Judenstaat (9 page)

[Photograph of the family on a picnic by the Elbe, sandstone cliffs in the distance. Dmitri Abramowitz frankly stout now, in a porkpie hat and shirtsleeves, holding the hand of a dark-eyed toddler, as Leahla's head bows over a child in her arms.

Cut to Leahla Abramowitz holding that same photograph.]

That's the last picture I have of him. He was on duty, and a fascist shot him. A sharpshooter. That was in 1954. I want to show my grandson his stone.

[Leahla Abramowitz stands at a cemetery with a young child, and together they pass black and white markers, each at the head of a rectangle of grass, ivy, or flowers. In the distance is the Elbe, and beyond it, those same white and black and yellow sandstone cliffs.

She pauses at last before a marker with Dmitri Abramowitz's name engraved in German and Cyrillic, and above it, a red star. Then she whispers something to her grandson, who turns his face towards the camera, fleetingly and with impatience. He picks up a stone. She guides his hand to place that stone on top of his grandfather's marker.]

I always like our tradition, to put a stone on top. I don't know why. He doesn't know we've been here. But someone will know.

[She faces the camera.]

Honestly, can I tell you what it means, living here? In this country? It means facing it all over again, every day. It means swallowing my own
kishkas.
But I can tell you, it always means really, really knowing—

[Off camera: Unidentified woman's voice:]

Knowing what?

[Abramowitz looks right at the camera.]

That I'm alive.

 

6

KRAVITZ
turned off the projector. He addressed Judit in German. “Well?”

It was clear that Kravitz knew that Judit was familiar with what she had seen. He'd watched her watch it. Through the moss and rust of his beard and tangled side locks, his face was undeniably expressive.

Brusquely, Judit replied in Yiddish, “
I'll pass. Not what I'm looking for.
”

Now there was no doubt. It was the same voice Kravitz had heard off-camera at the end of the film. He clearly struggled to find a way to turn this information to his own advantage, and persisted in his awful German. “So maybe you still want to make a business. The man who watched, you want to know a little more about him. A real character. Watch out. He took a special interest, I think, in the lady who made that movie.”

She didn't say a word.

“Interest in you,” Kravitz said, “and your husband.”

Judit's hand was in her pocket now. Her fingers closed around the note. She said, “My husband is dead.”

She wanted Kravitz to deny it. She tried to will his mouth into forming the words and telling her that Hans had sat in that same screening room just where she had been sitting, and that for a price, she could know where he'd gone. Instead, Kravitz reverted to Yiddish. “
This country is built on a cemetery. When the dead rise, they'll want their bones back. You need to put that in the film you're making now. I think you already got some very interesting material. Am I right?
”

The screening room was cramped and sticky with the residue of who-knows-what. What had possessed her, to come here? What stupid hope? Nobody sent a messenger. The messenger had sent himself, and fueled with pornographic movies, he had found her alone in the dark.

She finally asked, “
Does he have a name
—
the one who takes a special interest?
”

“
You think I ask those questions of outsiders? I wouldn't ask him any more than I'd ask you,
” Kravitz said. “
But he's a jailbird. That much I can tell you. I've got an eye for it.
” He removed the film from the projector and put it back in its case. Then his gaze rose from below those red eyebrows like oil rising through dirty water. “
Don't take chances. Look what they did to your husband. You want protection, I make arrangements.
”

Judit said, “
You don't have anything I want.
”

Kravitz said, “
Suit yourself.
”

 

7

EVEN
before she'd reached the bottom of the stairs, Shaindel had asked what film Judit was making and interrogated her to the point where she was forced to admit that she worked for the museum that had been the source of what they'd seen upstairs. To Shaindel, this was as exotic as working for the Stasi.

“Then did you see all those bodies?” Shaindel asked.

