Judenstaat (18 page)

“These bring comfort,” the woman said. “After all, Ha Shem will give us nothing that we can't endure, as long as we know we're not alone.”

“My God!” Judit shouted at Hans later that night. “Does Chabad have spies in the hospital?” He looked beleaguered. She suspected that he'd told them himself.

Then, one night, when they lay a distance apart in bed, Hans reached out to touch her. His hand moved through her nightgown, and slowly, against the protest of her spirit, she could feel her body rise to meet him, and then something broke in her, and she began to cry.

He didn't ask if he should stop, and she didn't pull away. She kept on sobbing, even as he touched her in the ways they knew, and she responded, and when she moved with him, she realized the period of mourning had an end, and they had reached it. Afterwards, Hans's long, familiar body lay against her own, breathing, letting out a faint and rhythmic snore, the way he always did after they made love. She wished he were awake. She wanted to talk, but she had no idea what she'd say. Mostly, she knew she had to go on living.

*   *   *

Hans was dead. Judit dreamed that the dome of the Yenidze was lit from within, full of floating islands, red, yellow, and blue. She dreamed of miracle babies with dull blue eyes, baby girls embedded in stained glass the way a fetus is embedded in the womb. She dreamed she was in her archive, and all the drawers were open. There was one drawer like a deep, long bed, and she climbed inside. Although she knew the archive's footage, reel by reel, the metal canisters under her feet and hands were unfamiliar. She rooted through the drawer, opening first one canister and then another, taking from her pocket Shaindel's plastic flashlight. The cells of the film glittered like leaves of gold. Imperfectly, she could observe the outlines of what she'd never seen before. If she pressed on, she could find films that had even more promise; they winked up from the depths. Yet she wasn't searching for something new. She was searching for something that was in her hand. How could she have held it for so long, for her whole life, and never thought to turn it over and see what was on the other side?

And now she turned over what she had been holding. She turned everything over. Reel after reel contained another side, mysterious and maddening, and under the cheap, faint bulb of Shaindel's flashlight, she could start to parse it out, an old-new thing that told a story part of her already knew. She lifted out each canister, took out what it contained, and flipped the old reel over, stock footage or discarded, and she saw the different story, faint but undeniable, and she may not like that story, but she could define its structure. And that was when she knew that the drawer she'd climbed into had been locked.

Someone had closed it. Someone had locked it with a lock of iron. A metal padlock snapped into place, and even as she'd fixated on what she saw, she had ignored what she had heard. She'd heard the drawer close and the key turn. Although she was deaf in one ear, she'd heard it all.

Not until now did she realize she was deaf in one ear. It had happened during the explosion when she fired the shot that killed her husband. Her hands were soaked in blood. There was nothing behind her now, not even the closed drawer. Did she have a choice? She had to move on. She must take that cheap flashlight, and she must shine it on everything she saw because it was all vividly important. She must move on because the drawer was locked behind her.

 

6

AND
Judit dreamed she looked at reel after reel; they lied about the murder. She couldn't voice the nature of the lie, only that it was profound, and it was one of countless lies that threaded through her consciousness and met each other like a string of pearls. Some of the footage that she watched was half-familiar, the ruins of '46, those men with spades. But as she shined Shaindel's flashlight on those spades, they became translucent. What was clear became unclear. The rifles aimed right at the camera lens; they fired, and it shattered. Light merged front and back until there was no front and back at all.

And Stein, at the crater of the Great Synagogue of Dresden, his enormous head, those hands cradling his chin, it all had swollen to the proportions of a mountain or a monument. A monument to what? His mouth moved. Words were forming. It was the very frame that had fixed her attention when Durmersheimer left that note.

If only she was not deaf in one ear, she would know who killed her husband, but now those words came from a muddled past that showed both sides at once, and in the unforgiving beam of Shaindel's flashlight, flaws in the film stock, flaws in the bulb, the shadows of her fingers, it showed a deeper mystery.

There was too much she couldn't know. The truth lay outside of the parameters of her dream, in her own archive, where she retraced that film's precise location. Now she would wake up. In an hour, she'd be back there. She did not wake up.

