Judenstaat (13 page)

Finances were simple. Young Lehmann's needs were few. She took a room in an unfashionable boardinghouse and supplemented her income by translating lightweight novels and dry scientific monographs from French to German for a local agency. As for pregnancy, that was hardly a danger. Her inclinations ran in less conventional directions. In short, her mother was correct. She liked her little room that looked out over a courtyard where shabby women hung their wash. She liked the Prussian Archive, where they would always save her a desk with very good light. If her friends considered her eccentric, that never stopped them from submitting themselves to her interrogations, and if any of the men tried to make love to her, she'd blink at them and say, “It's a strange impulse, this need to copulate.” She was twenty-six years old.

She didn't even try to find a teaching post. She preferred to be an independent scholar, and the subject she pursued with both passion and emotional detachment was the Jewish Question. She'd chosen that subject not because she herself was, as her mother delicately put it, a German of Israelite Descent, but because it seemed to make the best use of her strengths as a scholar. When she was a girl convalescing in Swiss sanitariums, she'd overhear conversations about the Dreyfus Affair, and the very agitation of all parties made her know it was a question worth pursuing. In a junk shop in Vienna, she'd come across a novel by a Hungarian reporter named Theodore Herzl called
The Old-New Land
about a settlement of German-speaking Jews who built a productive nation in Uganda. On the whole, her exploration of the Jewish Question was her favorite sort of project, open-ended, with no chance of resolution.

Then one day, a friend said, “I have an answer to your Jewish Question.”

“Are you proposing we move to Uganda?” Anna Lehmann smiled. “Maybe, if you ask me nicely.”

Instead, he introduced Lehmann to a young man with wild black hair and a stained and rumpled suit-coat. This wasn't the Leopold Stein of the iconic photographs, not Stein postwar. This was Stein just back from the Vilna Yiddish Conference, in Berlin en route to Munich, with his suitcase in his hand. He was two years younger than Lehmann, and he hadn't slept more than a few hours in the past week. This friend arranged a meeting in a café, and Stein was so full of what he'd seen and what he had discussed in Vilna that, without hesitation, he began to talk and talk.

“Those men have a romantic attachment to exile that's just plain superstition, but in practice the best of them think like Germans. It's remarkable to see the thread, the consistency of logic woven right into them, a kind of Ashkenaz blood-memory.”

Lehmann had ordered all three of them coffee, but the friend soon peeled away; he had heard all of this before. Stein kept on talking, his voice too loud, his hands expressive, his big-ness taking up the table. Lehmann made a few mild attempts to get a word in, but it was no use, and she ordered them both cognac in the hope that Stein would just run out, like a Victrola.

Of course, Stein was saying what he'd been saying for five years, but it was new to Lehmann. “There's a German inside of every Jew in Europe, and if we can only wake that German up—”

“In fact—” Lehmann began, in a fruitless attempt to insert a thought of her own.

“—Indeed. Look at this coffee shop. Look at the dozens of newspapers on the wooden racks. This is our prayer-house, Anna. This is our country. The Germany we made here is a culmination of a thousand years of—”

“—In fact,” Lehmann said, “the Jews in France felt the same way until Dreyfus was framed.”

“Listen,” Stein said. His big, wet eyes looked into hers with such conviction that her own actually widened. “Facts can be lined up. Facts can be knocked down. What matters, Anna, are deeds. What matters is what we do with our bodies.”

“Oh,” Anna Lehmann said. She leaned back in her chair and realized there was no more liquor left in her glass. He was still staring at her, so she said, “I will admit, Leo, that I have no idea what you're talking about.”

He kept the conversation going, though it was punctuated by disconcerting, liquid stares. Later, she'd learn that he would only do that when he was exhausted, but the erotic charge of those stares worked on Lehmann, and after the lights in that café began to flicker, he asked, “What time is it?”

“Past time for bed,” Lehmann replied. And then she said, “Indeed.”