“Somebody took those pictures a long time ago,” Judit said. “As evidence.” Then she had to explain about the archive and the photographs and footage that she catalogued and sometimes edited and spliced into the films approved for public distribution. Shaindel had never heard of the National Museum. As the two walked back to the center of Loschwitz, where Judit hoped to catch a bus back to her dormitory, she addressed question after question and described the rooms devoted to the Golden Age of Ashkenaz, the Hall of Bundist Heroes, and the exhibit on Judenstaat's early history.

Shaindel had heard of Leopold Stein. “Oh, Stein the butcher,” she said, with a throwaway authority that Judit couldn't counter. Then: “It doesn't matter where Jews live. When the Messiah comes, there won't be any countries.”

“This is your country,” Judit said in German, which Shaindel had continued speaking. “You need to know our history.”

“It's not real history,” said Shaindel.

“What's not?”

“That movie. All those dead people naked.”

“It know it's hard to see,” Judit said. “But it's all true.”

There'd been debate about incorporating those photographs. The National Museum had a strict policy about Churban artifacts: they must originate with the survivors. Purists considered images like the ones they'd used sheer voyeurism. Judit had argued at the time that the Soviets who took the photographs weren't pornographers. They were documenting genocide. If the pictures made people feel violated, that was the whole point.

Judit thought all this, but what she said to Shaindel was: “My mother survived Auschwitz.”

Shaindel asked, “What's that?”

Judit stopped walking. They'd come to the center of Loschwitz. Most of the shops were closed, though a few basement enterprises were open for business. What light there was filtered through their grated windows, and turned the dark street gray. How many of those shopkeepers came from Hungary or Poland and had family who died in Auschwitz or Treblinka? Then Judit remembered. The black-hats believed that the slaughter was a consequence of Jews like Judit who had turned their backs on God. Maybe Shaindel's ignorance was better than what someone might have taught her.

Finally, Judit said, “Auschwitz was a camp.”

“Oh,” Shaindel said. She must have known that Judit had left something out of the story, but she didn't pursue it. “Like an army camp. Where they train people.”

Now, the public bus passed by. Judit flagged it down and boarded before she had to say what people were trained to do.

*   *   *

Judit hadn't seen the last of Shaindel. The next day, the girl appeared in the archive. Judit had been trying to concentrate on the Anniversary Project, and began by sorting through her earliest material, a 1922 Ernst Lubitsch spectacle about the life of Moses Mendelssohn, and faded Dresden footage that included incidental glimpses of the Great Synagogue before its destruction. No historical reckoning. Nothing explosive. She knew that Kornfeld would reject it all, and the futility was a great comfort to her.

Maybe Judit would be fired. Then she would melt away somewhere untraceable, and she could stop looking over her shoulder every time she turned a corner or walked through that isolated underpass by her dormitory. She was edgy, rattled, and at the same time stubborn about interruptions. Thus, it was no surprise that Shaindel had been knocking insistently for at least five minutes before Judit—who'd assumed it was Sammy Gluck—opened the door.

“Shouldn't you be at school?” Judit asked.

Shaindel shook her head emphatically. She thrust a bulging plastic bag at Judit and said, “For your movie.”

Judit had no choice but to put the bag down on the worktable and remove what was in it: twenty videotapes, including
Rambo II, Nine to Five,
and
The Breakfast Club.
Most of them had no slipcovers at all.

“He watched these too,” Shaindel said. “Can you use them? Are you mad at him? Why is it so dark in here?” Then, “Who's that?” She'd seen the ghost.

The ghost saw her too. It stared back with detachment. Judit fully expected it to sweep the tapes to the floor, but it just receded in its smooth, uncanny way and assessed the titles Shaindel had deposited. Judit watched Shaindel watch the ghost and fought her own sense of utter violation.

The girl's eyes followed the specter with curiosity, and she repeated her question. “Who's that, Judit?”

“My husband,” Judit answered.

“Do you work here too?” Shaindel asked the ghost. Judit was so sure the ghost would answer, or do something worse, that she broke in.

“He's not alive.”

