Judenstaat (21 page)

“What you don't understand,” Judit said, “is that what I'm doing now is much easier than what I tried to do downstairs.”

“So you finally admit it,” Gluck said. He sounded giddy, but his face didn't show it. “All that time, you stuck to those old machines, and now look at you. We'll be done by early March for sure.”

Then he too melted away, and it was only Judit, the videos, and piles of Freddi's notes. The only sound was the electric heater and the whine of the machines. If she looked up, she would be startled by her own reflection in the blackened windows—face drawn, eyes enormous, hair in her face. Once, she lost control of her hands. She rubbed them together for a while. Then she sat back and gave her eyes a rest. If she wasn't lucky, something would appear behind those eyes, and she'd have to rub them, hard.

*   *   *

It was after just such a night, knocked senseless, beyond exhausted, that she came to herself and realized she'd have to get some sleep. It must have been three in the morning. She tried to hail a taxi back to her dormitory, but the streets were deserted. As she wandered beyond Stein Square, the webbing of orange hazard tape around the new construction rattled and glowed like exotic grasses in the desert. Then she realized she'd reached the edge of Johannstadt, and was two blocks away from an address that Bondi had made her repeat several times when they last made contact. It was on a small street lined with Yiddish
pashkevils
trumpeting something about a birth or death that wasn't her concern. All she knew was that he'd told her that the door was never locked.

Up an uneven flight of stairs, she turned the doorknob, and walked into the small, warm room. There was that bed, a daybed covered with a striped synthetic bedspread. Maybe she was still under the spell of the screen, or the sight of herself reflected in the window. Maybe just as her hands and eyes stopped working, something else shut down. She lay on the bed and slept.

An hour passed, maybe two. She woke to find that she had been turned on her back and was in the process of being undressed. Her shoes were off, and her blouse unbuttoned. Someone was unfastening her skirt, and for a moment, she wondered if she'd be slipped into a modest nightgown, but those hands worked the skirt down her hips. They weren't women's hands. She kept her eyes closed. Maybe he'd stop there. Maybe he'd put a blanket over her. He paused at the elastic of her underwear. She was awake enough to know that if she moved one way or another, she could determine the direction. She held still. He slipped his hand inside.

*   *   *

The room was in a black-hat enclave, across the street from a school for girls, and above a kosher dairy restaurant. There was a picture of one of their Rebbes over the daybed, not Schneerson, another one, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a black skull-cap above tired-looking eyes. On the desk, there was a row of Yiddish books lined up between two bricks. It would be some time before Judit learned the full story of that room, just as it would take time to find out much about Bondi himself. He mentioned an ambitious father who pushed him to graduate from secondary school two years ahead of schedule. By 1975, he was a student at the academy, aged sixteen, sober and quiet. He had been hand-picked for special training before he turned twenty, and spent a year in Moscow, which he made clear had been an opportunity that “should have been given to someone else.”

“What do you mean?” Judit asked him. It was hard to get Bondi to talk. It was hard to call him Joseph. Even after they'd made love, and his compact, beautiful body was naked on top of the striped bedspread, there was nothing vulnerable about Joseph Bondi. He would seldom answer a question like that in any way except:

“I mean just what I say. It was someone else's opportunity. As for me, I saw nothing wonderful about Moscow, and I heard nothing worth hearing there, except what is clear now and is not secret, that it's a dying city. I'm not a morbid man. Some men are. They would have appreciated Moscow in 1979.”

He approached their lovemaking as he approached all things, with precision and sobriety, a quiet resignation. That might have been the only way that Judit could have entered the affair. It was like that doorbell at nine o'clock when she sat at her sewing machine and she knew. Even before she saw the man in the brown suit and hat, she knew. Maybe she even knew then that one day she would be in that bed with the man who'd made a widow of her.

“If you're not a morbid man,” Judit asked Bondi, “why are you with me?”

He turned his head on the pillow, and pulled her towards him. “Are you warm enough?” Was that his answer? When Judit was with Hans, there were a thousand moments she could conjure when they were tangled into a single, breathing human being. Now she could feel her body against Bondi's, a few degrees cooler than his own, asserting a distinction.

“Have you ever been married?” Judit asked him.

Bondi said, “I'm married now.”

“Of course you are,” Judit said. “Where do you really live?”

After a pause, Bondi said, “You don't need to know that.”

“Then don't tell me,” said Judit. She could imagine the place well enough, an apartment in the Neustadt, though there'd also be a country house outside of Dresden, probably in Dolzchen, in one of the renovated villas. They were certainly childless, maybe saving to move to larger quarters when Bondi was promoted. Meanwhile, the wife worked, probably in a field that involves logic and precision, like bookkeeping. She would expect her husband to keep irregular hours. Something made Judit ask, “Are you on duty?”

Bondi gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean?”

Judit thought: I mean just what I say, but what she actually said was: “Does she think you're on duty now?”

“I don't know what she thinks,” Bondi said.

Illogically, Judit did know what Bondi thought most of the time. It felt like a parlor trick, that she didn't even need to see his face to know what passed across it, sometimes impatience, most frequently deduction, and once in a while a conclusion reached that took the form of triumph or of joy.

She'd never felt that clarity with Hans. Their thoughts were too entangled. There was a loneliness to her hours with Bondi when her body was so satisfied and her mind so engaged and her soul so alienated from her circumstances. She didn't think he loved her either. Maybe he had, back when he wrote on that card. He didn't now.

*   *   *

She moved in with her mother. The apartment in the Altstadt had plenty of room, and given the pending demolition of the dormitory, her earlier resistance felt absurd. When she arrived with her suitcase and sewing machine, Leonora waited by the door.

“Judi, did you have any idea?”

“Of what?” Judit asked. Then, she looked past the entrance towards the six long wardrobe-sized boxes in the parlor. “Oh. They thought I ought to have some new things, you know, because I'm going to be a public person.”

“Oh, sweetheart, why didn't you tell me? I was still in my nightgown when they came this morning, two wonderful men, and I was so embarrassed, I can't even tell you. They carried all this on their backs, right up the stairs, and all the neighbors opened their doors, and I didn't even know what to tell them. I wasn't even sure I had the right change for a tip.”

“They aren't allowed to take tips,” Judit said.

“Well they took it,” Leonora said. “You really do need to tip people like that, no matter what anyone says. And they seemed to appreciate it.”

So then, of course, Judit had to open all the boxes with her mother looking on and saying things like, “Heels aren't practical for a working woman,” or “The skirt's too short—some women can carry it off but you don't have the right build, sweetheart,” and “Of course, it'll all have to be dry-cleaned.”

“I guess so,” Judit said. She transferred the clothing to her old closet where her mother had kept everything that Judit had outgrown, from her baby clothes to her Junior Bundist uniform. Judit laid that strange, stale-smelling collection on her old bed without comment. Fortunately, the new clothes were packed on hangers or there wouldn't have been enough of them. Once Judit's closet was full, Leonora anxiously offered the one in the hallway, and then her own.

“So,” Leonora began, almost bashfully, “what does that mean, a public person?”

“I think it has something to do with the film,” Judit said.

“Will you be on television?”

“I hope not,” Judit said.

“Don't be such a snob,” said Leonora. “There are some wonderful things on television nowadays, very educational.” By then, she'd finally made Judit sit in the kitchen and drink terrible coffee that she'd left on the burner in anticipation of her arrival. Judit did try to be a good sport. The kitchen, she suddenly realized, was small and grim, and through an archway, she could see the dining room without the table, just six chairs against the wall, each with a plastic cover on its pad, and further on, the living room where every window had a double-lace curtain and every cushion on a couch or chair was covered in plastic.

Judit felt moved to ask her mother, “Why do you keep plastic covers on the furniture?”

“What a question!” Leonora said. “Since Daddy died, I've always kept it covered so I don't have to bother cleaning it. You know that.”

“Well take the covers off,” Judit said. Then, “I mean, if you don't mind.”

Speechless, Leonora sat, watching her daughter finish the coffee. Then she said, “Did the television people tell you I should? Will they film here too?”

“Maybe. I don't know,” Judit said. When she came back twelve hours later, Leonora had been waiting up for her and had removed each slipcover, revealing crushed velveteen the color of mustard, and blue silk that appeared to glow in the dark. Judit had simply come to change her clothes, and she walked past this display without a word. It was two in the morning. Leonora followed her into the hallway.

“You can't go out now. It's not safe.”

“There's a taxi outside,” Judit said, and of course, Leonora had to run to the window to confirm this information. There it was, waiting. A light was on inside, and the driver was reading a newspaper. Then, Leonora couldn't say anything at all.

*   *   *

The television people never came to the apartment. They did film Judit at work, as part of a news broadcast. She'd had her hair and nails done and had shimmied into the same skirt that had struck Leonora as too short. As it was February, Lenora had insisted that she change out of the tweed blazer she'd chosen and instead put on a tawny-brown jacket and matching shoes. “Tweed is for autumn. Besides, these are better television colors,” she'd said, and then she stopped speaking and watched in fascination as her daughter put on lipstick. “I never thought I'd see the day,” Leonora said. “You never did a thing but wash your face.” Then, with a different note in her voice: “Judi, is there something you want to tell me?”

“What should I tell you?” Judit asked, innocently enough.

“Are you seeing someone special?”

Judit blotted the lipstick, not very expertly, and slipped on those shoes. Her silence was an affirmation.

“I'm happy for you,” Leonora said, though she didn't actually sound happy. In fact, when Judit told her she'd be moving back home, she'd been over the moon, but her exhilaration had drained away, leaving her with a daughter who was a stranger. Leonora watched that daughter's back, as she walked down the hall in high heels, and she called after her, “It's about time you moved on! It's past time, sweetheart!” By then, Judit had already gone.

An hour later, striding between monitors and followed by a camera, Judit spoke in the most general terms about the project, stating that the film would not reveal new information. There was no such thing as new information, Judit said. The facts had always been there. It was a matter of being capable of seeing what was right before their eyes. And what was the response she hoped the film would generate? She stopped, positioning herself in front of the Media Room's wall of glass, in her red-brown costume, against the landscape of Stein Square, and beyond it, the gleaming Bridge Between East and West, the gleaming Elbe. Her hair was shorter, feathered around her chin in a way that softened and obscured her face. She said, “I hope we recognize ourselves. That's all.”

*   *   *

“You know,” Sammy Gluck said to Judit one day, “you're bound to replace Kornfeld.”

“Why would Kornfeld be replaced?” Judit asked.

“Well, you must know he's resigned.”

“I didn't know,” Judit said. She wanted very much to get back to her work, but Gluck was determined to complete this particular conversation. In a voice that was too loud, and with an air of knowing that it was too loud, he went on.

“He was pretty upset about the book. But you must have known that.”

“What book?”

“You signed off on the proofs.”

Judit tried to remember what this loud young man was talking about, and then she managed to say, “Well, didn't he want me to sign off on them?”

“You'd better talk to him about that,” Gluck said, with some importance. He seemed to be aware that he was playing a game that was far more interesting than transferring film to video.

So Judit took the bait. She pushed herself out of her seat, and for the first time in three months, she walked to the administrative wing and the office she'd entered so many times before only to leave with so many varieties of frustration. She hadn't thought of Kornfeld since December and was surprised at the force of her reluctance to approach him now. His secretary wasn't there. His door was open.

Kornfeld's enormous desk was piled with odds and ends, old photographs, boxes full of reels of audiotape. He was actually on the floor, sorting through files on a low shelf, and he seemed genuinely surprised to see Judit standing there in her sleek trousers and heels. He got up with difficulty and said, “I suppose you're getting ready to move in.”