Judenstaat (12 page)

But if you let go of ideology, then what is history but a lot of random information, informed by nothing? Judit let the other students make that case, and some of them did. Meanwhile, she sank into herself and thought about the summers when she learned how each layer of sandstone corresponds to an age. With her spade, she had dislodged real things. Those artifacts were just as real as Lehmann's room, with its upright piano and the photograph of the stern-looking lady who had played it once, the china cups and matching teapot, the nine small spoons. Let years do their work and bury that room, and then let Lehmann claim her life was only random bits and pieces. Judit knew better.

Judit felt a fierce ownership of Anna Lehmann even as she felt dismissed by much of what she said. Of course, even then, Judit knew the two emotions were entangled.

 

5

WHAT
Judit said to Hans was, “I wanted to take that teapot and crack it over her head. I mean, what the hell does she expect of me?”

“Why don't you ask her?” Hans said mildly. They had just made love, and the very ease and warmth of lying next to Hans made Judit talk and talk. He usually didn't mind. This time, he felt compelled to say, “You could always drop the class.”

“It's not even in my field,” said Judit. “I just thought maybe I'd learn something, but all I'm learning is that I don't know anything. Plus that picture of her old girlfriend keeps staring at me.”

“She's jealous,” Hans said.

Judit buried her face in the mattress. “Right. Of a library science student. I mean, I'm sure she's really threatened by me. I bet she'll steal all my material and write a Bundist exposé.”

“I mean the girlfriend's jealous,” Hans said. Judit rolled back over and couldn't help but laugh and squirm as Hans held her down. “Watch your step, Lamb. That woman's got such a reputation, even I've heard of her. Don't get too dazzled or I'll think you've fallen in love with her.”

“I'm not in love with her,” Judit insisted. “She's too old!” All the while, Hans pinned her to the bed, and they both hoped it wouldn't collapse from the activity. It was an awful bed.

“So who are you in love with then?”

“You, you, you!” Judit cried, until he fell on top of her and knocked out her breath, which was a good thing because that shut her up. They didn't want the neighbors to complain.

*   *   *

Judit had been spending more and more time in that apartment. On mornings when she'd slip back to her dormitory, what she did and who she was felt palpably apparent. Yes, she was full of sex, and also full of wild anxiety about her circumstances. Would the neighbors complain? Would they report her to the dean who would arrange for Hans to be evicted and expel her from the college? For what? For sleeping with the enemy? Did anybody say that anymore?

When Judit was in Archeology Camp, she was warned to stay close to the group. The implication was that there were Saxons in the area. Charlotte Kreutzberger reported that she'd seen one swimming in a gorge, and when Judit asked her how she knew he was a Saxon, she'd blushed from the neck and whispered, in her ponderous way, “His thing—it wasn't cut.” Until Judit met Hans, she had no idea what Charlotte was talking about.

There were plenty of rumors about Jewish men with Saxon mistresses who would do things that a good Jewish girl would never dream of doing. That was the usual line. Again, until Judit met Hans, she had no idea what that meant either, and then he both told her and showed her how to do it. Then she said, “I guess I'm not so good.”

“I'm glad,” Hans said.

“They'll have to put me in the Hygiene Museum,” Judit said, and when Hans looked baffled, she added, “Because I swallow foreign objects.”

Then Hans said, “Why don't you move in with me?”

Judit had a thousand objections. The apartment was too small, the bed was terrible, they'd never be able to stop talking and making love and therefore he would get no chance to practice violin and she would get no chance to study.

Hans said, “I'll buy you a desk.”

“And I'll buy you a bed.”

“Us a bed,” said Hans. Neither stated the obvious, that Judit couldn't leave the dormitory without making their relationship public, and that was why Hans wanted her to move into the apartment. He tried to prove that he was capable of practicing the violin while she re-copied notes on index cards. He played half an hour's worth of scales and intervals and trills, and she bore this patiently, until he kept moving closer and giving her comical looks over the bow, and then it all dissolved into its natural element and there was nothing to prove at all.

