Judenstaat (4 page)

As ever, Judit was taking notes like a madwoman, and her hair kept falling in her eyes. She pushed it away compulsively. Then someone pushed it for her. She stopped short and blushed. There was Hans, looking right at her. She couldn't decide if his eyes were gray or blue. She couldn't take any more notes after that.

Later, he said, “I'm glad you're not one of those girls who uses hairspray.”

“I should,” said Judit. “Or I should get it cut short.”

“It's like lamb's wool. The golden fleece. Or not golden. Soft, though.”

She gathered that fleecy hair in one hand and twisted it up in a way she'd seen other girls do. It stayed in place.

With that same grace and ease, they walked together. Hans had a loping, unapologetic tall man's walk. He didn't carry any books. He took her own substantial knapsack, slung it on one shoulder, and said, “What's in here, anyhow?”

“Three dictionaries,” Judit said. “A compilation of Aramaic translations from Hebrew. And of course my notebooks.”

“Of course,” said Hans.

They had coffee in a shop Judit had never noticed, a wood-paneled alcove with three round tables, bottles stacked behind the counter, and a weathered Righteous Gentile Certificate that must have dated from the early 1950s. It was a place where Saxons drank. That much was clear, just as it was clear now, in case Judit had doubts, that Hans was Saxon. The men at the bar wore overalls and probably worked as janitors on campus. Hans ordered two coffees with cognac.

The proprietor set those coffees down, and that was when Hans told her that he'd talked his way into the conservatory and had been studying music theory and teaching violin, but he remained distinctly off-the-books.

“So you don't have to sit for examinations?” Judit asked him. “Not at all?”

“Not at all,” Hans said.

“So you go to lectures just because?” Judit shook her head. “You don't take them seriously, though. You were smiling the whole time.”

“Some lectures are a pleasure. I take pleasure seriously. Don't you?”

“I don't know,” Judit said. “I've never had a conversation like this before.” She finished the coffee and cognac, and hurried to her three o'clock linguistics seminar, and some of the grace and strangeness of the encounter carried on. No one knew that she was a little drunk. She heard herself decipher a particularly tangled bit of Aramaic in a way that made Professor Romarowsky say, in a startled voice, “Well, that's a way to look at it, Judit, if one were trying to be original.”

Afterwards, as planned, they met in the library stacks. Hans showed her the libretto of an opera from the '60s based on the life of Rosa Luxemburg, and he confessed why he had smiled as the professor detailed the specifics of her assassination. “I was thinking about the music.”

“Is it the sort of music that makes you smile?” Judit asked. “It shouldn't be. Not if it's telling the truth.”

“I'll play it for you. There's a listening booth downstairs. I'll bet you never even knew the library had one.”

But Judit persisted. “You need to know this about me. I believe in facts. I believe in documentary history, in things that really happen. And I believe there's such a thing as justice.”

Hans didn't answer for a moment. His face was very close to hers. His shaggy, light blond hair was pushed back from his forehead. It was a long face, in every sense. The face was more serious than he was, really, or than he had seemed to Judit. Yes, his eyes were gray and narrow. They held her own. He said, “You need to know this about me. I believe in facts too. But I'm not sure I believe in history. And I know I don't believe in justice.” Then, he kissed her.

The kiss didn't come suddenly. After all, their cheeks had been touching as they paged through the libretto, and ever since that morning, she had felt the touch of his fingers in her hair. She had met him in the stacks, knowing that this would happen. Yet to have his mouth on hers just after he'd said he didn't believe in justice made her light-headed. She pulled back to catch her breath.

 

6

UNTIL
the day Hans Klemmer kissed her, Judit had few distractions. She was a few years into a graduate degree in library science and had just curated her first exhibition on postwar Leipzig. She loved choosing the images, laying them side by side on a long, clean table. Should the picture of the concrete mixer by the ruins of the Cathedral go next to the picture of a paint-spattered worker listening to a phonograph?

