Judenstaat (28 page)

“I'm not sure,” Judit said. Then, “Maybe I don't want to know.”

“That's a first.” Bondi spoke right into her womb, and she knew she ought to laugh. Instead, a thickness welled in her throat. Did she mean it? Did she not want to know? No tests, no sonograms, no sessions with technicians? Could she let those weeks accumulate, let whatever happened take its course? If that was possible, if she could trust sensation, time would stretch out like open country she would enter with no map, and it would carry her along. It felt so possible, to mean just what she said. Bondi's cheek lay on her belly. He breathed softly. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little open, like a child's. She stroked his hair. What was it Hans had said to her mother all those years ago? When you don't know, you're free.

Judit's hand lingered on the vulnerable patch where Bondi's hair grew thin. She didn't want to know. Really? Where else could she draw that line? Could leaving well enough alone be a way of life? Maybe for someone else. Maybe for Bondi. From nowhere came a thought that hadn't crossed her mind in months. Who lied about the murder? Hans wasn't free. He had known something. Someone was afraid of what he knew.

A disembodied humming note reverberated in her uterus.

“I'm scared,” she said. She said it so Bondi would look up. He did. Those candid eyes, the ones she could see right through, they reassured her that he was really there. It wasn't someone else.

*   *   *

Maybe five black-hats were outside when she emerged. They smoked and muttered in Yiddish, pointing to one of the
pashkevils.
Then one of them with a black beard and a high hat and a gold watch on his wrist gave Judit a look like a burning cigarette. In Yiddish, he asked, “
Are you a Jew?
”

Judit was in no mood for this. In that same language, she said, “
Go to hell.
”

“
You speak Yiddish like a German. Tell me,
” he said, “
do you fear God?
”

One of the other black-hats broke in and said something that stopped him short, and Judit knew she should just walk away and find a taxi, but instead, she said, “
I don't bow down.
”

That answer, from the tarted-up woman with the glowing hair, short skirt, and racy stockings was so unexpected that they didn't hear it. The headline on the
pashkevil
was about the deportation, but that wasn't what the black-hats were discussing. They were talking about their Rebbe's youngest son, a prodigy with mystic powers who predicted that on May 15th of that year, the Messiah would appear. In contrast, the eldest son was building a new Yeshiva in the heart of Loschwitz, and the Rebbe—may he live forever—sided with the eldest son, but it was likely that the prodigy and his followers would decamp to Poland because when the Messiah came the whole of Loschwitz would be swallowed by the earth.

Now Judit couldn't help it. She called out, in Yiddish, “
Who would notice?
”

The same black-bearded man with the high hat and the gold watch said, “
Do you know something, young lady? You're a slave.
”

“
You're the slave,
” Judit said.

“
Careful, careful
,” an older man said to the younger. “
What's the point? Just walk away from this.
”

“
I won't walk away from my own corner,
” said the black-hat. “
She speaks Yiddish like a German. She doesn't know she's a slave. She doesn't fear God. What does she fear?
”

“
Not you,
” said Judit.

“
Jews like her were the cause of the Churban,
” he said, not looking at Judit, “
and they will be again and again.
” He turned in her direction, worked something around in his mouth, and spat at her.

Judit stepped back. It was impossible to untangle anger and humiliation now. Why was she engaging with these people? The school across the street let out, and little girls who looked like Shaindel clustered in the doorway, whispering to each other. Bondi was upstairs, still, and he could hear them. Would he let this play itself out, or would he interfere in what she began to realize was not his business? No, it was someone else's business, that force that rose up in her with its own voice, and shouted in Yiddish: “
You parasites! You think that time stands still? It won't, and it will crush you!
”

They were already walking away, those men. They started for another corner, maybe for Poland, but she couldn't stop now, and the Yiddish wasn't the Yiddish of a German. It was rolling and Galician, a Yiddish that she never knew she had, and she called after them:

“
You'll all be crushed like vermin, and no one will even notice because time just doesn't stop, it rolls on over you and you're the slaves!”