*   *   *

“Will she wake up?”

“Don't get so close. She's probably contagious.”

“Will she be sick all over my bed again?”

“Shhh. She can hear you. Can't you tell? Her eyes are moving under her eyelids.”

They were leaning over her, three girls: the one—was it Leah?—with the long hair pulled back, a taller girl who'd clipped her hair to the side with a butterfly barrette, and Rebecca of the sippy-cup, two tiny hands on the side of that bed.

The barrette-girl asked, “Did we wake you up? I'll bet we woke you up.”

“You were sleeping for a long time,” Leah said. “You're in my bed.”

“Leah! That's not right, saying that,” said the barrette-girl.

“But it's a mitzvah that she's in my bed!” Then Leah turned around and shouted, “Momma!” with a force that broke the room to bits and caused little Rebecca to lose her grip on the mattress and stumble back in terror; then she also cried out, “Momma!” and the third girl, whose barrette implied some kind of girlish status, turned to Judit with a look of resignation or complicity. She was holding Judit's clothes.

“We washed them yesterday,” she said. “The sweater shrank a little. Sorry.”

*   *   *

The girl's name was Ruth. She was the oldest, but she was downstairs more than upstairs, helping staff the nursery school. She even slept down there on Shabbos. The oldest boy, Aaron, had left at dawn because he went to a yeshiva halfway across town, the most rigorous one in Dresden. “He takes after his father,” Charlotte said. She explained all this to Judit over breakfast, a chaotic affair, with paper plates and plastic flatware and Leah and that boy—was it Dov?—each frying eggs in a separate pan, and tiny Dahlia scattering fistfuls of breakfast cereal from her highchair. “You're much better,” Charlotte said to Judit. “I'll admit, we started to get worried when you slept through Shabbos, but Mendel checked with the Rebbe—you know he has a scientific background—and he said it was important for you to gather your strength for the task ahead.”

“Is it Sunday?” Judit asked. She could hear the hesitation in her own voice.

“Monday,” Charlotte said. “Leah, put on another egg for Mrs. Klemmer, no, two, and I think there must be some coffee left. Dov, pour her some. You know how to. Don't be scared. She's a nice lady. I knew her as a girl, and now she's a famous filmmaker.”

While Dov very nervously poured her coffee from the heavy pot, Judit rested her hand on the warm, soft head of Rebecca and was about to ask for a full count of Charlotte's children when another little boy appeared in striped pajamas, leading a hard-looking old lady in a pink bathrobe.

“Bubba, we didn't think you'd join us!” Charlotte said, though it was clear the woman didn't understand a word of German. She added, “That's Mendel's mother. I told you about her.” Charlotte pulled out a chair and anxiously addressed the woman in a whisper as she sat down and glared straight ahead under black eyebrows. Her white hair was clipped short. She said something in Russian without moving her lips.

Charlotte said, “Mendel's mother says she's been very anxious to meet you.”

It was clear to Judit that the woman had no interest in her. That seemed only fair. Judit had heard about those Russian immigrants to Judenstaat, along with a lot of other things that had happened in the past four years, and none of it had seemed to matter much. Those lips kept emitting Russian to no one in particular as her grandchildren ate their eggs or toast or cereal, and after a while, Ruth brought her over a glass of tea. She raised that glass to her lips, and sputtered.

“It's still too hot for her,” Charlotte said to Ruth, “but it's just the way she likes it, baby. Don't worry. She's really very grateful.” Then, to Judit, “Mrs. Rabinovich has seen it all, the fascist massacres, hiding in the forest with her older brother and coming across dead bodies frozen in a lake, and it turned out one of them was her best friend. And this was all when the fascists invaded the Soviet Union during the war—terrible, terrible things. You know, she saw her own parents shot by the man they'd paid to hide them. It turned out he was in the pay of the fascists all along. I'll tell you, Judit, there's so much evil in the world.”

By now, Mrs. Rabinovich had started on her tea, which she drank slowly. She smacked her lips, and certainly seemed to make no sense of what Charlotte was saying. She did survey the room and took in, without visible appreciation, all of her grandchildren wandering around with their plates or bowls.

