31   14 July 1992   What a fortuitous date for a postcard to arrive from Paris! This one, depicting Notre Dame (of gleaming white stone, greatly cleaned up since the last time I saw it in 86), was in an envelope and D’s message, in French, covered the entire back. Also in the envelope was a smaller envelope that contained a lovely birthday card for me. The message is that he had a wonderful time with Vicky, in Spain and for the last couple of days in Paris. He made a full list of the places that he visited in Paris. He is just about to leave for Israel with group of French kids of his age who are very nice. Ils sont tous très sympa. I am hoping that he will have a good time regardless of what he manages (or does not manage) to discover about Miki. Daniel of course does not know that I will be in Paris next week, for a few days. Bob organized our vacation just a few days ago. We will go to Marseille, where his parents now live since his father retired from BNC last year. From there we will go for a week to Corsica, where we will celebrate our second anniversary as lovers at a beach resort that Bob calls very romantic. I am guessing that he has been there before in romantic circumstances. Perhaps he will tell me, perhaps not. He has warned me that what I know of Judaic culture from my Jewish friends and acquaintances in Montréal will not help me much with his maternal family, because the people I know are all anglophone Ashkenazis who have little in common with francophone North African Sephardis. Of these there are actually quite a few in Montréal, mostly from Morocco, but they don’t mingle much with the others. What’s more, Algerian Jews look down on Moroccan ones, so that his mother did not make friends among them. Her social contacts were instead with non-Jewish francophones, but she always missed her people back in Marseille and got Bob’s father to agree that they would move there when he retired. Bob is an only child, by the way. So was Jean-Marc. And why did J-M pop into my mind just now? You aren’t supposed to do this to me, my journal. Of course I am not blaming you. The obvious connection is that Bob is my first French Canadian lover since Jean-Marc. But that is strange, isn’t it? That in a decade and a half of living in Montréal after Miki, I have been “seriously” involved only with anglo men? I have certainly had my share of attention from francophone men. Could my lack of interest have been an unwillingness to repeat the J-M experience? What is even stranger, my journal, is that I am only now thinking about this, now that I have half forgotten the details of my time with J-M. I couldn’t even tell you precisely what it was about that experience that has made me reject men who are my fellow French Canadians. Until Bob, that is. And Bob is different. His Jewish side, as different as it is from Miki’s, still connects me with Miki. Miki even knew the North African Jewish culture. He once took me to a Moroccan restaurant and told me that one of his friends when he lived in Israel was a Moroccan boy named Marcel with whom he tried to speak French, but Marcel insisted on speaking Hebrew. I wonder what kind of people Daniel will meet in Israel. I am looking forward to his next card. Good night, my journal. Holy Land   It could not have been much more than a minute after Sabine left his (and André’s) room that there was a knock on his door. Whoever it was must have been waiting, like a spy or a detective. “Entrez!” he said as he buckled his belt, his mind still in French mode. The door opened and a woman appeared in the doorway. She looked about Mireille’s age, with a trim but bosomy body, a pretty face and large hoop earrings. He knew immediately who she was. “Daniel Wilner?” she asked, surprising him by pronouncing the W as in English. “Yes.” “I am Ora Harzahav…” “You are my sister,” he said with a laugh. She returned his laugh. “So you know about me,” she said. “I have a picture of you. Let me show you.” He went to his shelf to retrieve the photo. “Sit down,” he added. “Thank you,” she said as she sat in the only chair in the room. He showed her the picture and saw amazement come over her face. “That was me in nineteen hundred and seventy! Your father took this photo?” “Yes. In Blankenese.” “I feel so ashamed now, after all these years,” she began, but did not go on, as if she were not sure of what she was ashamed of. “How did you know I was here?” “I still have connections,” she said with an enigmatic smile. “I mean… I know people.” “Karen Litov, for example?” he asked. She said nothing, keeping her smile. “I guessed that she is in the Mossad.” “Mossad, Shmossad,” Ora said. “It doesn’t mean anything. We are a small country, and people know people, that’s all.” “But you definitely were in the Mossad in nineteen-seventy, weren’t you?” “In the Mossad? Not exactly. Maybe I worked for the Mossad, in a way. I was doing my military service, and because I knew English pretty well I was assigned to work as a secretary for Tzvi Kaplan. So really I worked for Tzvi. He was my boss, and I did what he told me. He wanted to go to bed with me, and I said okay, but he couldn’t do it. Then he asked me if I wanted to do a different job for him, and it seemed like fun, so I said okay. He also asked me if I would go to bed with men if it was necessary for my work, and I said okay. I was young,” she concluded with a laugh. “I said okay to everything!” He waited for her to go on, and she did. “The business with Miki Wilner, your father” – this time she said Vilner – “Tzvi made it into a matter of national security. He said that Miki was a threat to Israel and had to be eliminated. Not killed, because that would make him a martyr, but made to be a criminal. I believed him, and I found out only later the whole thing was Tzvi’s