Now they were laughing. She trembled where she stood, and when a taxi passed by, she was so full of her own thoughts she didn't hail it. In a few hours, she'd be at the premiere, and whatever filled her now would fill her then and take her captive in a way that made her buckle at the knees. Maybe she was possessed. Maybe a dybbuk was inside her. A rabbi could perform an exorcism. Or an abortionist.

She stood in that luxuriant, oppressive sunlight. It was a lovely afternoon. There were a few hours before the premiere at Parliament. She knew what Shaindel would say. She had to go back into that archive. She had to ask that ghost what she should do, and show she was not afraid. She wasn't afraid, was she?

 

6

“
NO
harm in it,” said Mr. Rosenblatt. “But you be careful. There's still glass on the floor.”

What harm she'd done was past repeating. Now Judit walked down the stairway she'd descended every day for ten years. There was the light switch just where it ought to be. There was the door, no padlock on it, but closed. The very familiarity pinched Judit's heart a little. She opened the door.

Mr. Rosenblatt was right. The place was a shambles. Glass plates had been wrenched from their viewing boxes and shattered on the floor; loose film was everywhere; a projector lay in pieces like a wounded dog. That was the first thing she noticed. The second was how small the room looked. It was hemmed in with drawers and drawers, most of which were open. The open ones all looked empty. There was the long, gunmetal gray worktable on the far wall, spotted with rust. Judit felt herself growing grayer and smaller as she took that room back in, and she ran her fingers over the cold handles of those drawers and walked slowly across the room to her old editing machine. She looked down. A wisp of celluloid was caught in its teeth.

Once, she'd known what to cut and what to keep. She waited for a sign. Then, something tightly coiled began unwinding. She opened a closed drawer by the machine; it was empty. Had Kornfeld told the truth when he claimed everything had either been transferred or incinerated? Given this chaos, how could he be sure?

Then she heard a man breathing hoarsely.

She stood very still. “Who is it?”

No ghost. Ghosts never breathe. No, someone had been interrupted in the work of sorting through the wreckage. He rose, not easily, leveraging himself on an open drawer: Arno Durmersheimer.

He'd had a shave for the premiere and it made him look younger; so did the well-made jacket with all the buttons fastened. “I guess we got the same idea. Been here three times already,” Durmersheimer said. “You find it yet?”

Scrubbed, relatively sober, Durmersheimer looked half-tamed. But not completely. Judit had edited those interviews, but this was something else: him, in the flesh again. His hands were full of tangled film he must have scooped off the floor.

She said, “Don't touch my stuff.”

“Like I said, just cleaning up,” Durmersheimer said, and now he was impatient. “They made a real mess. The way this place looks, anything could be here, and if it's still floating around, someone might take it the wrong way.”

“You mean about the murder.”

“I mean,” Durmersheimer said, “I never should have left that movie. All I wanted was to set the record straight. What's done is done. An old man makes mistakes. I drank too much. I got confused.”

Again, Judit said, “You mean about the murder.”

A drawer slammed by the worktable.

Durmersheimer said, “That's not me.”

Judit drew her hand over her mouth and looked back to that table. That's where the ghost of Hans should have been, with its long legs hanging and its arms braced, gangling and relaxed, an unwound bow-string, with its mouth turned up on one side and its baleful eyes.

“It's gone,” Judit said. “He's gone.”

Then she was weak with longing, and she couldn't get the words out. She would have given anything to see that ghost again, standing as he had in life, with a straight back and the stance of a conductor, conscious of his stature, but self-effacing in the way that secure people can be. But he wasn't there. He'd crossed the border. He'd taken memory with him. Now she felt her own eyes glitter, maybe balefully, and she straightened and stepped forward. Now she could see herself from the outside, her face emptied of everything, and she was staring into what Hans knew, the inexplicable, the uncut version, layer after layer of those stories piled like bodies in an open grave.

