Judenstaat (29 page)

Judit was startled. “When did you get here?”

“Oh, I just arrived,” Lehmann said. “Nobody shows up on time. Seven-thirty is more appropriate. When one has gone to enough of these receptions, one learns to maneuver in such a way that one needn't interact with other human beings. Unless,” she added, “you have a preference for interacting with human beings. I thought not.” She took out a cigarette and lit it.

“So tell me, how long did it take to dig that hole?” Judit asked. She'd been so certain that Lehmann would follow her train of thought that it took a while for her to realize that nothing in particular had passed across her old professor's face.

“In general, it doesn't take long, if one has a strong back and a willing spirit. Who knows what we'll dig up next? The thought exhausts me.” She sank into the bench as though it were a divan and sucked on her cigarette. Smoke came out through her nose. “And off it goes into the marketplace of ideas. As though ideas were cabbages and one placed them next to other cabbages. Red, white, green, purple. In the end, it's just a cabbage.”

“Professor,” Judit said, “I'm talking about the synagogue.”

“What do you mean, child?” Lehmann asked. Then, she glanced at Judit's purse and added sharply, “Somebody's been playing you for a fool.” And finally, “You're not a fool. You check your sources. You won't go forward on the basis of rumor and fabrication.”

It was a relief to talk to Lehmann, even as she smoked and made wry and dismissive comments. If Judit could describe what she had seen, surely Lehmann would know enough to confirm or deny, and as she outlined the contents, she could hear her own voice break. Lehmann nodded, and when Judit reached the point where Stein spoke to the crowd, she interrupted.

“You consider these materials important?”

“I think they will surprise some people,” Judit said.

“I don't see why,” said Lehmann. “Did they surprise you?”

“Yes,” said Judit. “That Stein would say that. And it happened under his orders.”

“Ginsberg,” said Lehmann, “it's time we lost our illusions about how this state was founded. What was it Weiss wrote? The very thing that makes men brothers makes them butchers. Of course, Weiss didn't think that Jews were human beings at all. No. Jews are demons.” She seemed about to laugh, but thought better of it.

Judit went on. “You knew about this.”

“There's nothing to know,” Lehmann said. “It was the only possible statement Leo could have made back then. And so he made it. And maybe,” Lehmann said, adding the next words slowly, “it made him.” She stubbed her cigarette out in a portable ashtray she kept in her purse.

*   *   *

After all, what is a founder? Who is the embodiment of the age? When Lehmann knew Stein in Berlin, he was young and full of life. One could not help but give way to his enormous appetite. He gobbled people up, even the trim, hard little beast that Lehmann had been back then, and she'd allowed herself to get caught between his big, white teeth. With time, that appetite had grown, and everyone and everything was gobbled up, but after the Churban, the nature of the beast—the nature of all beasts—had changed.

She'd been in Switzerland, working as a caretaker for an old blind lady, and after breakfast, she would read her ten pages of a novel by Émile Zola and ten pages of a novel by Thomas Mann. The lady's house overlooked the mountains, and Lehmann's bedroom was as big as the apartment she had fled in Heidelberg. Every afternoon, when she'd received her five newspapers and sat reading them on the deck while the lady napped, she'd taken her remorse and sharpened her wit against it until the remorse wore down and the wit could cut through steel. Such was her late girlhood, and she thought she'd hardened. She used the woman's large library to review her Latin and teach herself Greek, and sometimes she would walk to town to have coffee with the Russian expatriates—Whites of course—who tried to sleep with her. She perfected her Russian in those years, both spoken and written, and had her first affair with a woman, a former ballerina, but that wasn't what Judit wanted to know. That was another story.

What Judit wanted to know was about Stein. But why did Judit want to know about Stein? Why didn't she want to know about the ballerina who was a few years older than Lehmann, a free spirit whose father perished in the Russian Civil War? Why didn't Judit want to know about the other expatriates, awful middle-aged men, self-parodies with monocles and Tsarist medals? Why didn't she want to know about the blind lady? She was elderly and gentle, a dear family friend who happened to have a house where Anna could live safely and study in peace, and who had no children, and thus left her a portion of her estate when she died, the balance of which allowed her to spend the first few months after the war in London and Paris until she received a telegram. “Why travel? Work here. Indeed.”