personal revenge against Miki, because of Nili Rosen. You know about her?” “Not only about her, but I know her, and her daughter Ora. It was a coincidence: Ora was my biology teacher at the university.” Ora Harzahav now laughed unrestrainedly. “You know that Ora! The one that I pretended to be! Except that she is much younger than me, and I had to make up a story that I was Miki’s daughter, so that in nineteen-seventy I was supposed to be seventeen, but I was really twenty. Tzvi at first had the idea that I would go to bed with Miki and then tell him that I am his daughter, but I knew that it was not going to work with a man who was married to Brigitte Wilner.” She paused before continuing. “There was also the mishmash with the Bulgarian Petrov. I went to bed with him to get him to cooperate, and we sent him to Germany to kill the Nazi Hemme, but it was the wrong Hemme. And then Tzvi had his accident and that’s when I found out that the whole operation was not official, only a personal thing for him.” “Accident?” “Yes, he drowned in the fishpond at the kibbutz where he worked. Some people thought it might be suicide, like his sister Ruth.” Daniel toyed with telling her the truth, but dismissed the idea. Something more pressing was on his mind. “Let me get this straight,” he said instead. “There was no official Mossad operation against my father? He was not considered an enemy of Israel?” “No, of course not. He wrote a book that was critical of Israel, but we are a democracy. Many of our own people are critical of Israel, and we don’t persecute them. We are not like our neighbors.” She chuckled. “When he came here to cover the Yom Kippur War the Defense Ministry offered to give him a military escort, but he refused, and went to the Golan on his own. I am sorry about what happened.” Thoughts were whirring in Daniel’s mind. “All I know about what happened then is what Brigitte told me about my father. He was convinced that the Israeli government was out to get him, and he probably didn’t trust the offer of an escort.” “That’s too bad. Really sad.” She paused before changing the subject. “So you know Nili? Have you visited her since you’ve been in Israel?” “No. I found out that she moved to Cyprus. That’s where I first saw her, by the way, and I met her Greek boyfriend Stavros, who is now her husband. They are both lawyers, by the way.” “Probably specializing in marriage and divorce for Israelis!” Ora laughed. “Believe me, I know about it.” The door opened without a knock. It was André. “Oh, pardon,” he said when he saw Ora. “Slikhah,” he added. André had already known a little Hebrew before the trip, and for the twelve days that they had been in Israel he had been practicing it assiduously. “Ein davar,” Daniel said. He too had managed to learn some Hebrew in the language workshop that they had been attending since arriving in Jerusalem. Ora laughed. “I must go now,” she said. “But when your Hebrew gets better come see me in the theater, the Kameri, in Tel Aviv.” “Oh, you’re an actress?” Daniel said. “Yes. When I pretended to be the other Ora I enjoyed it so much that when I got out of the IDF I went to acting school. Good-by now!” “L’hitraot,” Daniel said, and André echoed him. After she left, without waiting for André to question him, Daniel told him the gist of the story that led up to her visit. “Mais c'est formidable comme histoire,” said André, who was studying for a Licence Cinéma at the Sorbonne (Université de Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, to be precise). He thought that he would like to use it, at some time, as the basis for a film script, with Daniel’s permission of course. Since Le dernier métro, Shoah and Au revoir les enfants had come out in the previous decade, films with Jewish themes were all the rage in France.   His mission, Daniel felt, was accomplished. He knew as much as there was to be known about his father’s last few years. There were no longer any grounds for suspicion of foul play on the part of the Israel Defense Forces with respect to Miki Wilner, and therefore no reason to suspect that the body that was shipped to Montreal was not Miki’s. Since these suspicions had been the main motivation for his journey, there was no particular reason to go on with it. He could, if he wanted to, quit the group and spend the rest of the summer in Spain with Vicky. And yet he didn’t want to. Israel was beginning to grow on him. The challenge of learning Hebrew was enjoyable. The archaeological visits in and around Jerusalem were fascinating, and there were more to come, all over the country as well as in the now Egyptian Sinai. The variety of the human fauna to be found in the Old City was bewildering. It also didn’t hurt that André Halphen was a pleasant roommate, and that Sabine Kloizman, the pudgy little blonde from Bordeaux, who had become his occasional companion for the duration of the trip, was fun to be with, in bed and out of it. She spoke French without verlan but with lots of puns; she called herself une Bordelaise moëlleuse comme la sauce, riffing on her softness and on the marrow (moëlle) that goes into bordelaise sauce. André, moreover, was already involved with Sabine’s roommate Olga (whom he knew from the university), and so a modicum of privacy could be achieved, if not frequently. As had happened in New York between March and June, he found himself not thinking about Vicky as much as he thought that he should. Then there was the matter of the DNA analysis of his father’s body. It was now unwarranted. But the legal and biochemical machinery had been set in motion. He had signed his permission for disinterment and testing, he had sent in his mother’s and sister’s hair samples, and he had paid in advance Will Prosper’s fee, which included the costs of the