Judenstaat (24 page)

By then, Steinsaltz had reappeared, and the handlers moved him from his wheelchair to the table. He rubbed his hands together, and called the waiter to refill all three wineglasses. “Well, well,” he said, and then he managed to transform his old man voice, briefly, into the familiar politician's trumpet that he'd blasted for nearly forty years. “We ought to toast the film's premiere, I know. But it's bigger than the film itself. I must say,” Steinsaltz added, as he raised his glass in his right hand, “that it is moving beyond words to see, in the twilight of my life, a planting come to harvest.”

“Anton,” Lehmann said, “you're spilling wine all over yourself.”

“So my hand's not steady,” Steinsaltz said, and he rested his left hand against it. His face was flushed; a rash climbed up his neck, and for a moment, he said nothing. Then, he threw his glass of wine against the wall, and it shattered and sprayed glass and liquid all over the table.

Judit felt glass fly into the right side of her face, and when she brushed it off with a napkin, it left streaks of blood. The handlers rushed away to get whiskbrooms, and one of them gave a towel to Judit to mop up the wine on her lap and bread plate.

Lehmann shook her head and laughed. “Poor girl. She's gotten the worst of it. You shouldn't try to be so dramatic, Anton. It's not in your nature. Besides,” she said, “it's not your work. It never was. I think you meant to drink to Leopold Stein, didn't you?”

Steinsaltz's face was completely red now. He was speechless with embarrassment, and it was only with effort that he managed to work his mouth around what he said next. “Of course. Who else?” But no one drank now. They were moved to a different table, easy enough as they were the restaurant's only party. Judit took her towel with her, and she could still feel glass splinters in her cheek. The cuts were shallow, though. If she washed carefully, by the time she got back to work, no one would notice.

 

6

JUDIT
was the only member of the staff to get an invitation to the premiere screening, but she could select six guests. She realized, with some embarrassment, that aside from Gluck, she didn't know any of the assistants, and she asked Gluck to make the selections himself. He surprised her by refusing.

“I can't be your social director, Mrs. Klemmer,” he said. “I have three other projects running now, freelance jobs. After all, that's paid work.” That's when Judit realized that Sammy was still an intern.

“I'll pay you,” Judit said, a little desperately. Gluck looked startled.

“How? Are you in charge of payroll now?” He shook his head. “No, if you're asking me if I'll go as your guest, of course I will. After all, I was the one who got this started. And if you wouldn't mind, I'd like to bring Patricia.”

“Who's Patricia?” Judit couldn't help but ask.

“I did introduce her to you a few times. But I guess she's not too memorable. She's just my wife.” Then, he must have felt embarrassed by his own rudeness because he lowered his voice. “Look, I guess a lot of us feel crummy about Oscar. But that's not your fault. It's just all the pressure riding on this makes me a little nuts, and sometimes a guy starts to feel like he has to take sides.”

He was solemn, and Judit couldn't help but notice that he'd aged, these past few months. The bones of his face were more clearly defined. He looked almost handsome. She said, “I didn't know you got married, Sammy.”

“We sent you an invitation, but maybe it went to your old address,” Sammy said. “Besides, you've been pretty busy.”

“You don't have to take sides,” Judit said. “There are things that are true, and there are things that are false. How complicated can it be?”

Sammy looked at her. What he saw might have played with his own set of categories. He wanted to write her off as ambitious; she was not ambitious. He wanted to blame her for taking credit for his work; she desired no credit. Most of all, he wanted to tell her that everyone knew she was cooperating with the Stasi, and it would come back to haunt her. Judit watched all of this pass over Sammy's face. Then he said, “Say, didn't you want to get back into your old archive?”

It was Judit's turn to stare. “What are you talking about?”

“They opened it yesterday. It's a mess, I hear. Lots of stuff on the floor. They say they cleared everything out and sent it upstairs, but it sure doesn't sound that way.”

“You mean it's open?”

“Didn't I just say that?” Sammy looked amused. “I didn't go in myself. Still has that yellow hazard tape everywhere. But you should check it out, Mrs. Klemmer. Maybe you'll find something really explosive down there. Who knows?”