*   *   *

Of course, everyone knew about the two of them already. In the eyes of certain students, it made Judit a much more interesting person. Some girls from the dormitory asked her, shyly, if she'd like to have a drink with them sometime. One of them said, “We're going to a little place by the train station. They make their own wine from a local vineyard. It's Saxon-owned.” Another added, “Is it true they don't use pesticides? That's so authentic.” They were earnest, and in no way mocking. When she begged off, they looked sad, and wandered away, talking about how indigenous cultures can't really be revived, only replicated, stealing a glance at her over their shoulders as though they'd hoped she'd overhear the conversation.

Others were less sympathetic. One boy planted himself in front of her as she was crossing campus: “So I hear you like to be punished.”

“Excuse me?” Judit said.

She tried to sidestep him, but he wouldn't let her pass and shouted in a voice that carried: “You like your men with swastikas and pistols. You like to be pistol-whipped. Let me give you a history lesson, baby.”

“Let me give you one!” She'd raised her voice to match his own and pushed her way forward. “It's 1974. I can do whatever the hell I want!”

He hadn't expected her to shout like that, and he let her pass but called out after her: “They shaved the heads of girls like you in Paris—shaved their heads and paraded them down the fucking street!”

He stood there all alone, looking crazy and stupid in his tight T-shirt and blue jeans, an artifact of another time, and as she walked quickly towards her linguistics tutorial, warmth flooded through her body, half-relief and half-gratitude. She was living in the present, and she was free.

*   *   *

Maybe it was that same impulse that made her consider changing her major to history. Old things were only interesting if she could figure out how they led to who she was and who the awful boy was, and who Hans was too. Hans may insist he had no history, and she would just laugh and let him keep insisting. In the end, she knew that her life's work would be getting to the bottom of Hans Klemmer.

Not that she said this when she went to Anna Lehmann's office. Lehmann had told her students that she had an office—“a dreadful place, no reason for you to go there”—as she did have official business such as writing course waivers and requisitions from the library and so on. When Judit arrived, the door was open. The professor hadn't lied. Her office was, in fact, dismal, small and overstuffed with books that were clearly of no importance. The light was so poor that it took Judit a while to make out Lehmann herself, who appeared to be writing something at her desk.

Judit stood in the doorway. Then Lehmann noticed her and said, “Oh. Yes. Come in, Ginsberg. Sit down if you can manage to remove what's on the chair.”

This, Judit did, not carefully enough, as half a page of something stuck to the varnish. “I ruined it,” Judit said. She was afraid she'd start to cry.

“Ruined what? Child, that's just some bureaucratic nonsense that's been on that chair since August and stuck to it. Some travel fund application. No one will miss it. You're overwrought, dear.”

“No, I'm fine,” said Judit. “I just wanted to ask you about that paper I presented. Should I rewrite it? Keeping in mind what you said about ideology and principles?”

Lehmann asked, “What paper?”

Judit tried not to show that she was hurt. “The one about the 1949 construction contracts.”

“Oh yes, carefully researched,” Lehmann said. “Very fine work.” Judit began to protest, but then Lehmann interrupted. “I've been meaning to tell you, last spring I saw your exhibit on a similar subject. Those photographs. Very well done. Particularly the arrangement. Very little context.”

“I'd meant to do more,” Judit said quickly. “I could have written something up.”

“
Pft. Words on a wall.
” Lehmann's Yiddish took Judit so much by surprise that she answered in that same language.

“
So you like pictures. Why? Because they can mean anything. But isn't that just lazy, Professor?
”

“Rather the opposite,” said Anna Lehmann. Her German was deliberately distancing, and Judit felt embarrassed by both the initial intimacy and the shift back to formal discourse. Lehmann went on. “You have a talent in that direction. Make people work. Create mysteries. Let others solve them. Never solve the mysteries for them. Which is of course…”

She was going to say that of course that was the problem with the seminar paper, but instead, she sank deeper into the chair, and Judit realized it wasn't a desk chair at all, but an elaborate velveteen armchair that almost matched the pattern on Professor Lehmann's dress. She disappeared into that chair, and something sparked. She'd lit a cigarette.