The exhibition had come off well, and now she was at loose ends, keen to find another project. There was nothing she liked more than sitting in the library all day with a bunch of documents no one had bothered to touch in twenty years. With her pencil between her teeth, she'd decode chicken-scratch until a little bell announced the library was closing. Then she'd find her way back to her dorm with a head full of the past.

But now, Leipzig was about the present. In 1972, Judenstaat had just started getting exports from the West, French and American films, translation of poems by Allen Ginsberg, and of course the kind of music that throbbed through the floor. Everyone smoked marijuana. Young border guards bragged about gathering hallucinogenic mushrooms in the woods by the Protective Rampart. They'd make tea out of them, get sick, and brag about that too.

Of course, there were courtyard parties every night, but after a while, girls stopped inviting Judit. They wrote her off as a prig, the sort of girl who'd belonged to the Junior Bundist League until she was old enough to be a Youth Leader, and kept all her badges and trophies. They would be right. One of those trophies was from Archeology Camp. It was a small brass spade in a block of sandstone: “Junior Excavator: First Class.” She brought it to college.

She'd earned her Junior Bundist history badge by following the path of Elsa Neuman, a martyr from the Churban. The path began at Elsa's home on Budapester Street. Each Junior Bundist had a different address and picture of a martyr, and some of the more ambitious girls brought cameras and handed over their photographs to Mr. Rosenblatt, the guard, who took those pictures with great ceremony and promised to make sure they'd find their way into the Churban wing of the National Museum.

Judit loved the museum: exhibits on the Golden Age of Ashkenaz, and the portraits of Moses Mendelssohn and the Age of Reason, and then, through a passageway of glass, there'd be the Hall of the Churban, stuffed floor-to-ceiling with mementos, photographs of martyrs, accounts from the concentration camps and death camps, all lit by candle-stubs in cheap tin boxes. It was only by climbing out of that hall, and crossing an outdoor terrace, that they could reach the third wing and the final exhibition on the founding of the Jewish state. That moment on the terrace, where they shook away the horror and gazed across Stein Square to the clean, familiar Dresden skyline was like coming back to life.

Elsa Neuman had been forced from her home to a Jew-house just south of the park and soon after, she'd been deported by train from Dresden to Thereisenstadt, where she was murdered. It was weird and moving how Judit and the other girls engaged in following the paths of different martyrs converged on the Dresden train station. Old Saxon ladies sold violets for the girls to leave on the tracks.

Afterwards, there was a final ceremony at the Great Synagogue, an empty lot that—according to the photograph from a book held up by Youth Leader Charlotte Kreutzberger—had once been a magnificent nineteenth-century structure with a hexagonal dome and Moorish interior. The synagogue was burnt by fascists in 1938 on Kristallnacht, and then—Charlotte closed the book for emphasis—when British and American airplanes rained incendiary bombs on Dresden in 1945, the fire returned.

Charlotte was a tall, stern girl with straight black hair and a sonorous alto voice that managed to carry even in the open, in front of the rectangle of grass where the synagogue once stood. She asked the group: “Why wasn't the synagogue rebuilt?”

Few of those girls had been inside a synagogue. They were for old people and black-hats. The question was obviously rhetorical, but Charlotte had the answer.

She swept her arm across that empty rectangle and said, “This is our prayer-house. This is our monument.”

When Judit found treasures buried in odd places, when she reproduced the past without amendment, it was as though she raised the dead. Back then, she kicked a little of that synagogue grass and wondered what the dirt contained.

*   *   *

Summers in Archeology Camp had been the high point of Judit's life. To scrape away coarse sand and clean a fragment of blue tile engraved with oriental patterns common to Jews who traveled with Charlemagne, to fit it seamlessly into a fragment someone found two years ago, nothing could match it. The Jewish settlements were buried under Saxon barns and pigsties and even fascist bunkers. They had been waiting for her for a thousand years.

At night, the campers would toast bread over an open fire, and eat it with honey that would scorch their lips and tongues. Nothing could match the sensation of burnt honey mixed with sand that got into their bread and even into their knapsacks, and the August moon doing crazy things to the black and yellow cliffs of Saxon Switzerland as they sat at the mouth of a pit they'd spent the summer excavating.