*   *   *

For the rest of the afternoon, Judit wandered through the National Museum. She could have entered the archive more directly and bypassed the exhibitions, but something made her take the long way round. When she'd first started working there, she'd always visited those rooms she'd known from childhood. She hadn't done it for a while. A corridor led from the Media Room to the third floor of the museum exhibition wing: the Golden Age of Ashkenaz.

Worms, Mainz, Cologne, the three great centers in their medieval splendor, each had its room; fragments of prayer-houses, of ceremonial goblets, artifacts from more recent excavations, ornaments and tile work set in velvet, like precious stones. A diorama of a dance hall where a wedding took place, replicas of period instruments like lutes and tambourines, maps charting the routes of Jewish spice merchants both east and west, bags full of saffron, pepper, precious salves. Isaac of Navarone, Charlemagne's emissary, Isaac of Gans, Daniel Itzig, court Jews and bankers. Jacob of Franconia. These rooms had long been marked for renovation, and some of the panels were too faded to read. A sleepy female guard in a blue uniform stirred, looking up to wonder who this woman was who stepped quietly through the corridor in her high heels.

A room devoted to Moses Mendelssohn, who entered Brandenburg through the gate reserved for Jews and cattle, personal artifacts like the pocket watch he gave to his son-in-law, his china plates, portraits of his children, his translation of the Torah into German. A portrait of the man himself, whose homely, pale, clean-shaven face was dominated by benevolent brown eyes. Then onward through portraits of early heroes of the Bund, bearded socialists and trade unionists, the writer Peretz lit from below in a way that made his bushy mustache glitter, old publications under glass. No guard sat in that room. No one dusted. At one point, it went dark, and Judit had to fumble for a switch, only to discover that the light was movement-activated. She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass display. She was stunned as a rabbit, blinking at whatever was inside.

If she took the stairs down one flight, she'd reach the glass corridor that led to the Hall of the Churban. She couldn't count the times she'd been there as a girl, far more than the other exhibitions. At first, she'd explored the artifacts and testimonies left by survivors, and when she'd followed the trail of her own martyred Elsa Neuman, she'd added her own impressions. Those rooms had been so dense with papers, photographs, shelves holding a spoon someone had used in hiding before capture, improvised cloth shoes that took a woman through a death-march she did not survive, a hair of a beloved son in a transparent package, it seemed impossible that more could be added or that anyone could pass through that dark place and climb out on the terrace. The very claustrophobia was the horror of it, and its real intention. Did anyone still take children there? Even when Judit was a child, it hadn't seemed a place where children ought to go.

Of course, there were exhibits like that everywhere in Judenstaat, and Judit knew from her own studies that they were deliberately homemade. In Dresden's own Churban Hall, Leonora's story was posted on the south-most wall; she'd written it in her ungrammatical and fearless German in 1951, five years after Liberation and the year Judit was born. Judit's father had laminated it to ensure a kind of permanence. As time went on, though, it would all decay, and yet this decay was more like a fermentation, turning what was there into something more volatile: the handwriting of the dead, the spoons of the dead, the crammed shelves full of suitcases of dead people, or survivors soon to die of other causes. Where did the dead travel? To their death.

It had been years since Judit had walked through that glass corridor to the first-floor, Churban wing of the museum. She'd concentrated on her own exhibits on Judenstaat's early history, on the far side of the terrace. Below it was her film archive. Such was the evolving nature of the Churban Hall that hundreds of items might have fallen off the shelves or been replaced with other artifacts or testimonies. She could only imagine what she'd find. She brushed her hair out of her eyes before she remembered that it was cut short now. She walked downstairs, through the glass entryway, and stopped.

The rooms were empty. Judit was so certain she was dreaming that she actually turned the light off and on again. There was nothing on the walls. She could still see places where things might have been, chipped paint, nail-holes. The floor had been swept recently. She walked through room after empty room, hardly knowing what she was doing, and she opened the door at the far end. Yellow hazard tape blocked the passage to the second-floor terrace, and the entrance to the permanent exhibition on the founding of Judenstaat.

Instantly, she was back upstairs in the Golden Age exhibit and she shook the guard who'd gone back to sleep. “What happened to the Churban Hall?”

