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 Ds 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 dont mingle much with the others. Whats 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 Bobs
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 arent 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, isnt 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 couldnt 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 Mikis, 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 Andrés) 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
Mireilles 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 doesnt mean anything. We are a small country, and
people know people, thats all.
But
you definitely were in the Mossad in nineteen-seventy, werent 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 couldnt 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 Tzvis 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 Mikis 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 thats 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 dont
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 Daniels 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 didnt trust the offer of an escort.
Thats
too bad. Really sad. She paused before changing the subject. So you know
Nili? Have you visited her since youve been in Israel?
No.
I found out that she moved to Cyprus. Thats 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,
youre 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!
Lhitraot,
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 Daniels 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 fathers 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 Mikis. 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 didnt 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 didnt 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 Sabines
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 fathers 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
mothers and sisters hair samples, and he had paid in advance Will Prospers
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 groups return to Jerusalem after touring Galilee including Nazareth and
Tiberias as well as Haifa and Acre, plans for the following weeks 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, Cest toi le fils de Miki
Wilner! Now it was Daniels turn to be surprised that the twenty-nine-year
old Gabi knew about his father. It turned out that Gabis 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 magics 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 magics gone, he heard in his head the voice of Mariah
Carey, lately ubiquitous alongside that of the newly anglophone Céline Dion.
Theres 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 Sabines 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 didnt
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 Vickys 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: Im
having my period. Of course! He had seen the spine of La Dame aux camélias
on his mothers 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.
Vickys
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.
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