Judenstaat (19 page)

“You'd better check with Mr. Kornfeld,” Mr. Rosenblatt said carefully.

Judit shook his hand off her arm with difficulty; he was stronger than he looked. She switched on the light and started down the stairwell, conscious that Mr. Rosenblatt had gone back to his station, and aware that he was phoning someone; she could hear his thin, anxious old-man's voice rising and falling. Then she saw the padlock.

It was clamped, crosswise, on the door, a padlock with a combination. She stood there. Then she shook it. She called up, “Mr. Rosenblatt! What's this about?” He didn't answer. Finally, she walked back to the lobby and saw that Mr. Rosenblatt was still on the phone, and he turned to Judit, cupping the receiver with his hand.

“They're waiting for you. Upstairs.” His voice shook a little.

Had someone found out about the break-in three months ago? He did look spooked. Judit hoped that she hadn't inadvertently caused the poor man trouble. When she reached Kornfeld's office, his secretary said, “Gosh. I'm glad you're back, Judit. Everything here's been topsy-turvy. The new setup must have cost a fortune.” That's how Judit found out that her footage had been moved to the Media Room.

That room, which Judit had always refused to enter, was in a newly restored atrium that had been boarded over until just last year. When the museum had been a palace, this must have been its greenhouse, walls of glass awash in light, and an expansive view of Stein Square. Several expensive-looking chairs faced each other across an oblong table where five dull-plastic monitors sat like burlap sacks. There was a lot of business underneath the table too, dials and switches, tiny flashing green lights. It was no surprise that Sammy Gluck was there to greet her, looking moist and holding both his hands out effusively, happy enough to burst.

“Welcome back!” he said. “Isn't this beautiful?” He switched on a screen, and there was the face of Leopold Stein as he looked in 1952, square-jawed and hostile. Sammy wiggled a dangling object on that table, and the eyes of Stein were suddenly all whites. Blue irises appeared. Then the whole face vanished, leaving a pair of angry blue eyes.

Judit said, “Sammy, this is an incredible waste of time and money. We're not here to play.”

Someone spoke up from behind. “No. We're here to work.” The accent was a strange one. Judit turned, and faced a well-dressed, slim blond woman in rectangular glasses who extended a hand and introduced herself. “Fredericka Schumaker from Berlin. Freddi. I take it you're the editor. I've been waiting on tenterhooks. I hear you're terrifying.” She smiled. Her teeth were excellent. Judit took the hand because she wasn't sure what else to do with it.

“I guess you're the director,” Judit said in a voice that sounded childish even to herself.

“Good guess,” said Freddi. “Now sit down, kiddo. I laid out most of the storyboard even before I got here, and the interviews are almost done, but what we need's a feel to the thing, see? It needs a flow.” Freddi leaned back in one of those chairs and crossed her expensive-looking legs. Her shoes had square toes, and thick high heels; her feet were enormous. “Sammy's already worked with some of the footage from downstairs.”

To Judit's horror, across those screens ran film she'd pieced together—shots of rubble, construction sites from 1949—and what had been sunlight was now white and flattened, not a shadow visible. Then Judit realized he'd done something else to the footage. There were no people in it. Reading Judit's face, Sammy said, “Hey, I just cleaned it up a little, Mrs. Klemmer.”

“Cleaned it up?”

“Better to start with an empty canvas,” Sammy said. “Then we can add what we need later.” He looked at Freddi for reassurance, but her face was unreadable. Somewhat deflated, he said, “Nothing that can't be undone. I mean, that's the whole point. Nothing's permanent.”

Judit pulled one of those chairs from behind the table and sat glaring at them both. She had no intention of condoning this brand of mischief, but she couldn't take it seriously. Then it came back to her: what she had said to Sammy on Thursday in her delirium. Well, now she had recovered and she would let him know that it was all a misunderstanding. That the archive was padlocked, that this mad scientist's laboratory was functioning, that a Berliner marched in here on legs like a giraffe's and talked about a storyboard, none of it had anything to do with her work. Kornfeld would have some explaining to do, but in the end, it wasn't possible that any real damage could have been done in just four days.

*   *   *

The first thing Kornfeld said was, “We thought you were dead. A week and a half, no sign of you.”

“I was just here Thursday,” Judit said.

“No you weren't. And you weren't at your dormitory, or at your mother's.” He looked shaken, and actually seemed more angry than relieved to find Judit sitting across from him. “That poor woman's called here twice a day.”

“Oscar,” Judit said, “I swear I don't know what you're talking about.”

