Wolf

In Friday's post, I wrote about the value of a friendship. Today I write about the death of one.

I first met him on the ferry from Cyprus to Piraeus, 18 years ago. A man about my age, perhaps a few years older, he was waiting for the dining room doors to open. Holding an English-language book, he evidently planned to read it while dining alone. I was at the beginning of a journey around the world by surface transportation, having boarded the ferry in Haifa the day before. Traveling by myself, I struck up a conversation with him. He told me he was leaving Cyprus, where he had lived for the past few years, and was on his way to Switzerland, planning to stop in Milan to visit his son and daughter in law. By the time the doors had opened, I had asked him if I might join him for dinner and he agreed.

Two days later, he invited me to accompany him on his drive from Piraeus to the west coast of Greece, where we would take a ferry to Italy, and then northwards to Milan, where I would board a train to Paris and he would continue on to Switzerland. (The ferry was carrying his car.) I had already purchased a non-refundable Eurailpass, but I was happy to throw it away. It would be entertaining, I thought, to travel with Wolf, as I shall call him.

Wolf had retired a few years before as chief of the European branch of a multinational company. His mother tongue was German, but he was also completely at home in French and English. In addition, he could get along quite well in Italian. A master raconteur, he entertained me throughtout our ten days together with stories about his childhood, his ex-wives (two), his children (six), his work - indeed his whole history. His steady stream of narratives, anecdotes, and jokes and his explanations of what we were seeing along the way, would have been sufficient to make me glad of his company, but he also introduced me to the glories of Italian cookery. He ordered some of the best meals I've ever eaten, making me wonder why I had spent so many vacations on an Aegean island, when I could have been eating in Italy.

His savoir faire, story-telling, and general good humor captivated me to the extent that when we were in Florence, I chose to sit with him in a cafe - Campari and soda at 11:00 in the morning - rather than to visit the Cathedral or the Uffizi. This was criminal, perhaps, for I had never before been to Italy and might never return, but Wolf provided, in himself, a cultural experience. I was sad when we finally parted in Milan, and I wondered if I'd ever see him again.

But we kept in touch via e-mail, and I did see him again, several times in fact, twice in Israel and again in the Sinai. Soon after our last meeting, he moved back to Cyprus, where he remarried, happily it seemed, and I was hoping to travel there with my wife to see him again and to meet his new wife. But then he began to write fevered essays lambasting not only Israel but also the United States for its support of Israel. He sent these screeds to everyone on his mailing list and he also forwarded articles written by others that expressed similar sentiments. Israel is by no means innocent of faults, but I wondered why he concentrated on that small country to the exclusion of all others. He had nothing to say about Kurdish desires for autonomy, for example, or Chinese oppression of Tibet, among the many targets he could have chosen for his wrathful indignation. I would respond with reasoned arguments, hoping to moderate his views, but my eloquence, such as it was, did not change his mind in the slightest. If anything, his essays become even more violent and extreme.

After he wrote me asking how I could bear to be a citizen of two such retrograde and oppressive regimes, I asked him what he wanted me to do - burn both my passports in a public square? That was our last exchange. He never responded to my exasperated question, and I never wrote to him again.

These days, when a friendship ends, the cause is death. In Wolf's case, it was the death of my view of him that ended our friendship. I wondered how I could have so misjudged him, so misplaced my admiration. My sadness at the transformation of this sophisticated cosmopolite into a ranting ideologue was almost as great as the grief I feel when a friend dies. A friendship creates its own world. When a friendship dies, a world dies with it.