Judenstaat (10 page)

The statement had no answer. Judit was suddenly aware of how she looked to Mrs. Cohen: the cotton trousers from college, the sweater that had belonged to Hans, the duffle coat that had belonged to Hans. She looked deliberately vagrant, homeless. How long had it been since she'd just sat down and made herself something nice on her sewing machine? It was as though she wasn't worth the trouble.

She walked up to her room and switched on the light. That evening, it felt too small. She sat and laid the agent's card on the middle of her desk.

J
OSEPH
B
ONDI

L
IEUTENANT
C
OLONEL

C
ENTRAL
O
RGANIZATION FOR THE
P
ROTECTION OF
S
ECRECY

M
INISTRY OF
S
TATE
S
ECURITY

AR
TUR 5-3112

And on that card, the sword crossed behind the shield with its blue stripes and yellow star.

On the right-hand corner of the desk, beside her pencils and her sharpener, were a stack of those cards from the past three and a half years, the ones she had accumulated as a way to mark that time had passed at all. They were the physical evidence that she was three and a half years older, three and a half years alone. Her hand on the desk looked alien to her, with its short nails, skin hardened with the cold, the wedding ring.

She picked up a card and turned it over. On its back, in Yiddish:

I love you.

Judit flipped the card back over and laid her hand on top of it. She sat there for a while. Her first thought flew by too quickly to name. Then: it's an agent's trick. Then she thought: Yiddish, in Hebrew characters, how did he learn to do that?

Finally, and fully, it was clear: he was somebody else. It was all too confusing. She could never call him now.

 

T
HE
B
ATTLE
OF
THE
L
ANGUAGES

 

1

EVERYONE
understood spoken Yiddish. Reading and writing were another story. Aside from black-hats and a few scholars like Judit, young people couldn't do much more than slowly sound out the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The assumption was that Yiddish would die a natural death, and by the time Judit was old enough to go to school, that seemed to be the case.

Back in those days, Leonora used to pick up a Yiddish magazine called
The Book Peddler
that published fiction and poetry, but when the corner store stopped carrying it, she didn't complain. “It was nonsense—fairytales about goblins and loose women, rabbis making deals with the devil. Better we should forget those stories.” A scholarly periodical called
Studies in the Mother Tongue
hung on until the mid-'60s, when it got into trouble for a piece attributed to no single author: “
A Stylistic Analysis of the Manifesto of Stephen Weiss.
”

The article contained no more than a few passages from the manifesto, the same ones that the prosecution read into the transcript of Weiss's trial-in-absentia. In a public statement, the editors insisted, “We quote the passages for one reason alone, to analyze their Yiddish, the syntax, the absence of Hebraisms, the choice of Slavic rather than Germanic synonyms, and most of all the impossibility of accurate translation into any language other than Yiddish.”

Maybe that's when it began: the rumors. Had the magazine taken it upon itself to translate the entire manifesto into French, German, and English just to prove that it couldn't be done? Was the full document still in circulation? It got around that if you held
Studies in the Mother Tongue
to a pane of glass, you'd see the whole of the manifesto written in flowing Yiddish script. Copies disappeared from public libraries, maybe taken by the authorities or maybe taken by someone else and duplicated.

And some say Weiss himself had never died in exile. No, a dummy had been sent to the morgue in Buenos Aires, or one of his notorious apprentices was buried in his place after allowing his face to be reconstructed by a plastic surgeon. Or Weiss had died but not before he had arranged for his successors to disseminate his manifesto and carry on his treachery worldwide. Under the guise of so-called neutrality, they would sell Judenstaat to the highest bidder, sabotage the Protective Rampart, and put the country in German hands again.

Judit's father Rudolph would say of Weiss, “He should have found a different line of work.” Then he would smile in his abstracted way. Nobody else's father talked like that. Leonora said, “You'll scare the girl.” But Judit wasn't scared. She was disgusted.

