Judenstaat (16 page)

“Collaborators? Right—that's what they said. We wanted Saxons you people listen to, names Jews know. The ones with family who died in '46. And he was the only one who was ready to speak out about the massacre.”

This was all going too fast, the back-and-forth, the information that he seemed to think she knew. If she had a gun, she'd kill him, but she had no gun. The ladder to that crawl space was still hanging from a trapdoor. She could probably get past him if she took him by surprise. Then he leaned in and blocked out any chance. His whisper was like gravel.

“Look, I don't know who killed your husband, but if you ask me, it had to be a Soviet assassin, Moscow trained. And think about it—a Moscow-trained assassin in a balcony shoots your husband in the head and shuts up the other people on the list.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Judit said.

Durmersheimer said, “The massacre!” When she was silent, he went on. “But aren't you here because you watched that movie? I know you can't see much from that distance, but you don't know how long I had to trade favors in that filthy Loschwitz ghetto to even find it! The Dresden massacre in '46. The Reds who killed his parents!”

“My husband didn't know how his parents died.”

Durmersheimer poured himself another drink. “Sure he knew. But the dead can't testify. That's why they're dead. I saw that movie you made—the nice old lady talking about her Russian on the white horse. So-called liberation! It's a pack of lies. Your husband knew it. You've got to tell the story that your man didn't live to tell.”

“Don't mix my husband into this load of shit!” That came from Judit with a force that shook her. Her hand trembled around that cup of rum that seemed to have emptied all by itself.

“Little girl,” said Durmersheimer, “Red Russians killed your husband. If you don't believe me now, there's not too much I can do about it. Go home and try to find that evidence I left you. Bet it's missing.”

Judit put down the cup and stared into it.

“Watch out,” said Durmersheimer. His eyes narrowed. “And you keep away from Loschwitz. Everyone knows you there. Those Loschwitz people, they're no joke. They're not like us. Nothing matters to them. I hate the Reds with all my heart, but in the end, it's Loschwitz Jews and Cosmopolitans who own this country. Their hands are soaked in blood. I hate the Soviets with all my heart, but they won't last. It's Weiss who lasts. Yes, Stephen Weiss. There's a reason you look at me like that when I say his name.”

Judit hadn't been aware of what her face was doing. The pressure of those weeks and hours that led her to this place had settled on her like dead weight, and she could only ask, “Could you turn down the heat?”

“But it's so cold, I can see my breath. Look.” Durmersheimer blew out a trail of vapor.

“Then why am I so hot?”

“Because you're sick, I guess,” said Durmersheimer. “Fuck. They'll blame me. Everyone's counting on you. You watch your back. You need protection, and I can't give it. Fuck,” he said again, and then he guided Judit towards his bed.

Now she was horizontal. The overwhelming heat had formed a yellow penumbra around the metal bed-frame beyond her stockinged feet, and when Durmersheimer threw a thin blanket over her, it fell down in slow motion. She was powerless to stop it. Something else fluttered against her cheek.

“Do you read French?”

Not really, Judit said. Or did she think it? Durmersheimer must have left the room, and Judit moved her head and tried to block out the aggressive light that plastered itself to her forehead. There were three pages, clipped together:

Le Manifeste de Stefane Weiss

 

4

U
NE
spectre hant l'Europe—la spectre de la catastrophe …

Why had he left the light on? She'd had some French in college, but her head felt thick.

Oui, elle signifie, la catastrophe, une esthétique, une symétrie, et une unité.

Would it make any sense if she were in her archive or her dormitory? Those places felt distant now, like pages in a foreign language.

 …
Une réponse personnelle ne peut pas s'éloigner au delà
de la vengeance.

