Judenstaat (3 page)

“You think the prime minister wouldn't recognize her own hometown? What more proof do you need?” Kornfeld appeared to smile as Judit stood to go. “Take care of yourself. You're all flushed. I hope you're not coming down with something. This would be a terrible time.”

*   *   *

It was a terrible time. That note was in the pocket of her duffle coat, the flap secured by a single khaki button. What was she supposed to do with it? Throw it away? She hadn't been present at the trial. Everyone understood, even if she herself did not quite understand what made her avoid reading anything about the case. Why would anyone bother to break in and leave a note like that? It was as though she'd been mistaken for someone else.

After Hans died, she could have had Kornfeld's job. She'd been up for a promotion that would have put her in line for the directorship. She turned it down. Nothing was more revolting than being the public face of any institution. At the same time, it was clear that she was not just another museum employee. For one thing, she was left alone. For months now, there'd been pressure to transfer the entire film archive to video and move her work upstairs. It never happened. Judit just said no.

She had been working in the archive since she had moved back to Dresden with Hans years ago, compiling material for the permanent exhibit on the early history of Judenstaat. Her film montages were projected on screens between glass cases of artifacts, and she made a practice of searching through bins at flea markets or asking pensioners if they had family photographs or reels of film stored in the attic. She had no use for stock footage. Her methods were considered controversial. Moving images in exhibits were something new, and this was the sort of institution where the gatekeeper was the same man Judit knew as a girl. When she signed in that first morning, there was ageless, friendly Mr. Rosenblatt with his full head of white hair under the official sky-blue cap. They hadn't been surprised to see each other. The National Museum was an old-fashioned place.

Still, that was changing. Last year, Judit had attended a trade show where sleek young people in turtleneck sweaters filled screens with fuzzy images that they manipulated into other images with even worse contrast and resolution. Something called Avid, weird dots called pixels. The very language was repulsive. Her intern Sammy Gluck was there too. He nodded a lot.

Whenever Sammy came down to her film archive, he'd knock like he'd made a mistake. Judit ignored it. Then he'd get more forceful, and she'd have to surface from whatever she was doing and let him in. He was studying computer science at Dresden Polytechnic, and until the trade show, Judit didn't know what his work had to do with hers. Once she knew, she had even less use for him. He spent most of his time three flights up, in something called the Media Room, working on footage that had been transferred to cassettes. When he did look in on Judit, he'd keep hovering and nodding, and blinking at her through his aviator glasses. She used to think he had a crush on her, but he brought his girlfriend once, a very pretty chemistry student. She nodded a lot too.

Sammy once said to Judit, “You know, I saw him.”

“Who?” Judit asked, not very nicely.

“Your husband,” Sammy said.

For a moment, Judit thought he'd seen the ghost. She couldn't decide if she felt relieved or violated. But Sammy had been in that archive countless times and looked right through the ghost of Hans. That wasn't what he'd meant at all.

“My parents took me to hear him conduct. It was still controversial, I mean his appointment. I couldn't believe it when it happened.” Sammy meant the murder; that was clear. Then he added, “Everyone still remembers you. In New York, they'd send us any new equipment we wanted. State of the art. All you'd have to do is sign off on it.” This was his way of telling her that she had authority, and she could claim it any time she chose.

*   *   *

Judit's mother Leonora never understood why she had turned down the promotion. If Judit had real connections, she could have found her a desk job in the National Museum and she wouldn't have to take the forty-minute bus ride to her desk job at the nursing home. Leonora lived in the Altstadt and could see the museum from her balcony.

The apartment had been reclaimed by her husband after the war. His family had lived in Dresden for generations, mostly in that apartment. The place was too big, room after room, light bulbs that always needed replacing, furniture under dull plastic slipcovers. Aside from the kitchen and the parlor, it looked like no one lived there anymore, but if she gave it up, Leonora said, who knows where they would put her? Probably across the street from the nursing home. When Judit pointed out that this would eliminate a long commute, her mother shook her head.