disinterment, reinterment and analysis. It would seem silly now to stop it. In fact, if Will had managed to get – as he had been close to getting – the court to order the disinterment permit, then the tests might already have been done. He had an appointment with the lawyer on the last Friday in August, the day after his return to Montreal. On the group’s return to Jerusalem after touring Galilee – including Nazareth and Tiberias – as well as Haifa and Acre, plans for the following week’s tour of the south were discussed. Daniel asked Gabi privately if there was a possibility of visiting Kibbutz Refadim. Gabi seemed surprised by the question, Why Refadim, he asked. Daniel explained that his father had been there as a teenager. Gabi reflected for a moment and said, “C’est toi le fils de Miki Wilner!” Now it was Daniel’s turn to be surprised that the twenty-nine-year old Gabi knew about his father. It turned out that Gabi’s father, Marcel or Moshe, had been there at the same time, and Miki, who later became the famously controversial writer Michael Wilner (Mikhaël Vilner, Gabi said), had been one of his very few friends. Marcel, as a Moroccan, never felt comfortable in Refadim and left when Miki did, moving to a moshav with a largely North African population. It was where Gabi was born. It was yet another link in the remarkable chain of chance meetings with Israelis that Daniel had experienced over the past three years, starting with Ora Rozen. He hoped that this was the last. His quest was over. Gabi telephoned Kibbutz Refadim, and told Daniel that they were not welcome to visit.   The magic’s gone, he thought when he saw Vicky, looking just as pretty as he had remembered her, waiting for him at the Luxembourg station. All the magic’s gone, he heard in his head the voice of Mariah Carey, lately ubiquitous alongside that of the newly anglophone Céline Dion. There’s just a shadow of a memory / Something just went wrong… Had anything had gone wrong? No, not really. Might the magic still be there if the taste of Sabine’s quick good-bye kiss had not lingered on his lips? While he sat next to Sabine throughout the five-hour flight, he hardly thought of Vicky; that would be normal. Once they had passed customs and Sabine ran off through the Möbius maze of Roissy to catch her flight to Bordeaux, Vicky came back into his mind, but without the excitement that he had expected. After checking the timetable of the RER train, he called Vicky at their hotel, where she had been since morning. He wondered what effect her voice would have, but she was not in their room – she was probably having lunch – so he left the clerk a message with the arrival time of his train. He now expected the exhilaration to build up in the course of the forty-minute train ride, and when it did not do so, he thought that seeing her would create it, but it didn’t happen. He had to admit to himself that he was no longer in love with her. Had he ever been, he now wondered. How does one know? He knew that had experienced a feeling, or a combination of feelings, that he identified with being in love, and now that feeling, or combination of feelings, was no longer there. Was he a mutant after all? He could not deny the time he spent with Vicky in June and July was the most fun he had ever had in his life. But was it Vicky’s doing? While she was busy with finals, he went to Majorca, where he managed to spend a couple of days with Brigitte in a spectacular seaside villa. But life in Catalonia, once he was back there, was like a nonstop party. Barcelona, that year, was reeling with pre-Olympic giddiness. In Sitges the nominally religious feasts of Corpus Christi, Saint John and Saint Peter were occasions for floral displays, fireworks, fire runs with people dressed up as giants and dragons, not to mention lots of music, dancing and drinking, interspersed with processions and outdoor masses that themselves were more spectacle than ceremony. Tarragona hosted the recently inaugurated International Fireworks Displays Competition. It was like the Fallas all over again. Feuertrunken. Drunk with fire, he had entered the temple of joy. Wir betreten feuertrunken, Himmlische, dein Heligtum. And Vicky? Wer ein holdes Weib errungen, mische seinen Jubel ein! Yes, winning a lovely woman added to his jubilation. But was that the same as being in love? Their greeting was affectionate, even sensual. But, as they walked to the hotel, she told him, “If camellias were in season, I should be wearing a red one.” “Meaning?” he asked, half guessing the explanation that she gave him: “I’m having my period.” Of course! He had seen the spine of La Dame aux camélias on his mother’s bookshelf, and he would have read it if he had gone to a francophone secondary school, but by the time he was interested in grownup literature he was avoiding French. He had some catching-up to do. Vicky’s remark gave him a sense of relief. He had spent the last night in Israel with Sabine, while André slept with Olga, and felt tired. Vicky sensed his state and suggested that he take a nap. He agreed. He slept for twenty minutes while Vicky read the Ian Rankin novel that she was absorbed in, and felt refreshed. They had agreed beforehand that on this day they would visit the Cluny Museum, which they had missed during their first Paris stay. They spent most of the afternoon there. The next morning they said good-bye, with no promises of seeing each other again. Daniel took the RER train to the airport. Vicky accompanied him to Châtelet, where she took the metro to Gare de Lyon. She had decided that she would rather take a daytime train – via Lyon and Montpellier – to Perpignan, spend the night there and go back to Sitges the next day. Their last kiss led Daniel to fantasize about a romp with Megan once he was in Montreal.