Judenstaat (7 page)

Now Leonora addressed Judit in Yiddish. “
Never trust a man who talks about freedom. They're the ones who trap you and get you into trouble.
”

“
Mom, I'm not in trouble,
” Judit said. Then, “
You know he can understand Yiddish.
”

“
I can't speak it, though,
” Hans said, in terrible Yiddish.

This disarmed Leonora somewhat, and she offered Hans a glass of cranberry juice and a slice of cake. She said she'd heard he was a musician. The only people more musical than Germans were Jews, and her own husband, Rudolph, being both German and Jewish, had an unusually good ear and sang in the Community Choir. She still had all of his old sheet music. Maybe Hans could take a look and see if there was anything he wanted to bring back to Leipzig.

Later, when Judit and Hans emerged with two shopping bags full of yellowing choral sheet music, Hans said, “Lamb, what else do I expect? You're Junior Excavator, First Class, and she's Senior Excavator, First Class.”

*   *   *

What had become of that persistence? She'd lost it when she lost her husband. She'd never seen his body. A month after the murder, his ashes had been scattered over the Opera House. She had not attended. Everyone understood. She was the widow and got to make those choices. Yet would Hans understand what kept her from questioning the circumstances of his death?

She walked out of Kornfeld's office. She would get no more work done that day, and she left the museum without a real sense of direction. It was late afternoon. A keen, late-autumn wind came up from the Elbe and blew her coat flat against her chest. Her hair was in her face, and she blinked until her eyes teared. The faux-baroque façade of the National Museum threw a dense shadow on Stein Square. Why had they tried to replicate what had been blown to pieces? What were they trying to prove? She suddenly found her whole life repulsive, inauthentic.

Once, revisiting closed cases had been her nature. Since Hans had died, her own life had become like one of the archeological parks where she could revisit old ruins and unearth them a millimeter at a time. Did anyone still go to those parks? They were out of fashion. Now everything moved relentlessly forward, and when all of those roads in Neustadt were widened, no one bothered to sift through all the rubble. No one cared. It was just her. And maybe that stranger who had left the note.

When you dig, you can't help but work in the dark; that is, if you climb into what you dig, or rather, if you're stupid and determined and brave enough to climb into what you dig. You climb into dark places. And then, Judit was aware that she'd been walking in circles.

The ghost of Hans Klemmer never spoke. If Hans were still alive, what would he ask of her? What would he say?

Judit pulled her baggy coat a little tighter. She knew where she had to go.

 

4

THE
bus to Loschwitz didn't have a number. It left the northeast corner of the garment district a few blocks from Stein Square at five-fifteen precisely. Judit had boarded without going home to change, and so she waited in her duffle coat and trousers amongst the black-hats milling at that corner. They stared past her with a hostility so clean and direct that she almost turned back. When she did not, they stubbed out their cigarettes and boarded the bus. The motor was running.

What did the Yiddish on the side of that bus signify? There was a lot of it, in Hebrew characters, a regular list of blessings, curses, and restrictions, like their
pashkevils.
Judit had read plenty of Yiddish documents in graduate school, but black-hat Yiddish always eluded her. It was deliberately elusive. What if the bus were going to one of their neighborhoods in another district, or the village near Zeitz they'd named after one of their rabbis? The center door opened. One of their women—stone-faced, hair covered in a turban—got on board. So did Judit.

When Judit was a little girl, she'd sometimes see them around the garment district. Her father always said, “Don't be afraid. They're just ghosts. They can't hurt people who are still alive.” Nobody else's father talked like that. She hadn't been afraid, though. If Rudolph had let go of her hand, she would have followed those angry-looking men in their long black coats and high black hats across Stein Square to see where they were going.

Now, the bus pulled away from the center of Dresden. It filled with black-hats like a net fills with fish: jewelers carrying heavy cases, caftan-wearing men with low-crowned hats and broad, aggressive shoulders. There must have been one of their girls' schools not far from Parliament because the middle doors swung open and girls poured on—at least a dozen of them—bundled up in sweaters, with their legs encased in thick brown stockings, all carrying identical cheap knapsacks and angling for seats next to their friends. They whispered girl-secrets in Yiddish. So they had taken over that neighborhood too.