So yes, she brought the Junior Excavator trophy to college. She also brought her sewing machine, a graduation gift from Leonora. It fit into its own suitcase. She sewed her own clothes. She would have mended other people's clothes if they'd bothered to ask her. No one asked her. That was the sort of girl she was, at least until Hans Klemmer kissed her.

*   *   *

In 1984, Judit would be using that same machine in the apartment she and Hans had purchased after they'd moved to Dresden. The place was new, and still felt raw and strange, not fully furnished, not their own. When Hans conducted, she liked to stay in her little sewing room, the one they'd hoped to make into a nursery. That's where she was, in her robe, at nine o'clock when the doorbell rang.

It couldn't have been Hans. She sat at the machine for a moment, running a seam down the edge of Hans's new dress shirt. Then she got up and pulled her robe a little tighter. She walked to the door. It was already open. The agent stood there, in his brown hat, with his mild face. He just looked at her. That's when she knew.

*   *   *

Judit had always suspected that the Stasi agent had been Hans's bodyguard and he'd been delegated to her case as a perverse demotion. She could never see him again without reliving that night. Thus, when Mrs. Cohen said, “That man's in the sitting room,” they exchanged a look of resigned complicity that made Judit grateful, yet again, that she lived in the dormitory, particularly when Mrs. Cohen added, “Don't let him go too long. It's common space, after all. The other girls don't like it.”

The sitting room was another artifact. It was supposed to be for gentleman callers. Its big glass partition faced the hallway, and it contained a square modernist chair and two uncomfortable couches. The Stasi agent sat on one of those couches. At some point in the past three years, he'd stopped wearing the hat. Rising, he began, as ever, “Just a courtesy visit.” Then he said, “How are you, Mrs. Klemmer? You look tired.”

“It's the lighting in here,” Judit said. “It makes everyone look tired.”

The agent motioned for her to sit in the chair. She kept on standing. She looked at her watch. She'd found that if she stood and looked at her watch, he'd usually leave sooner, but sometimes he would just say, as he did that day, “Please sit down.”

Then she would have no choice. She'd sit down as he went through his litany of questions about her schedule, her route home, and any changes in her routine.

The agent shook his head. “It's not just the lighting. You're worn out. I believe you're under pressure at work and it's interfering with your health.”

There was a probing quality to this conversation. “I always look like this,” Judit said. “You sound like my mother.”

The agent allowed himself a small, wry smile. “I'm flattered.”

“She'd love a visit from you,” Judit said. “It would impress the neighbors.”

He laughed. “I'm sure the neighbors are already impressed with Mrs. Ginsberg. Returning to the point at hand, if you're running into trouble in the archive, we could help. I've said all along, we have access to resources that would make your job far easier.” The agent did say that. All the time. The fact that his laughter was rueful and disarming did not make Judit like him any better.

She said, “I work best independently.”

“You've made that clear,” the agent said. “But you should understand that your mother and I are alike in putting your welfare first.” Now he did something so quickly that she didn't have time to stop him. He took her hand, turned it over, and checked her pulse. “When is the last time you saw a doctor?”

“Surely you have access to that information,” Judit said.

“We've told you many times that we don't interfere, or pursue trivial questions. Yet there is a question that isn't trivial. In fact, it's a very interesting question.”

He gave Judit a look, half-tender, half-diagnostic, and he hadn't yet released her hand. His fingers pressed in gently. Then, without warning, his gaze hardened and focused in a way that cut through to the bone. Judit had been under that particular microscope before, and the degree of intensity never ceased to startle her. She said, “What question?”

“The question of why you won't let us help you. Is there any other question, Mrs. Klemmer? Is there something else you want to tell me?” And this whole time, the note was on her. Why hadn't she destroyed it? He could smell it. There was nothing about her that this agent didn't know. He didn't pursue it, though. He was no fool. That was the trouble.