“Oh,” Shaindel said. Her mouth tightened. “So he's a dybbuk. I've heard of them.” She turned back to the ghost and started to say something else, but Judit interrupted.

“He doesn't talk. He's just here.”

“Why?” Shaindel asked.

“He just lives here,” Judit said savagely.

Shaindel didn't look convinced. “When a dybbuk comes back, it's because it forgot something. Or because it wants something. Unless you visited the grave and looked back. You should never look back. Did you call out to the Evil One?” she asked as though it were an ordinary question.

Maybe it was an ordinary question for those people. After all, they believed the dead would rise from their graves and want their bones back. They considered Judenstaat a massive cemetery, so it was only natural that Shaindel would see the ghost and speculate about its motives, but Judit didn't care. “He's just here,” she said. “He lives here. And you'd better leave before he hurts you.”

Shaindel departed with reluctance. She said, “You'd better find out what he wants or he'll end up inside you. That's what dybbuks do, if you're not careful.”

*   *   *

When the Stasi agent appeared for his November visit, before he rose from his couch in the sitting room, Judit said to him, “So I guess you know I was in Loschwitz.”

He was on his feet now, courteous as ever. “I know. Good afternoon.”

It was impossible to throw that man off-balance. Deflated, Judit sat down in the couch without his invitation. If that struck the agent as unusual, he gave no sign. He asked the usual questions about the bus line to the dormitory and her detour through the underpass.

“You realize,” he said, “we'd sooner you didn't risk it. It's an enclosed area and not as secure as we'd like.”

“What? You think someone's going to shoot me down there? Who? The old Saxon lady who sells violets?”

“Not her,” said the Stasi agent. He smiled a little, or at least the edges of his mouth turned up. He had on his winter coat. Over the past three and a half years, Judit had seen the man so often that she could mark the changes of season by the brown corduroy, the black wool, the tan worsted, the beige trench coat. He went on. “In reference to the earlier matter, I must remind you that when you leave our jurisdiction, it makes our work very difficult.”

“Surely you could have followed me,” Judit said. “You'd just need the right kind of hat.”

“Mrs. Klemmer, if you want to make a joke at my expense, I certainly won't stop you. But I'm sure you're aware that the residents of Loschwitz are not like us.”

“I'd say they're a lot like you,” Judit said. “Dead certain. Except when they're not, if you know what I mean.”

He shifted in his seat. Why was she playing with him? She had no proof that he'd been Hans's bodyguard, but his very discomfort fueled her own suspicions. He had not protected Hans. What made her think he could protect anyone else? She could just hand him that note, and his reaction would tell her more than she knew now.

The agent had run through his list of required questions and had to get on with the rest of his miserable day. Where did he go after these monthly interviews? Did he walk to the phone booth on the corner and file a report? Did he take a taxi to an office full of surveillance equipment and watch somebody else? No, improbably, she sensed she was his only case, and he was stuck with her.

Still, he certainly seemed unusually anxious to move on, and finally, he got up, and for the first time in three and a half years, he was the one to end the interview.

“So any time I need you? Is that what you're going to say?”

“Any time you'll let us help you,” the agent said.

“Well, I needed you that night,” Judit said. She didn't elaborate, but she looked right at him.

He bowed his head and buttoned his coat. “It's cold out, Mrs. Klemmer. I hope you don't have any great plans. If you don't mind my saying so, get some rest. Your health hasn't improved since my last visit. You may not realize you're sweating. Do you own a thermometer?”

“I don't,” Judit said. She took his card, and held it in her hand as she watched him go.

If she ran, she could catch him. The wind swept across the windows, and the hallway was so bitter cold that Mrs. Cohen the porter wore her coat indoors. As Judit walked past her, she looked up and said, “You'd better put on something warmer if you're braving what's out there.”

“I don't have anything warmer,” Judit said.

She looked surprised. “What do they pay you where you work? I've seen Saxons who dress better than you do.”