Of course, Chabad was different. They had always been in cities. Their headquarters was the Yenidze, an ostentatious mosque-shaped former cigarette factory in Dresden, and they made it their mission to get all Jews to perform mitzvot and speed the coming of the Messiah. Judit herself was often accosted by a woman in a wig who tried to get her into a white Mitzvah Tank. The woman spoke good German and promised her an audience with Rabbi Schneerson, who would receive her like his own child and give her a dollar—a real American dollar from the United States. Frankly, Judit was allergic to Chabad. The people who fell in with them always looked like they'd been hit on the head too many times and started to like it. Chabad were the friendly black-hats.

The men and women on the bus were not Chabad. They looked through her as confidently as Sammy Gluck had looked through the ghost of Hans Klemmer. They believed in ghosts, the spirit world: demons, angels, the raising of the dead. They did not believe in Judit.

*   *   *

Judit wasn't sure where to get off the bus. The first time she found the junk shop, it had been below street level, down a short metal stairway. Then, when she'd returned a few months later, it had moved, and she wandered for hours until the same old man appeared two blocks away, pulling a heavy grate across his door to lock up for the night. It seemed to move less by design than by necessity.

Was the junk shop a going concern? Had it simply appeared when she appeared? More and more now, she suspected that all the discarded footage hadn't found its way to her by chance. The shopkeeper never seemed surprised to see her. Still, if he had an opinion about Judit or her work, he didn't show it. He took her Judenmarks and passed the merchandise without meeting her eyes.

Every time Judit went to a black-hat neighborhood, she crossed into another country. The note in her pocket felt like an imperfect road map. Like any map, it looked different every time she traveled in a new direction. It might lead her astray. But one thing was certain: if someone wanted to disappear, to be erased from public record, there was no better place than Loschwitz. A room above a junk shop, say, a bed in one of their rooming houses, and no one could trace you.

Could she even allow herself to attach Hans's name to these speculations? To do so felt too dangerous, like stripping herself naked. But someone might disappear. Then years would pass. He'd send an emissary.

Or, at the very least, someone had sent the stranger with the note. She hadn't seen a face—just a shape that pushed her into that table in a way no black-hat would have done. But the film had come from Loschwitz.

*   *   *

As the bus progressed through Dresden, it passed by the nursing home where Leonora worked. The neighborhood had taken on an aggressive theological ugliness. All those cheap concrete houses, the fat women with their baby carriages, gawky beardless boys in white shirts, hurrying somewhere.
Pashkevils
plastered everything, marking territory. No street signs were necessary. Judit couldn't help but wonder how she'd found that junk shop in the past, and that was in the daytime. It was getting dark.

Someone tugged at Judit's coat. At first, she thought she'd imagined it, but the tug was insistent. She turned and craned her neck. A girl sitting behind her had attached a hand to Judit's sleeve. She addressed Judit in careful German.

“Are you lost?”

“
Shaindel, Shaa!
” That must have been her mother who was standing in the aisle holding a bag of groceries, and when she turned to reprimand her, the babies in her double-stroller started bawling, and she tried to find a way to balance the groceries and somehow pick up one of the babies. Every seat on the bus was occupied except the one next to Judit.

Shaindel's hair was pulled back severely, and her sweater was buttoned to the neck, but she had a sly expression. A little boy sat next to her—probably her younger brother—and he sucked his hand. She pulled the hand out of his mouth and addressed him in German too. “That's dirty!”

The boy snatched his hand away and said in Yiddish, “
Stop showing off.
”

Shaindel cheerfully replied, “
You're the big show-off. Hashem knows every filthy thing you do. That lady paints her fingernails when she meets a man. She isn't modest. But at least she doesn't stick her fingers in her mouth. She has more sense than you.”

Judit hesitated. Then she leaned over and whispered, “Excuse me. How well do you know this neighborhood?”

