on the top floor.”

Daniel suddenly became aware of being extremely tired. He had catnapped intermittently during the flight, but the effect of the breakfast coffee had now worn off. “I think I’d like to get up there and rest a little, maybe even sleep, and then shower,” he said to Vicky as they entered the small lobby. A pretty, somewhat plump blond woman (who might, when she was young, have had a dancer’s body) sat behind the desk, speaking in Spanish on the telephone. “Hola, mamá,” Vicky said to her. So she got her blond hair from the Spanish side, Daniel thought, not the English. Marisol waved at him and handed his room key to Vicky, who in turn gave it to him. He noticed that his bag stood beside the elevator door. “You can take the lift up to your room,” she said. “I’ll take the stairs. Ciao!” He would gladly have taken the stairs with her – his bag wasn’t very heavy – but he really did feel exhausted. “Ciao!” he said.


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