*   *   *

That same year, Lehmann moved back to Heidelberg, where she assumed a professorship that wouldn't last for long. Lehmann and Stein wrote each other frequently and at length. Most of his letters were lost when she fled the country, but she'd kept a few, including one that laid to rest the rumor that it was Stalin who had ordered Yiddish banned from Judenstaat's public discourse.

Stein had written, “Those men in Vilna have their own reasons for speaking and writing in jargon. They're internationalists, anarchists at heart, and have no use for states or borders. We both know that Yiddish by its very nature cannot be a national language. It's all about crossing borders, not creating borders, and we must have a border, Anna. We must have protection. The Bund itself must be restructured along pragmatic national lines. How can anyone deny that now?” This was in 1935.

Later: “I am afraid, sometimes, that I wear my nerves on the outside. I envy your equilibrium. You are stronger than me.”

Lehmann remembered her reply to that one. “Thus, you've recanted, Leo. Facts matter more than deeds. Then, she had signed, “In fact, your Anna,” just as he always signed his name, “Indeed, L. Stein.”

That exchange dated from 1938, just before Stein went underground. It was cited as proof that his health was more fragile than it had appeared. The stroke he'd suffered on return from Moscow was no sudden thing. He'd finally wound down and stopped. Lehmann kept going. As she might say, the facts speak for themselves.

 

7

THE
last time Judit saw Professor Lehmann was not long before she graduated. She had been summoned to catalogue the material in her steamer trunk. When Judit arrived, she found the trunk itself emptied and pushed against a wall, and its contents piled on a rug in the parlor, some of the old photographs, letters, and diaries still bound with twine, some loose and spread like playing cards. Judit stood, mystified, even angry at the disrespect the scene implied.

“I don't know what's expected of me here,” Judit said to Lehmann, who sat in her big chair, watching with her tiny lioness eyes. “Can't you at least let me know where this is going?”

“Would Dresden want it? Probably not,” said Lehmann. “Perhaps we should send it to London, or even Jordan. There used to be a museum in Jerusalem before the war. I don't suppose it's been kept up.”

The diaries with half their pages missing, the faint, cracked photographs, and on the back of the photographs, Cyrillic or Hebrew script faded to brown, when they were in the trunk they'd looked like treasures. Now they just looked like an impossible mountain of junk.

Lehmann stared at some middle distance, and then glanced down at the piles of documents strewn on the floor. “Of course, if that experiment hadn't failed and we were in Palestine, these papers would be much in demand. Why, they'd be precious. And digs everywhere, dear. Artifacts to catalogue. You'd be a very busy girl indeed. By now, I'm sure, we would have dropped incendiary bombs on whatever didn't interest us and rebuilt the Holy Temple.” She lit another cigarette. “It's high time to move on, wouldn't you say? All paradigms have their seasons, and one needs to look ahead, to begin now to find a past that illuminates the future. In fact, I must begin to fill this trunk again. Where will we be in ten years' time?”

She paused. Then, she looked right at Judit. That was when Judit realized Anna Lehmann expected her to answer the question. Judit said, “Professor, I don't know.”

“Yes you do,” said Lehmann. “You're always in the vanguard. That's your gift, whether you know it or not. Perhaps it's unconscious.”

The nature of that statement flustered Judit to the point where she didn't say a word the rest of that afternoon. She did manage to make lists of all the documents and photographs and put in a call to the university library, which accepted them on a temporary basis. As Judit took her leave, Lehmann was standing—one of the few times Judit had ever seen her stand—at the threshold of the house itself, as Judit marked some information on the sides of five cardboard boxes. Upright, Lehmann was not imposing. The doorway didn't frame her to best advantage. If seen a certain way, she might be an ordinary old woman, overweight and unattractive. The library van kept its motor running, and Judit couldn't help but know that she was passing a sentence on those documents about the Rothschild Colony in Palestine. They would be in a kind of permanent internal exile. No one would see them again.