“You don't know what it's like out there. Those black-hat parasites spreading out from Loschwitz. You can't look at the wall without seeing a dozen of their
pashkevils
telling me to cover my hair and not to show my elbows in the summer.” She switched to Yiddish. “
Imagine if I turned on the light on Shabbos, they'd burn the place down. I'd be a prisoner in my own home.
”

Leonora had no use for black-hats, but it didn't keep her from lapsing into their jargon when she got the chance. Like everyone else she knew, she flew the Stripes and Star from her balcony on May 14th and hung on every word of Prime Minister Sokolov's speeches, but there was still something of the Polish girl remaining, and the Yiddish remained with it. So did some superstitions. Every October, Lenora made a heavy New Year's dinner of brisket and honey-cake. October was also the anniversary of Rudolph Ginsberg's death, and Leonora—who believed that only backward Jews went to synagogue—paid a black-hat to say Kaddish for him, purchased a memorial candle at the Chabad House, and visited his grave.

They met a year after the war. In their wedding picture, Leonora wears a silky dress that had made do for several brides at their Displaced Persons camp in Gorlitz. She had asked Rudolph to find her a German name and he'd chosen a heroine from a Beethoven opera, which she then asked him to spell for her—both “Leonora” and “Beethoven.” In that photograph, she's skinny and intent—all eyes—clinging to the arm of her abstracted-looking husband like a lemur to a tree.

Rudolph Ginsberg had never completed his degree in biology before he was shipped off to a labor camp in Riga. By the time Judit was born, he worked in Dresden's Hygiene Museum constructing displays on the human body, and writing instructive labels on jars of brains and livers preserved in formaldehyde. One of Judit's earliest memories was of that museum where she opened drawers labeled “Foreign Objects,” filled with oxidized coins and bobby pins, misshapen marbles, most of them well over a century old. They had all been removed from the stomachs of children. As Judit opened drawer after drawer, her father had said, “Isn't it strange, Judi? Here are all these things the children swallowed, but all of the children are dead.” Nobody else's father talked like that. Leonora would say, “You'll scare the child.” But Judit was never scared. She was bewildered. Even then, she knew the difference.

Rudolph died when Judit was in college. Leonora still kept his chair turned to the window. Neither sat in it.

“So I take it you're too busy to visit Daddy this year,” Leonora said.

“I don't see the point,” Judit said. “It's not like he notices.”

“I like to make sure his grave isn't overgrown,” said Leonora, “and the little bush I paid for, nobody watered it. I had to see the caretaker and get it replaced. Those things don't just take care of themselves.” She wrapped a hunk of brisket in heavy foil and loaded a striped plastic tote bag with honey-cake, stewed carrots, and a dozen other things that Judit hadn't asked for.

“Mom, where am I supposed to put all this? My fridge isn't big enough to hold it.”

“Then get a bigger one. Really, I don't see why you stay in a dormitory at your age. You could move back here. It would make a world of sense. You're getting so thin, a strong wind would blow you away.”

“I was always this size,” Judit said.

“It's an observation, not a criticism. Maybe it's the coat. It swallows you, Judi. I know why you won't give it up, but take a look at yourself in the mirror and you'll admit. It's a man's coat. And an old one too.”

“I know it's old,” said Judit. “And I know it's a man's coat.”

“You take everything I say the wrong way today. What's the matter? You're so pale. Have a banana. You know they used to be impossible to get, and just today they were on sale. It's just a little bruised.”

Judit told her mother that nothing was the matter, but in the end, of course, she took the banana, along with the striped bag full of food she knew she wouldn't eat, and once she was outside, she put her free hand into the enormous pocket of the duffle coat that had belonged to Hans and put the banana there. Next to the note.

 

4

They lied about the murder.

What she should really do is give the note to the Stasi agent who visited her dormitory once a month. That agent was unfailingly polite, so tactful and insistent that he was there for her protection that he would probably just take that note and pursue the matter without further questions. After what happened in the archive, how could she doubt that she needed protection?