Charlotte said, “If we didn't know that Ha Shem had a plan for us, we couldn't go on living.”

Judit did not reply. She was dressed now, and if she could find her shoes and coat, there was no reason she had to stay. It couldn't have been Monday. That was some Chabad trick. There were no windows in the kitchen, and no clock at all in that apartment, but time didn't just lose its elasticity. She would have felt it pass. She pushed her chair back and got up.

Mrs. Rabinovich looked right at Judit and said, in perfect German, “The Russians killed my husband.”

The words had been quite clear. Nevertheless, Judit said to Charlotte, “What did she just say?”

Charlotte shook her head. “Yes, isn't it shocking? After everything she'd been through. A terrible story. Terrible. Mendel was five years old when it happened. It was just after the war, a terrible time. It wasn't safe to be a Jew in Russia then, and there was no escape. No one talks about it. He was buried alive.” Then she asked, “Do you understand Russian?”

*   *   *

It felt jarring, walking down those stairs and through the glass revolving door and out into the street. Judit was still unsteady on her feet, and she almost walked into a Mitzvah Tank parked in the driveway. The day was overcast. Getting out of that apartment, of course, was a true production, with the girls hanging on her and Charlotte buttoning the duffle coat to the top, insisting that she really ought to wait and get her strength back. There was a free bed in the women's dormitory. She should eat lunch. She could see Rabbi Schneerson afterwards. Mendel had met with him yesterday, and could easily arrange an appointment on short notice.

After Judit dislodged herself and found the exit, she was relieved, almost surprised, to find an ordinary street with a recognizable sidewalk and a familiar, if oppressive, railway bridge, and then she saw the bus to Stein Square pass; she had just missed it.

How long would it take to walk to the museum? Once she arrived, she knew just where she'd find the footage of Stein at the Great Synagogue, and there'd be audio. She knew it. There'd be audio and mystery and certainty. Of what? Soon she would know.

Then Judit did something acutely un-Judit-like. She hailed a taxi. The gesture felt expansive. She'd done so without being sure she had the cash to cover it, and when she awkwardly climbed in, she reached inside the pocket of her coat. That's when she found the envelope. There was a letter inside.

Dear Mrs. Klemmer,

We met only briefly, but I take the liberty to write you to let you know that our encounter has left a deep impression on me and on my family as well as on the whole of our community. Chana Batya informed me of your childhood friendship, and I can only take it as evidence of your loyalty to our people, Israel, that even in these confusing times, you have performed mitzvah after mitzvah telling our stories through the medium of film. Yesterday, I approached the Rebbe, and he is very aware of your work, which he has followed closely. Rabbi Schneerson's message to you, for which I am only an emissary, is this: Remember, always, you are a Jew. When miracles occur, you may laugh, like Mother Sarah, or you may weep, like Mother Rachel, but you are forbidden to despair.

Sincerely,

Mendel Rabinovitch

Folded inside was an American dollar bill. At least Judit assumed that it must be one. She'd never seen an actual dollar bill before. It was dull green, smaller than a Judenmark. She didn't know what it was worth these days. There wasn't time to calculate exchange rates. The taxi pulled up by the entrance of the National Museum, and Judit fished around for Judenmarks. It was morning, and she had work to do.

 

7

IT
wasn't morning, though. It was past eleven. Judit glanced at the clock above the front desk as she passed and was surprised to find Mr. Rosenblatt rising in alarm and calling, “Wait! Mrs. Klemmer—Judit!” and abandoning his post to follow her. She kept going, right to the stairwell that led down to her archive, and she opened the door when she felt his hand on her arm.

She turned at last. The poor old man had her arm in a grip. “I know I'm late,” she said. “And I know I missed a day. I should have called the office. But I'll make up for lost time even if I have to work all night.”

“Judit,” said Mr. Rosenblatt, “no one's allowed downstairs.”

“That's ridiculous,” Judit said. “What is this? Was Sammy in there? Did he touch my stuff?”