*   *   *

Judit could have contacted Lehmann in 1982, when she'd booked a room for two nights in a hotel in Leipzig, but she was nowhere near the university. She'd gone there to get a full evaluation at the Teaching Hospital and stayed in a hotel across from a new highway. The hotel was intended for hospital patients and their families, and had been built so recently that there were still squares of dirt where they had yet to plant shrubs around the entrance. Judit's room had two double beds, a color television, and something she'd never seen before, a minibar. She opened that minibar with trepidation and found it contained quite ordinary Hungarian sunflower seeds, a German candy bar, and two Czech beers. There was a pedestrian bridge across the highway to the hospital entrance, marked with arrows to direct disoriented patients. After a night in one of those big, cold beds, Judit felt disoriented enough to be grateful for the arrows, and even the black and white hospital tiles that urged her to put one foot in front of the other.

In the waiting room, a young man behind the desk handed her a sheaf of questionnaires about her eating habits, her sexual history, and the most recent results of examinations by her other doctors. Judit had come prepared with a blue binder that contained records of every visit with the midwife and her own physician, copies of her sonograms, the report from the first stillborn delivery where fetal growth had stopped at week sixteen, and the analysis of fetal matter from the second pregnancy, which had followed the same pattern and, in spite of weeks of bed rest, had died inside her and been expelled at a Dresden clinic. The binder also contained Leonora's records, including her mammograms and recent blood-work, and a copy of the results of Hans's physical, which Judit had made him get before she came. The binder was so thick that Judit had to hold it in both hands.

Somehow, Judit had expected everyone to be impressed by the binder. The technician didn't even look at it. She also didn't look at the questionnaires. She was a small, thin woman with a distinctive dome of gray hair, and she wore a gray smock and asked question after question with enormous tact and patience. Did Judit take an aspirin a day during the first pregnancy? During the second? Had the midwife prescribed heparin? Was she intolerant to heparin? Was there a history of stillbirth or miscarriage in other members of her family on her mother's side beyond her mother? When Judit replied that every woman other than her mother had been murdered in the camps, the technician informed her that it was possible to find records of stillbirths in village rolls in Poland. Had she pursued this avenue? Somewhere in there, Judit said, “When do I get to see the doctor?” The doctor appeared, with five medical students, and he seemed to have read Judit's whole binder while she was talking to the technician because he summarized pretty much everything in it to those students, while Judit sat there listening to three years of her life passing, and when he was finished, he made some observations about how this pattern reoccurred at week sixteen, and in both cases, the fetus was female. Then he suggested a full body scan, heparin injections, and weekly blood-work, not to her, but seemingly to those five students.

He only looked at Judit to ask, “So do you plan to try again?” Judit just stared. He took that as assent and said, “You know, every pregnancy is unique, just like a snowflake.” “That's what the midwife said,” said Judit. He said, “She's right.”

Then off she went, but not without getting her binder back. She crossed the pedestrian bridge across the highway, hugging the binder the way she had seen a patient in a room she passed hug a hard white pillow when he coughed. She didn't go back to her room. She phoned Hans from the lobby and said, “I'm going crazy.”

“Come home,” Hans said. Then, “I should have come along.”

“I didn't want you to,” Judit said. “No need for both of us to go crazy. Besides, isn't tonight the big audition? Where you step in?” That was the first of several times Hans would guest-conduct the Dresden orchestra.

“It was last night,” His voice sounded very far away.

“So are you a master conductor?”

“Lamb, come home.”

She did, although she had to pay for two nights in the hotel anyway. The report was mailed to her three months later, in an impressive-looking envelope, and when Judit looked back on that day in Leipzig, she couldn't remember why she'd booked a second night. It might have been that she had intended to see Anna Lehmann. She suspected that she'd hoped the doctor would discover a problem that required urgent and immediate attention, and that would explain everything.

 

8

Transcript:
CONFIDENTIAL
. Dresden 1952. [Note: the following was recorded in the office of the Prime Minister of Judenstaat, Leopold Stein, via hidden mic. Soviet Diplomatic Mission re: Trade.]

MOLOTOV:
Impressive, Stein, the Parliament. You Jews amaze me.

STEIN:
I hope we will continue to work together in harmony for years to come.