The guard looked cross. “Closed for renovations.”

“But I need to get through there.”

The guard rolled her eyes. “Ma'am, the Churban Hall and the other permanent exhibit on the first floor are both closed until September. You'll have to go back the way you came, and take the elevator in the Administrative Wing. How did you even get in here?”

“I work here,” Judit said.

“Well, if you work here, then you should know.”

Judit knew many things at once, and felt many things at once, and just as the guard now doubted her authority, she doubted her own. She was in somebody else's clothing, with somebody else's haircut. The guard just shook her head, and picked up her newspaper, which had the following headline: “Sokolov Announces New Policy of Open Border.”

*   *   *

“You're home early,” Leonora said. She was washing the dish on which she'd eaten dinner. “I'll heat something up.”

“Don't bother,” Judit said. She threw her blazer on a chair, and opened the packed refrigerator. Without much thought, she dislodged an apple.

“Let me wash that,” Leonora said, and Judit obediently handed her mother the apple, sat on a kitchen chair, and stared at nothing. “How about a nice piece of chicken?”

“Alright,” said Judit. Her mother gave her a long look.

“Sweetheart,” she said, “how are things at work?”

“Well, to be honest,” Judit said, “I'm pretty much used up. I might sleep in tomorrow.”

“Shouldn't you call and let someone know?”

“I don't even know who I'd call,” Judit said.

Leonora handed Judit a plate with a cold chicken leg and some potato salad on it, and Judit took a bite out of the chicken leg and then a bite of the apple, holding one in each hand, her skirt hiked up well above her knees, her shoes half-kicked off, hanging from her toes. “Listen, I've been thinking,” said Leonora. “I shouldn't go to the premiere. It's bound to be a late night, and if I need to leave before it's over, you'll have to figure out what to do with me.”

Judit sat up. “Don't you want to go, Mom?”

“Well, to be honest, I just don't think I'm up to it.” Leonora turned to the sink again, and squeezed out the sponge. “If it means enough to you, of course—”

“Don't you want to meet the prime minister?”

“I need to get up early for work,” Leonora said. “It's a weeknight, after all, and there are people counting on me.”

Judit didn't answer. She kept eating the apple and the chicken leg, turning each in her hands, biting into each in turn, and she didn't even notice when her mother placed a fork and knife and napkin on the table. Judit had made a purchase at the drugstore. It was in her purse. It wasn't so far to the bathroom, yet the distance through the hallway seemed impossible. That kitchen chair, with its hollow metal legs and plastic back, was like the cockpit of an airplane. If she got up, the world would tip and veer into free fall.

Leonora said, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” Judit said.

“Have things slowed down at work?”

“Actually, they have,” said Judit. “I was thinking that maybe I'd take a vacation.”

“Oh, that's nice,” said Leonora. “That's wonderful news. And when will you go?”

“After the film premieres,” she said. “I think, in June.”

“Well, I'm asking you a long time in advance because I know how busy you are,” Leonora said, “but I'm hoping this October you'll go to the cemetery with me to see Daddy.”

“Sure,” Judit said. She was eating the potato salad. Then, she added, “Just remind me when it's closer. I'll make sure I'm free.”

“I appreciate that,” said Leonora. She cleared the dish with the apple core and the chicken bone, and Judit at last forced herself to her feet. She knew already; what was the point? By now, she couldn't help but know that she was pregnant.

 

T
HE
D
YBBUK

 

1

“
WHEN
did you find out?” Bondi asked her. He must have been in the middle of some other project when she'd phoned. He sounded distant.

“I'm sorry I told you at all,” Judit said, “but I figured you'd know when I went to the clinic to get rid of it.” In fact, she'd taken the day off for just that purpose, though she would have been just as happy to stay in bed. Leonora had left for work before Judit had managed to make it to the kitchen, and she'd poured herself an orange drink that tasted like poison, dumped most of it in the sink, and threw on some of her old clothes because the apartment didn't have a private line and she couldn't walk to the phone booth in her bathrobe. She didn't have the clinic number, and her hand had dialed Bondi all by itself.