It all came flooding back, a shouting match she'd once had with a fashionable lecturer in graduate school who'd shown slides of archeological parks and kept going on and on about the Jewish Narrative and the Saxon Narrative, and Saxon homes that were demolished to make room for excavations, as if half of them weren't fascist strongholds like the one in so-called Saxon Switzerland. He brought in French sources that supposedly proved that the Ashkenazi artifacts they'd excavated in those sites were all transported from Cologne. There was a family resemblance between the argument with that polished faker in his expensive sweater and what had come to pass between herself and the man who killed her husband.

Because of course he'd killed her husband. It was written on his face. And all the talk about Russians and atrocities was just evasion.…
au delà
de la vengeance
.… Her husband's ghost had called for vengeance, and instead she'd let the man who killed him fill her with his rum, lay her in his bed, and blanket her with phrases that she didn't understand.

La catastrophe permet
à
les victimes la liberté
definitive: l'abdication de la responsibilité
 
…

How had he gotten this translation? Of course, she knew it existed, everyone knew after
Studies in the Mother Tongue
was shut down in 1967. The original manifesto was a rumor. But Weiss was real. In that discarded footage, she caught fleeting images of Weiss: lean, craven, eyes hard behind round glasses, head thrust determinedly forward, a vulture of a man.

How had Weiss been unmasked? There were a thousand reports: suitcases full of gold bullion discovered in his basement, surveillance cameras tracking his meetings with a fascist in a restaurant in Bavaria, leases from apartments in Spain, Syria, and Argentina, testimony from one of his apprentices who'd sworn a blood-oath to be loyal to no country but to offer himself to the highest bidder, and in those years, the highest bidder surely was the Soviet Union's enemy, America.

Judit had been born the same year Weiss had fled the country. There was a line of silence drawn across that year; 1951 was a hard year all around—martial music playing on the radio, neighbors looking over their shoulders at each other, all those half-finished constructions projects that had been funded by Americans, and Leopold Stein finding traitor after traitor in his own cabinet. Until the death of Stalin two years later, those prison trains full of Weiss's followers left station after station and crossed into the Soviet Union and from there, they went to the end of the world.

Une mémoire n'a aucun de pouvoir inhérent. Un monument convient et absorb la mémoire et la vengeance. Ainsi, l'état devient luimême le monument. Mais, un monument
à
propos de quoi?

Monument. Absorbs memory and vengeance. What was the point of struggling with the words? Stein himself had said it many times. This country is our monument. And it was Weiss himself who raised the question. Judit had first seen it on one of those Yiddish
pashkevils
in 1968.

A monument to what?

It was a provocation. Everything in '68 had been a provocation. The miners' strike in Halle, the protests in Leipzig, the vote of no confidence in Anton Steinsaltz that had thrust his terrified opponent Klein into the position of prime minister. Steinsaltz had led the country for eight years, and Klein was so used to being the voice of the loyal opposition that once he had power, he lost his voice completely. He just stammered and watched what happened to the country, raising his hands in a gesture of surrender.

It began when the Judenstaat Defense Force was deployed across the border in Czechoslovakia. These boys rolled into Prague to suppress a coup. Their tanks were soon surrounded by fascists—that's what the radio said—the same scum who had herded Jews into Thereisenstadt. Photographs surfaced: stone-throwing thugs attacking JDF troops. Wearing their blue striped helmets with the yellow stars, those soldiers continued the brave work of the ghetto partisans, and, as before, they fought side by side with their Soviet brothers, completing the work of the Liberation.

Judit had been seventeen then. She'd kept an ear on the radio, fixated on the Youth Leader who'd been her boyfriend in Archeology Camp, and who'd been deployed six weeks before. She'd exchanged two letters with him since the summer's end, and now she felt sure he was somewhere on those miserable, cobblestoned streets, bloodied by the mob, fighting his way towards ancient synagogues the radio said were all on fire.

Leonora said, “I don't see why we're over there. It's not our problem.”

Judit had been appalled. “Prague is right on our border. Do you want them to invade?”

“That's not the border I'm worried about,” Leonora said. “Our boy should be at the Protective Rampart, keeping the Germans out. Let the Russians take care of their own business.”