There was no story too wild in 1967. Maybe it was because of stirring in the east, across the Polish and Czechoslovak borders. Judit was a young girl then, impatient and judgmental. She sang the Bundist songs and knew the story of her country. She thought her ideological education was long over. The chaos forming around her seemed absurd, and she had every reason to believe she could wear her certainty like a magic cloak and stride forward in good Bundist fashion. How would she know that in six years, she would meet Hans, and nothing would make sense again?

 

2

AFTER
she'd introduced Hans to her mother, Judit had looked forward to giving him a tour of Dresden. She'd dragged him all over town, to her old school, to the site of martyred Elsa Neuman's house on Budapester Street, to the neighborhood community center where the Bundist Youth Group met, a former church with fabulous acoustics for their concerts. They took the little steam-train that ran through the park, and Hans managed to stifle his amusement as a grim little boy in a uniform and visor told them that their tickets were invalid and they'd have to get off at the zoo. Then they visited the Hygiene Museum, and she showed him the drawers full of foreign objects children swallowed.

“And there's a slice of a person under glass, a real slice, head to toe, so you can see everything, the brain, the bones, the bowels, the organ systems,” Judit said. “But it's not here. It must be closed for renovations.”

Hans said, “What are they renovating? I hope they don't want volunteers.”

“I used to dare myself to look at it,” Judit said. She blushed without knowing why. She couldn't explain why it felt so important for Hans to see everything, and for her to look at those places through his eyes.

Finally, she led him to the site of the Great Synagogue, that lush green rectangle not far from Parliament, and she said, “This is our monument. This is our prayer-house.”

Hans gave her a strange look. “I know this place.”

“I should hope so,” Judit said pedantically. “Fascists burned it down in '38. But the fire returned.” Then she felt foolish. “So when you were at the orphanage, they talked about it?”

“Sometimes,” Hans said. “They said it was a graveyard.”

“Who said?”

“I can't remember,” Hans replied. “Lamb, let's move on.”

Of course, Hans insisted that they go to a concert at the Opera House. He had made an extravagant gesture: two box seats for a program of Liszt and Schumann with Vladimir Ashkenazy, a guest conductor. He'd bought the tickets well in advance, and took along a copy of Schumann's First Symphony so he could follow along as they played. He was too tall for that little box, and he folded himself in half and propped the score on his knees, making notations with a pencil.

Judit felt visible and vulnerable. She knew she ought to be enjoying the performance, but the box creaked every time Hans moved, and she was afraid they'd fall into the orchestra. She was relieved when intermission came and Hans whispered, “We don't have to stay for the Liszt. I really wanted to know how Ashkenazy would handle ‘Spring.'”

“So how did he handle ‘Spring'?” Judit asked when they were safely outside once again, walking across Mendelssohn Bridge with their arms around each other. The train for Leipzig left at ten, and of course, they had to be on it. They couldn't very well stay with Judit's mother.

Hans said, “He's just finding his way as a conductor. You can tell. But it's moving to see him up there. He knows Schumann inside and out. He's a master pianist, and in ten years, he'll be a master conductor.”

“And will it take you that long?”

“Probably,” said Hans. Then he whistled something that Judit didn't recognize, and he had to tell her that it was the theme of what they had just heard. He said, “You know, he wrote that right after he finally married Clara. Over her father's objections. Clara's father was very protective of her. She was a virtuoso pianist and a pretty good composer too. They lived in Leipzig when Schumann wrote his best work. Their house is a museum now. I'll take you there.”

When Hans talked about music, he walked quickly, and Judit had to trot to keep up with him. They should probably catch the trolley to the station, but the night air was gentle and seductive. Maybe they could just sleep on a park bench in each other's arms. Judit liked the idea just enough to thread her fingers through Hans's hand and slow him down a little. She asked, “Why don't you write music?”

Hans said, “Me? I'm not built for it.”

“But you know so much and hear so much, I know you could compose.”

“Why are you so set on my being a composer?” Hans asked, and he laughed and pulled Judit down on a bench by the bridge. He opened the score. “Look at all this. You realize what it takes? All those notes, and Robert Schumann had to choose between them.”

“You know I can't read a thing,” said Judit.

“Come on. You read the Hebrew alphabet. Music's not so hard. But that's beside the point,” Hans said. “I want everything—all the notes and what's underneath the notes, their history, who's played them, how well or badly—”

“But we all choose,” Judit said. She had turned serious. It was unbearably wonderful that she could have this kind of conversation in her hometown, and with a man she'd share a bed with that night. That didn't make her any less determined to press her point. “I mean, when I curate an exhibit like the one on Leipzig, I have all these documents and photographs, whole boxes of them, all that film footage to sort through, but most of the work I do isn't looking at it. Looking's the easy part. It's about figuring out what I can use. That's what film editors do. Nothing would get done if you kept everything.”

Hans said something unexpected. “Every time you cut a frame, you slit a throat.”

Judit said, “That's not fair.”

“It's true though,” Hans said. “What do you leave out of the story?”

It was a pointed question, one Judit knew she couldn't answer. It was all of a piece with all the questions she couldn't answer. It struck her like a hammer then. She had spent all day dragging Hans to the sacred places of her childhood, and logically, he ought to do the same. Only, Hans had no childhood. He had the orphan home, before that, his uncle's tavern, and before that, nothing. None of those places were sacred to Hans. Maybe enough time had passed to let Hans know that Judit couldn't answer his question, or maybe she had found a way to turn that question back at him. She said, at last, “This Clara, once Schumann married her, were they happy?”

“Very,” Hans said. “At least in Leipzig. They had eight children. Then it gets complicated. There's a younger man in the picture, a certain Mr. Brahms. But that's much later, after Schumann went mad.”

“I'm glad you're not a composer,” Judit said.

“Me too,” Hans said.

After that, they really did have to run for the train. The whole time, Judit thought about the parts of Hans's life she'd never really know, the names of his parents and their fates, the place where they were buried. For Hans, every rectangle of green would be a graveyard, every cornerstone a tombstone, and for that reason alone, he would have no country. After they'd boarded the train and were in their seats and out of breath, Judit asked Hans, “When is your birthday?”

Hans didn't seem surprised at the question. “I don't know, Lamb. Maybe the year. My uncle told me '44, but there's not even proof of that.”

“Well, don't you have a birth certificate?”

Hans shrugged. Then he said, “Why don't you choose a birthday for me?”

Without hesitation, Judit said, “September fifteenth.” She waited for Hans to ask her why she'd chosen that date, and when he didn't, she added of her own accord, “It's when I always wished I had my birthday. No one's on vacation, so your friends are all in town, and the weather's wonderful. Plus, it's an easy date to remember—right in the middle of the month.”

“Then that's my birthday,” Hans said. He pulled her close to him, and she leaned her head against his shoulder as the Leipzig Express took them home.

 

3

MAYBE
Shaindel was right. Hans haunted Judit because he wanted something from her. Even as he hectored her about her little executions, he wanted to be organized. He demanded his own coherence. If somebody lied about the murder, she must fill in the missing pieces. Hans demanded the truth, a full historical reckoning. Or did he? What could a ghost demand?

Everything. That was the trouble. If Hans had been alive somewhere in Loschwitz, she could have asked him what he wanted, but now there was no limit and no warmth to humanize those harsh demands. Let her take all the facts and organize them, pornographic images that documented genocide, canisters marked “Discard,” and even ordinary footage that no one would find explosive:

February 1949: Leopold Stein and Harry Truman. They walk together at a brisk pace by the Elbe, and Truman stops and points across the moonscape of rubble still in evidence along the banks where American bombs had leveled Dresden not so long ago. According to the German voiceover, Truman has once again repeated his offer of interest-free loans.