Then she said, “Which is of course the beauty of archival work. Its power is insidious. Its hand is light. You have a light hand, Ginsberg.”

Not sure how to respond, Judit said, “Thank you.”

“Keep it nimble and precise. And keep it off his
putz,
young lady.”

Judit thought she'd heard wrong. She hadn't. Lehmann stared out from the depths of that armchair, smiling lasciviously and pulling on that cigarette. It looked—was this possible?—as though she'd winked. Judit watched all of this as from a distance, her own cheeks burning, Lehmann's cigarette held between two fingers as she blew a trail of smoke in her direction. Judit finally said, “Professor Lehmann, I don't know what to say.”

“Then don't say anything at all,” said Lehmann.

“I don't want to get in trouble. I don't want to get expelled.”

“Nonsense,” Lehmann said. “Who gets expelled for that these days? It's practically a degree requirement. And a pretty girl like you, I'm surprised the wolves have kept away for this long.”

“He's not a wolf. He's a musician.” Then, “And he's a Saxon, Professor, but you know that already.”

“Do I?” Lehmann stubbed out her cigarette. “I can hardly keep track of everything I know. The Saxon Question. Fascinating. There's a dreadful piece in last year's
Journal of Historical Inquiry.
No one has really done justice to the Saxon Question. Perhaps you will, my dear.”

Judit retreated from that office, angered, flattered, belittled, and fascinated. She felt dirty. She also felt like rushing back to the apartment and telling Hans that Anna Lehmann had seen her exhibition, and that was probably the reason why she'd been admitted to her seminar. Also, on a level she couldn't quite acknowledge, Lehmann had given the two of them her blessing, but that, she wouldn't tell him.

Lehmann's own story was half a rumor. Yet that rumor was what led students to vie for a place in her seminar and was probably the reason why she'd been kept on through any controversy. She and Leopold Stein were lovers long ago.

 

6

WHAT
Anna Lehmann actually said was, “Oh, Leopold Stein.” After a dreamy pause, “Leo and I were lovers.” Judit never actually heard her say it, but of course, stories like that do get around. In spite of all the physical evidence, or maybe because of the physical evidence, the story was believed to be true.

Photographs of young Lehmann were awfully arresting. She was a model for some of the great Berlin photographers of her day, not a conventional beauty, but with what some called “the head of a lioness,” a strong jaw, Tartar cheekbones, and thickly lashed eyes. Her hair was black, and she wore it loose across magnificent shoulders. She'd been a student at Heidelberg, liberated by the security of her position as the only daughter of a judge and a woman with a generous allowance from her own wealthy family. She was a child of Weimar when there were no restrictions on education for Jews and few for women, born at precisely the right time. She wore her privilege like a fur coat, unapologetically. She had friends everywhere.

As a child, she had a weak chest, so her parents sent her to a sanitarium in Switzerland with a nanny who taught her French. She'd mix with other patients who came from France or England or Romania or Italy, and she would charm them with her precocious questions. Afterwards, she'd spend summers at one country house or another, collecting languages the way another girl might collect butterflies. She'd pin those specimens down and examine them with a good-natured vigor that was a little frightening to those who didn't know her.

In Heidelberg, a casual circle gathered in her room for rolls and coffee, and young Lehmann would question them each in turn about—for example—his opinion of Baptized Jews. At least half of those present fit that description, and it was both a relevant and a tactless subject. She'd blink her little black eyes and classify the topic into its spiritual and intellectual components, and it was around that time when someone would say something like, “Well, it's just easier, Anna.” She'd reply, “In fact, you have a point. Maybe I should try it. Do I have to take my clothing off? Will you come with me and watch?”

That was Lehmann, both clinical and playful. Her father, when he noticed her at all, felt that his girl needed to settle down. Her mother, who was a good deal sharper than her husband, replied, “Don't worry about Anna. She likes her life too much to threaten it in any way.” Certainly, aside from her originality, there was no cause for scandal. Or not yet. In 1929, when Lehmann completed her degree, her mother asked only two things of her: that she not run through her allowance and that she not get pregnant.