That's when she saw the reel. It was just where she had placed it in that dream she'd had a thousand years ago: camouflaged against the surface of the table.

“You're sick again,” said Durmersheimer. “Oh, fuck. We don't need trouble.” He was white as his dress shirt. He could have knocked her down, but some force seemed to hold him back, and he stood paralyzed as Judit reassembled the projector and switched on the audio.

She watched the footage. It was eight-millimeter, unmistakably the content she had seen before. But now the camera kept on going, from the moment Stein made that sweeping gesture with his hands. Even under these primitive circumstances, Judit could see enough and hear enough, and she didn't turn away, even as Durmersheimer kept repeating, “It's all a lie. It's a mistake. It doesn't matter. Turn off the damned machine!”

*   *   *

1946. A crater on the site of what was once the Great Synagogue of Dresden. A bearded Leopold Stein addresses a crowd of adolescents. His big, working-class boxer's hands articulate a circle. Then, they turn upwards and cup his chin, an intimate gesture. He is about to address them, intimately, in Yiddish.

“
I make no promises. But there are some who can. I only know what we want. The fire returns. This is our monument. This is our prayer-house. No one can bring back the dead. I can only speak in their name for all of us today, tomorrow, throughout the generations. Bring them here, all the guilty ones. Six million Germans. We will blot out even their memory, and we will make them bleed
.”

 

7

HELENA
Sokolov took Judit's hand in both of hers. Those hands were manicured and very small. She looked just like her photographs, though up close, her face was mapped with tiny wrinkles. “The woman of the hour,” she said. “I can't believe we haven't met before.”

To be in close proximity to Sokolov was a little like being in front of a radiation lamp. Judit managed to say, “I don't know.”

“Somebody's been protecting you from me,” Sokolov said, maybe slyly. “Well, get yourself a drink. And do make sure to circulate tonight. People need to know who you are.” Then, lowering her voice, she added, “Keep this between us. In an hour, there will be two very special guests.”

Judit nodded. She managed to back away and find a glass of mineral water. Everything tasted lousy now, but she had to have something in her hand; she had to look occupied. Durmersheimer was somewhere in the crowd, ready to disavow whatever happened. The small reel didn't quite fit in her evening purse, and it stuck out just enough to be conspicuous. At least one person said, “What's that? A new project?” and she answered, “I don't know.” She said “I don't know” so many times that evening that she began to wonder if there were any other words left in her.

Fortunately, she didn't have to say much of anything at all. Everyone present took Helena Sokolov's advice; they circulated. Judit stood with her glass and her purse like a stone in midstream. The only one who paid Judit the least attention was Sammy Gluck, who made much of a formal introduction to Patricia and was solicitous of Judit, bringing her a plate of herring on toast, and asking if she needed to get off her feet. Judit tried not to read too much into it, but it didn't help when Patricia said, “I love what you're wearing. I hope you don't mind me saying so, but that kind of blouse wouldn't have looked good on you before. Now, you fill it out.”

“I don't know,” Judit said, and then she hid her face in the glass of mineral water.

After a while, she searched for the bathroom. At least that's what she told herself. Really, she just wanted to be alone with the film. If she could review each frame in her head until the end, then she could consider actions and consequences. Could she slip it into the projector and force those present to confront what she had seen? And what would follow? An investigation? Of whom? A formal and pedantic voice framed these obvious questions, a whole string of them, and Judit managed to find a glass door that led to a veranda. The air was cool and damp. She sat on a bench with her purse in both hands like a little girl.

*   *   *

That was how Anna Lehmann found her. Certainly, Judit looked less polished than when Lehmann had last seen her, hair in her face, her blouse too tight around the chest. Lehmann had dressed up for the reception. Her massive body was encased in an embroidered tunic. As a result, she looked more than ever like a big couch turned upright and propped on heels. She wore eyeliner, lipstick, and rouge. The effect would have been comic if she hadn't been so monumental.