The girl peered up at her. “I know everything.”

“There's a shop. It's got a lot of junk. Old movies.”

“Oh, I can take you right there,” Shaindel whispered. “I know where it is. Just get off when we do, but walk a little behind, okay?”

*   *   *

At Shaindel's signal, Judit pushed her way through the center doors. She should have gone home and changed. In her trousers and duffle coat and her loose hair, she couldn't have been more conspicuous, and she felt all the more on display as she waited for Shaindel's family to disembark. They took a while: the girl, her brother, the mother with the double-stroller, two more toddlers. They headed down an alley in ragged formation, and Shaindel made a great show of pausing to tie her shoe. Then she looked up, and motioned Judit over.

Shaindel said, “You're Stasi.”

Judit said, “I'm afraid not. Nothing that important.”

“Then why do you want to find that shop? The owner's a bad man. You should arrest him.”

“Your German's very good,” Judit said, by way of changing the subject.

“I'm the best girl in my class,” Shaindel said. She led Judit up a steep passageway. “The boys don't even study it in school. They just learn Talmud Torah. I'm glad I'm a girl even though I can't clean and I hate babies. We have so many babies that I'm not home half the time and no one misses me. They'd miss a boy.”

Judit knew that they were heading in the wrong direction. She was in a different part of Loschwitz altogether, residential, dull-yellow blocks of flats. They climbed yet deeper into a labyrinth of housing blocks, criss-crossed by hanging laundry, littered with overturned wagons and tricycles. Judit almost tripped on half-embedded stairs, and actually had to pick her way along like a mountaineer.

Shaindel looked down and laughed. “You're out of breath. I'm not. I don't even feel it. We're used to climbing because you people won't fix the elevators. You must be my mother's age. Why don't you cover your head? Aren't you married? Why are you wearing a man's coat? Are you a man? No? Follow me through the playground.”

Judit wouldn't have called it a playground. There was a rusty metal frame from which hung two lengths of chain and a single precarious swing. Shaindel planted herself right on the swing and rocked a little.

“The man you want to see, he has a little room in back.”

“A room in back?” Judit struggled to keep her composure but she switched to Yiddish to make sure the girl understood. “
Is there someone living there, a tall man around my age? He has blond hair.
”

The girl gave her a ruthless look and answered in German. “What are you talking about?”

Judit paused to collect herself. Then she tried again. “What's in the room in back?”

Shaindel let herself be sidetracked. “A screen. It's a place to watch”—she struggled for the word in German—“the sexy.” Then she blushed. “Is that what you want? Those kinds of movies?”

Judit hesitated. The sun had set an hour ago. The lights in the blocks of flats winked on behind closed shades, and she was pretty sure she'd never find her way back to the bus stop. They were nowhere near the street where she had always found that junk shop. Maybe it no longer existed. During her old forays into Loschwitz, the prospect of a store selling forbidden films that was supplemented with a screening room would have made her heart beat faster. It beat fast now. She felt it, almost heard it knocking in her chest.

Finally, Judit said, “I do want to see that shop, Shaindel. And I do want to see the room where people watch those movies.”

Then, Shaindel stopped the swing. She stared right at Judit, looking both comical and daunting. Her sweater had come unfastened over her modest white blouse, and her ponytail was askew. She said, “What will I get if I take you there?”

Judit thought for a minute. Then she said, “You can watch the movies with me.”

That was the right response. Shaindel smiled. She said, “He won't like that. I'll have to sneak in. I'm a good
gummie.
Is that the word in German?”

“That means sneaker,” Judit said. “Like a tennis shoe.” They continued up the hill together.

*   *   *

Judit had no idea where Shaindel led her. They might not even be in Loschwitz anymore. Identical five-story concrete apartment blocks reproduced themselves in tiered rows, painted in shades of pastel that were all muddied in the darkness. Shaindel had led her to a dull-pink concrete block. The side was plastered with the usual assortment of
pashkevils,
and a hand-printed sign in German: