Judenstaat (14 page)

MOLOTOV:
It is a hope we share. I have a proposition for you, Mr. Stein. How much is a Jew worth?

STEIN:
[Inaudible.]

MOLOTOV:
In our country, we have tried for many years to come to grips with the National Question. Comrade Stalin offered Jews a homeland in the Crimea. They rejected it. He gave them a home in Birobidjan. It proved to be full of traitors. Now we give you Germany and we still have a million of your people within Soviet borders. What do you say to that?

STEIN:
They are welcome here.

MOLOTOV:
How much will you give me for them?

STEIN:
Surely they can arrange for their own transportation should they choose to come home.

MOLOTOV:
So you agree. Germany is their home. They are not Soviets. They are essentially without loyalty and without scruples. There are plans to transport these Jews to Siberia. Troops stand at the ready. He [Stalin] need only say the word. Yet I am here to see if other arrangements are amenable.

STEIN:
With all due respect, why do you speak of a financial transaction? With some encouragements, they'll emigrate. There is no need to send Jews to the ends of the earth and make another country for them.

MOLOTOV:
Are you a literary man, Stein?

STEIN: [Inaudible.]

MOLOTOV:
There is a story by our own Tolstoy called “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” It's a small masterpiece. A man is told he can have as much land as he can cover on horseback in a day, and he rides himself into exhaustion. In fact, he rides himself to death because he doesn't know his limits. In the end, the riddle has an answer. How much land does a man need? As much as it takes to bury him.

STEIN:
Comrade, how is your wife?

[Note: Molotov had a Jewish wife with whom Stein corresponded. She had been arrested and executed after the war. A.L.]

MOLOTOV:
[Inaudible.]

STEIN:
And how are those young men, our officers in training? No one has heard from them in eighteen months. What is their status?

MOLOTOV:
Stein, whose Jew are you? You're playing both sides. It's a dangerous game, and you can't win it.

STEIN:
It's not a game. Children play games. We aren't children.

MOLOTOV:
Think carefully, sir. I can speak for both myself and for others when I say that our patience is not infinite, and that, pragmatic as we are, we have firm principles.

STEIN:
You need us. You can't admit it, but you need us. So does the West. Don't burn your bridges.

MOLOTOV:
How much will you give us for our Jews, Mr. Stein?

STEIN:
[Inaudible.]

MOLOTOV:
The arrangement must be a gentlemen's agreement, and if you are to take action, you must do so without delay. We will expect an answer by the end of the week.

[
END OF REEL.
Transcript made available December 1987 for the National Museum of Judenstaat in preparation for that country's 40th Anniversary celebration.]

 

9

“
THEY
just delivered that?” Judit addressed Sammy Gluck, who had watched her as she listened to the tape on an old-fashioned reel-to-reel machine they'd rigged up in the basement.

“It was delivered by parcel post, like an ordinary package. It's really amazing, Mrs. Klemmer.” Gluck's face was red, and he was sweating so heavily, his glasses steamed. “The Soviets are releasing all kinds of stuff these days.”

“And they just mailed it.” Judit's voice was flat. “Parcel post.”

“The thing is, we need visuals. So Oscar wants to know if you can come up with something.”

“How on earth would I have footage of that conversation, Sammy?”

“Of course you wouldn't. But don't you have a picture of Molotov and Stein together? Or maybe Russian Jews in an old newsreel. We need it right away.”

He just stood there swaying. Judit let him sway. Then she said, “You realize what Molotov was saying? Buy our Jews—or we'll deport them. This isn't Nazi Germany. It's Moscow—1953.”

“I didn't study history in college,” Sammy said. “I guess it must have been the same year Leopold Stein had that stroke. It doesn't sound like him, though, not like in the old newsreels. Maybe it's the tape.”

“It was recorded in someone's basement a month ago.”

“But it was sent parcel post,” Sammy said helplessly. “By Professor Lehmann. I still have the receipt, Mrs. Klemmer. Look.” He held up the slip of paper, and waved it around in a way that made Judit seasick. Or maybe she already felt that way. Her face was burning.

She leaned against the cabinet and tried to get her bearings. Lehmann would not send anything that hadn't been verified. Yet what she heard was a reactionary fantasy out of an American spy novel. It felt stagey, grotesque. It made no sense. It was a piece of a puzzle that felt deliberately manufactured. And if it were true? She heard herself say, “If that's the kind of thing they're looking for, I'm off the project, Sammy.”

Sammy blinked. “You can't mean that.”

“I mean it!” Judit said, and fiercely and abruptly, she did. “Take everything upstairs. Transfer it to video. Try to find that newsreel where Stein's hooked up on life support with that male nurse. From '53—same year: sixteen millimeter. Or there are photographs. You want explosive? That'll do just fine.”

She pulled open a wide, heavy drawer and wrenched it from the cabinet. Then she opened up another, pulled and pulled, and when it would not come out, she stumbled, tried to right herself, and Sammy said, “Are you okay, Mrs. Klemmer?”

“You'll need to bring down the cart,” Judit said. “The catalogue's all self-explanatory except for some junk you won't want anyway.”

“I'll get you a glass of water,” Sammy said, and with hesitation, turned to go. He really seemed concerned about her, and she felt sorry for him. Then, before he closed the door, he had to turn and say, “Can't you just take things on faith? You can't always know.”

*   *   *

Take it on faith. You can't always know. If Judit could strangle sentences, she would have forcefully taken both of them in her hands and snapped their necks. She'd heard them forever. They were unanswerable, because the people who said them had their answers ready. The arrogance—the empty-headed arrogance of people who believe in videos or heparin injections or Shabbos candles or the State. She would not take a lie on faith, never. She believed in facts. Facts matter. You can verify, and with great effort, if you take into account what is discarded, you can find the truth. It's humbling work, but it's the work that makes us human. And sometimes, you get tired, you despair, because there seems to be no explanation. That's when it's tempting to surrender to something that feels a lot like death.

Yes, Hans was dead. The case was closed. That note had been in her pocket for nearly three months now. There wasn't much left of it. She took it out again.

They lied about the murder.

The ghost appeared by her side, smiling critically, not a sly smile, more melancholy.

Judit addressed that ghost. “Whose murder? Leo Stein's? Not yours.”

When Sammy took the stuff upstairs, then he might find that unmarked reel of Stein and those Soviet soldiers; it would be out of her hands, into the Stasi's, and they would find the man who'd broken in, and arrest him for trespassing and a thousand other petty crimes. She probably had a fever, and she asked that ghost as though he knew:

“The Soviets—our liberators with the guns. The ones at the synagogue. What could Stein say to them? I should have turned the sound on.”

The ghost drifted back without acknowledgment and left a cold wake. If only it had been warm, there'd be some justice. It could have come in from behind and leaned into her body the way Hans used to do when he came home from a concert and found her at her sewing machine. It would be after midnight. Even when she heard the door open, she wouldn't turn around. She would pretend to keep on sewing, waiting for what was about to happen. It was the sweetest of discoveries that habit has its own eroticism and can deepen.

Yes, once she had not been alone. She had been loved. Her life was full of tenderness and possibility. And now the ghost did just what she'd willed it to do. It came up from behind her. She could feel its cold breath in her ear.

“So you don't like that story?”

Judit's breath caught. It was her husband's voice. No question. It came out of the cold throat like the note of a bassoon. It broke her heart. Her legs went out from under her, but she was held upright by the ghost's arms, as its face moved towards her own, so close she could make out the texture of the light hair pushed back from the forehead, faint creases around the mouth, the little white patch of a cigarette burn on the chin that Hans had gotten as a boy in Leipzig. He was just a ghost. He couldn't hurt someone who was still alive. The eyelashes were long, the shrouded eyes grayer and colder than they should have been.

“You should avenge me.”

She could feel an articulate hand move up through her loose hair and press against her skull.

Again, his voice: “Avenge me.”