Those words were dangerous. And more and more, Judit heard that kind of language everywhere, waiting in line at the fabric store, along the river promenade where her youth group volunteered to prune the bushes, even at school among students whose older brothers were in the JDF. Since Judit could remember, the Judenstaat Defense Force was kind of a joke, with their badly fitting uniforms and Soviet rifles from the '40s. Maybe if those officers in training had returned from Moscow, or if the soldiers had something to do other than sit in their little watchtowers by the Protective Rampart, they would have been ready for Prague. But the young men—those hapless boys straight out of secondary school—to thrust them into Soviet-made tanks and turn them loose against civilians—

“They're not civilians,” Judit insisted to anyone who made those claims. “They're Czech Nazis. They're fascists. Don't you listen to the radio?”

Still, even at seventeen, Judit knew that news came from a hundred other sources. There had always been a push and pull between those sources and the facts. How could anyone trust rumors? Yet people did trust rumors, maybe even listened to the badly blocked transmission from abroad, and those who understood English sometimes received a faint whiff of the BBC.

Another rumor: soldiers had deserted. They'd crossed the border on foot and were hiding all over Judenstaat. It could even be that the widow downstairs had a nephew sleeping in her husband's study, but it wasn't a good idea to talk about those things.

Sometimes, Judit would think she saw him, a tall young man, too tall for that tiny study. He'd smoke a cigarette on the fire escape late at night, not too far from Judit's window. She knew she ought to report him to the Stasi, and knew she would never report him to the Stasi, and this felt like the first conscious contradiction of her life. She'd watch the orange end of the cigarette, and the long shadow he threw, and be amazed at her own awareness of his vulnerability.

*   *   *

Maybe it was in October that the first
pashkevils
appeared. There were always a few of them scattered around the garment district, notices about this or that event only of interest to black-hats, but those were dense wall-posters full of religious obscurities. This one was in Yiddish too, but it was just one line long:

How do we know they're fascists?

There were dozens of them, plastered on the wall of the train stations in the Altstadt and the Neustadt, and on the sides of buildings, black block Hebrew letters, cheaply stenciled on a square of newsprint. Supposedly, no one could read that language anymore. Yet people slowed down when they saw the
pashkevils,
and if they were a certain age, they'd stop. They'd whisper something to a neighbor. The next day, there was a new one:

Are the synagogues really on fire?

They were everywhere you looked. By afternoon, they'd all been whitewashed, but the next morning found three times as many plastered in those same strategic places:

Are we Moscow's Court Jews?

Are we Moscow's Court Jews?

Are we Moscow's Court Jews?

And more were glued to the broad avenue by Parliament, the blackened sandstone façade of the Opera House, the National Museum. They were soon whitewashed or blackwashed, but someone replaced them even before sunset, dozens more, lined up in rows. At first, the messages were one line long. Then, students began to tell their parents that they'd seen longer
pashkevils
at the Dresden Polytechnic, whole paragraphs of Yiddish. Soon young people led their mothers and fathers to wall-posters with eyewitness dispatches from the soldiers in Prague. When those
pashkevils
were blackwashed, more were pasted over them.

Whitewashed, blackwashed, night after night, somehow more of them appeared on top of old ones every day until the day—Judit remembered—when a teacher at her school took her aside and said, “A group of us are meeting tonight, Judi. It's important.” Judit spent the rest of the day wondering how she'd tell her parents that she had to go out after dark. Getting the two of them entangled felt at cross-purposes with everything else she was feeling. The teacher who'd spoken to her was her algebra instructor, and Judit was no particular favorite of hers, but the glamour of the invitation made her breathless.

In the end, she didn't ask her parents for permission. She just climbed out the window and down the fire escape—all the while hoping she'd startle the nephew in the middle of a cigarette—and walked to the designated place, an alley just off Bautzen Strasse.