Yet she remembered the form that protection took, the constant presence of that agent by her bed, the oppression of that tact, the way she felt all of the air pumped out of her and something else pumped in. No—it had been more than three years since the murder and not once had she asked a thing of that man. She would be vulnerable. So what?

Her silence didn't make her complicit in a crime. No matter what lie they told her, Hans was just as dead. He might as well be murdered by the Saxon fascist with his forty-year-old gun. He might as well be on a list of Saxons who collaborated with the Jewish state. The case was closed. She'd throw the note away. She did not throw the note away.

*   *   *

The bus took Judit from Altstadt, where she worked and where her mother lived, to Neustadt, gray with concrete, glass, and steel. There was a new bridge across the Elbe: the Bridge Between East and West. That bridge had been called Augustus Bridge before the war, and then Mendelssohn Bridge, and its most recent incarnation was white and sleek, with a translucent crest of cables. Judit used to see swallows dipping and soaring below. She never saw them now. Somebody must have cleared their nests away.

What happened to the fabric store with the embroidered butterflies in the window, or the coffee shop where she and Hans used to get pancakes on Sunday mornings before rehearsals? Once there had been electric trams that took you everywhere. There used to be a little steam train in the park run by children dressed as conductors and engineers. Like every child in Judenstaat, Judit had longed to be an engineer on that train. The chosen few asked for tickets solemnly and pulled levers in signal boxes even in the rain. Those trains were gone.

As recently as last year, Judit liked to get herself ice cream at a little stand on Joseph Roth Square, and the last time she'd tried to find it, the stand had been torn down and replaced by a glass door stenciled with some acronym: DonReDox or RonDexDo, maybe a Danish corporation or one of those upstart companies financed by Soviet Jews who'd started emigrating in the past few years. That was Sokolov's doing—some trade agreement. It was easy to get past the checkpoints now.

Since Prime Minister Sokolov had taken office, the homely, hopeful Dresden that had been rebuilt after the war had disappeared. They were still tearing up the trolley tracks, and half of the streets were disemboweled and crosshatched with orange safety fencing. Lanes were widened, cables buried, thoroughfares constructed over the rubble of what Judit still remembered.

Because of the construction, Judit had to get off her bus early and walk the last half-mile to her dormitory, through an underpass, around the engineering building of the Polytechnic, and across a complicated intersection where cars waited five minutes for a signal change. She liked passing all those cars on foot. Her mother always wanted her to take a taxi home. That was out of the question. Why put herself at some driver's mercy? She could cross against the light, walk against traffic on a one-way street, and if she wore herself out, that was nobody's business but her own.

*   *   *

Judit's dormitory was built in the '50s when everything was painted the same Judenstaat yellow. There was an old-fashioned coffee bar and canteen in the lobby, and the only available telephone was in a booth outside. Even the porter, a snarling lady in a hairnet, had been on the job since the building opened.

“Hello, Mrs. Cohen,” Judit said as she arrived. She feigned a brightness she didn't feel.

Mrs. Cohen responded by flipping a page of a movie magazine. Richard Gere was on the cover. Even the magazine was coated with dust. Her cousin in America had sent it over, and although she probably couldn't read English, she always had it in front of her so she would look occupied.

Judit asked her, “Would you like some brisket?”

“Don't keep food in your room. It'll spoil,” said Mrs. Cohen, and she took the brisket for herself, and left Judit a few jars of stewed carrots and prunes and the honey-cake. That dormitory couldn't last. It was bound to be demolished. Judit was amazed it had been overlooked this long.

 

5

JUDIT
had lived in just such a dormitory fifteen years ago at the University of Leipzig, but back then, the porter was a crone who liked spy novels. She'd never look up from that book when Judit slipped past her after a night with Hans.

Hans couldn't live in a dormitory. He was distinctly unofficial. Some colleges did admit Saxons, but it was understood that the few spots in elite institutions had to go to Jews. Yet there he was, sitting next to Judit in the middle of a lecture on the Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. He didn't look so very different from the other students, though there was nothing on his desk but his elbows. He leaned forward with a distant smile.