Lehmann received that telegram as she stood in a kimono in the hallway of a gorgeous hotel, with a cup of coffee in her hand. Her hair was very long then, the only time she'd ever worn it long. That “Indeed” got her smiling. Why not? What was she going to do in Paris aside from lounge around and play with a couple of ballerinas? “Indeed” for all practical purposes meant “In bed.” With her current connections, it wasn't hard for Lehmann to book a ticket to Berlin and show her passport and documents, and before she could change her mind, she was standing in the rubble of Dresden, with dust and mud all over her expensive shoes, and a scrawny Jew leading her past Soviet barracks to a big, gray tent.

The tent was open. There was a desk inside, really a plank between two filing cabinets. She recognized Stein's back; it was a recognizable back, wide and meaty, and of course there was that famous hair. She could not remember now if she was the first to speak, or maybe say, “In fact.” Such details were erased when the man turned around.

He had that beard. That was the first thing anyone noticed. But then she saw what was behind that beard, a mouth half-sunken, and eyes like lead. He got up and said, “I'm glad you came, Anna.”

“My God,” said Anna.

He gestured her over, and she'll admit that she approached him with hesitation. Then he kissed her on the mouth and told her to sit down. “You've come to work. Good. You'll get your fill of facts. I'll get you a secretary.” When she started to speak again, he interrupted. “She'll be pretty. I have a girl in mind.”

“What sort of facts?” she asked, although she already knew it was the wrong question. She was thrown by the way he looked at her, by the efficiency of the exchange, and by the chastity of that kiss.

Stein brushed the question aside and continued. “There are thousands—thousands in this place alone who will give you all the material you need. And don't be sparing. You'll use all your languages, including Hebrew. Then you'll translate and the secretary will write everything down, every description, every name, but in good, clear Russian, Anna. That's important.”

Before Anna Lehmann could ask about the room that she'd been promised, before she could so much as leave her suitcase at the door, Leopold Stein rose from his seat and took her arm and told her to leave her suitcase in the tent. He had something to show her. His arm felt hard and cold. All of the flesh he'd worn so wonderfully as a young man had worn away. She noticed that he stank. But she'd come this far; she had come far enough to let him lead her across the mud and cold and the ridges of the tracks from tanks. This was in 1946.

He walked to the edge of a great pit. It was a quarter of a kilometer wide, and she couldn't see its bottom. He said, “Our people dug this. By hand. Imagine, Anna. They could barely lift their feet a month ago. But they did this by themselves, and in a week. In midwinter. That's what it means.”

“What what means?” Lehmann asked him.

“The work you'll do,” Stein said. He told her that men would be lining up, come daytime, and women too. She ought to get some sleep. He implied that she would share his bed that night, and although she'd traveled there for just that purpose, she wondered if it was in her interest to decline. Stein must have felt it. Perhaps that's why he said, “How strong is your stomach, Anna?”

“Strong enough,” she replied, with some of the bravado that had brought her to him in the first place.

“Strong enough to fill that pit?”

“Indeed.” Anna hardly knew what she was saying. He stood close to her now, enclosed her in his decomposing overcoat. She couldn't know what Stein knew. She hadn't been with those survivors and seen them return to life for the sole purpose of digging that pit because they knew it would be filled. And she couldn't know what her work would be for the next six months, through the spring, as she took down names and descriptions of Germans and turned those descriptions over to the Soviets, who rounded them up and shipped them to Dresden. No, not six million. But enough to fill that pit and others across liberated territory. Each of those Germans had a history, and based on the testimony of the Jews who named them, those Germans would be shot in the head and thrown into the pit.

*   *   *

“Don't say you're surprised,” said Lehmann. “You've heard much worse. Seen worse. You've documented this century, and now we're near the end of it. Imagine that.”

Judit said, “There are documents.”

“There are always documents, somewhere,” Lehmann said. “These are probably in Moscow. After all, we didn't fire a shot. Perhaps if we'd been in Palestine, we'd be the agents of our own salvation, and we would have had guns of our own. But that is just speculation. No, all we did was dig, my dear. Just tell the truth and dig. Is that a crime?”

Outside, the twilight had turned into evening. By now, the hall inside was packed with journalists, with dignitaries, with waiters bearing little plates of crackers and caviar. The very flow of history ran through that brilliant hallway, and on the veranda, Lehmann lit another cigarette and adjusted herself on the bench. The look she gave Judit was no challenge, simply an assessment.

“Well, it's bound to come out eventually. Everything does. With the way things are headed, every file will be open within the next five years, and there will be so much to read—so much—that people will have to choose what to remember. But now? Think hard, dear. All things have their proper time and place.” Lehmann gave a grunt and pushed herself to her feet. “Speaking of which, we should go back inside.”

Judit said, “Durmersheimer knows.”

“I'm sure a lot of people know,” Lehmann said. “How is that knowledge useful to them? You never ask yourself that question. You've got a self-destructive streak, Ginsberg. And you always get yourself into hot water. That's when cabbages begin to stink, isn't it? When they're in hot water? When they start to cook?”

Then, even through the walls, they heard applause explode. One surprise guest had arrived. It was Mikhail Gorbachev, flown in for the private screening, and later there would be talk that he shouldn't have come, that he'd taken things too far, and that he would pay for it later. Judit and Anna Lehmann both missed the spectacle of Gorbachev kissing Helena Sokolov, first on both cheeks and then on the mouth, and though the second guest had been delayed, the lights flashed on and off three times. The film would begin shortly.

Yet Judit persisted. “My husband is dead because he knew about this.”

“About what? The Soviet atrocities against the Saxons? They're the subject of the film we're about to see. About those lost souls who lined up at my tent and told me horror stories? You've catalogued those stories too. So did those lost souls kill your husband? Did I kill him? Who is your quarrel with, Ginsberg?”

“Somebody killed him. Because he won't forget.”

“So is your quarrel with memory?”

“I can't forget,” Judit said helplessly. “I can't forget him.”

“And so you avenge him. Just as Stein avenged the dead. And so did I. You know,” said Lehmann, “the dead can only say one thing: Avenge me. It's a motif. It's as reliable as death itself, my dear.” She looked, critically, at the end of her cigarette. “What you might ask yourself is this: What do the living say?”

 

8

From Helena Sokolov's Anniversary Address Televised immediately after the screening of the documentary: “We Have Survived Them,” May 14th, 1988.

Tonight, we have watched an extraordinary film. What is extraordinary about this film? I will say first that it is frank, and that it is courageous, and that it is of the moment. It is the embodiment of the extraordinary times in which we live. Forty years after our founding, businesses from around the world flock to our country and pour their resources into our economy. We see the results in the towers rising throughout the nation, in our new roads, new rail lines, new industries. And we will continue to grow. I have said time and time again that when a girl like me can stand before this body and tell the truth, everything is possible.

Forty years after our founding, two girls like me have found each other. Each has suffered a tragedy. The first, we all know. Judit Klemmer was a young bride when she lost her husband, whose life was cut short as he raised his baton over the Dresden Orchestra on this very day four years ago. His legacy of tolerance lives on through the work you saw tonight. The second story is no less compelling. Fredericka Shumaker was six months old when she was abandoned on the Brandenburg border in 1953. She was raised in Germany, but as you saw tonight, she found her way back to our country, and what she found here has made you reconsider everything you've known about our early years and everything you thought about the future.

Judenstaat is forty years old today. We've lived through challenging times. We have moved from an uneasy infancy to childhood to adulthood, and against all odds, have built ourselves a state that has surpassed the expectations of our founders. We have survived. But we are more than a nation of survivors. And I will say it now: it is not enough for a nation to survive. A nation must live.