The ghost held out the other hand. It was the hand of Hans, long-fingered, flexible, the hand of a conductor. Was she supposed to take it? Where would it lead her? No, that was not the expectation. Judit passed the note to the ghost, who turned it over on the table. For the first time, Judit saw something was written on the other side:

Yenidze. 7th Floor.

It was the Chabad House.

 

A
NGELS
AND
D
EMONS

 

1

THE
Yenidze Cigarette Factory was named after a town in Thrace. As a girl, like every child in Dresden, Judit had been fascinated by the building. It wasn't far from Stein Square, and it came on you suddenly. You'd turn a corner, pass a railway bridge, and there it was: an exotic monster taking up a whole block, with a chimney disguised as a minaret, and an enormous dome. It had closed down even before the war, and it stood vacant, except for a restaurant. You'd go through a little gate that led to a special entrance with an elevator that went five flights up to the dome where, as Leonora said, a cup of cocoa cost twice as much as anywhere else. Most of the dome's stained glass was missing, but the waiters wore fezzes, and the little porthole windows transformed even the most ordinary view of Dresden into a fairy tale.

When Hans was appointed concertmaster of the Dresden Orchestra, and he and Judit were looking at apartments, she heard that some of the old factories around the Yenidze had been converted into luxury condominiums with new appliances and even private telephones, and a realtor showed them a place with a window that looked right out on the dome. In fact, if she'd been eating at the restaurant, she could have looked out from the porthole into her living room. The Yenidze had been restored, and someone had put a lot of money into the place. At night, the dome glowed like sugar-candy. When she worked late at the archive, and walked back across Stein Square, she could see it lit up in vibrant reds and blues and yellows. There was even scaffolding around the minaret.

Of course, the realtor had said nothing about Chabad. She knew her clients, and one look at Judit told her that the information would have been a deal-breaker, and it almost was. There was a certain kind of buyer who would have found Chabad charming with their Mitzvah Tanks and cheery Shabbos greetings. Judit was not that sort of buyer.

“How did they get the money to fix the place up?” Judit asked everyone she saw, the realtor, her co-workers, the oboe player who came to dinner after they moved into the apartment, even Hans himself. Then she answered her own question. “I'll tell you how they got the money. From us. Money that ought to go to roads or medical research goes straight into their pockets. Or worse yet, they get it from anti-Bundist donors from America who want to undermine the State.”

Hans said, “Aren't you glad to see a light on in the dome?”

“You don't understand,” said Judit, and so she talked to her mother, who did understand, and as the two of them went on and on about those people and the subsidies they're given by the government and their manipulative political power, Hans listened in wonder. Never had he seen Judit and her mother in such complete accord.

Maybe it was that same night that Leonora offered them her dining room table and insisted on finding an identical replacement for the broken leaf, and in the heat of solidarity, mother and daughter talked about whether they needed good china for entertaining, and if the new pieces from Meissen were cheaper if they came straight from the factory. Hans let that conversation go on without interruption, and only afterwards, when they were alone, did he say to Judit:

“I think she finally believes we're married. And a good thing too. Otherwise, we'd have to get Chabad to do a ceremony.”

“Don't even joke about that,” Judit said. “I know those people. They're predators. They move in if they see any sign of weakness.”

“You know,” Hans said, “they only have the power you give them, Lamb. And that appears to be considerable.”

*   *   *

In the years since Hans's murder, Judit hadn't been back to their old neighborhood. She'd been afraid of what she'd find there, maybe afraid it hadn't changed at all. As it turned out, most of the renovated former factories had lapsed back into vacancy, and there was no one on the street. A wall between two empty lots was covered with the remnants of a mural of Leopold Stein at the helm of a yellow tractor, but his head was obscured by graffiti. Was that Yiddish? Could it be Cyrillic? She couldn't trust her own eyes. Most of the other walls were plastered with enormous pictures of Chabad's Rebbe: Schneerson's stern, white-bearded face and cunning eyes flashed below a black fedora. If their apartment was still standing, it would be full of black-hats and their children.