Kornfeld fell back into his chair and gave something between a growl and a sigh. He ran his hand over his forehead and face so that what little hair he had stood up, and then he said, “I was told to say you'd taken a vacation. It was simpler that way. Gluck worked night and day transferring the stuff to video before that German could take over completely. Where the hell were you, anyway?”

Judit felt sweat bead all over her body. “I need the combination.”

“What combination?” Kornfeld asked. Then he said, “Oh. I see. Well, that's beyond my jurisdiction.”

“What are you talking about?” Judit asked. “Whose jurisdiction is it?”

“Ministry of State Security,” Kornfeld said. “Apparently, there was some funny business down there. But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you?” He looked at her hard, bluster gone from his face. “No, you didn't do a thing to compromise yourself. You haven't gone anywhere you shouldn't have gone. You've been as good as gold, Judit. And what they found down there had nothing to do with you at all.”

Shaken, Judit wasn't sure what to answer. All she could imagine were the reels of footage, uncoiled and exposed, the images of Weiss she'd found all tangled on the floor, the viewer torn from the table, all in the blaze of the fluorescent light she'd turned on maybe two times in her ten years at the archive. And down there was that reel with Stein at the synagogue. And down there was the ghost.

Kornfeld dropped his voice. “Judit, what have you been doing? You know, you could've had my job.”

“Why did you let them search?” Judit asked, feebly.

“I could ask you plenty of questions, of course,” Kornfeld said. “Like where you've been for nearly two weeks. Mr. Rosenblatt's job is on the line. But we were tipped off, thank God. The bomb squad took a pair of wire cutters to it.”

Judit felt so violated and raw that it took her a moment to realize the implications. “They found explosives?”

“Apparently,” Kornfeld said. “Inside a video cassette. Plastics with a timer. You don't even have a cassette player down there. What if Sammy had taken it upstairs? They'd be scraping him off the ceiling of the Media Room, or no, there'd be no Media Room. We'd have a hole where it used to be. My God, Judit. All of this, and no one can find you.” He lowered his voice in bewildered sympathy. “We're keeping it quiet, but they do expect a resignation. Just a short note, sweetheart. Don't give it too much thought. Just have it to me by the end of the day.”

*   *   *

She was not about to resign. If she had to face the consequences, so be it, but she would see this through, and when she was questioned, she would tell the Stasi everything: Durmersheimer and the note left in the dark, the trips to Loschwitz, the pink nightlight at Chabad House, the husband who had been buried alive, all of it concocted to get her anniversary film out of her hands and get her out of the archive so the German could take over. With the force of that conviction, she strode out of Kornfeld's office, out of the museum, and into the winter sunshine. It was late afternoon now, a cold December Monday, though the date was still an open question. The clean, gray light implied a clarity of mind.

Her conviction was still burning when she caught a taxi to her dormitory. Flagging one down felt automatic. Once inside, she stared ahead, full of suspicions, and knew if she could just dredge through them she would find a logic and coherence.

When she arrived, the porter looked up from her magazine, impassive. “You have some messages.”

She took them and sorted through. Five from her mother, three from Kornfeld. That Stasi agent—what was his name? Bondi. He hadn't called. That was his name, Joseph Bondi. She would have to call him herself. She walked to her room and was surprised to find it was just as she had left it. The small refrigerator, goose-necked lamp on the nightstand, the narrow bed with the square pillow, and beneath her bed, in its case, her sewing machine. No one had taken that sewing machine apart and searched for a hidden bomb. Then there was the desk. That was where she was supposed to write the letter of resignation. What she looked at now was the pile of cards from Joseph Bondi.

She lifted the topmost card and turned it over. Nothing was written on the back. She spread the other cards across the table, with their Stasi sword and shield, and flipped them over, one by one until they spread across the surface of the desk, rectangles of card-stock, some a little worn around the edges. This Bondi, he had stood by her bedside during those awful days after the murder, fielding phone calls in that old apartment. When she was strong enough to care, she hated, beyond words, the sight of his brown hat on the table. This Bondi, he'd undressed her at night when she was still under sedation. He had sent her clothing to be laundered. And the day she'd moved to this dormitory, he had said he would look in on her once a month.

Who was Joseph Bondi? His suits had grown more expensive as time passed. He had less hair. The rest was speculation. She must have imagined the Yiddish she'd seen written on the back of his card a month ago. She picked up one of the cards and walked outside to a phone booth to place the call.

 

T
HE
A
GE
OF
R
EASON

 

1

THE
phone was answered by a woman who knew who Judit was, and didn't seem surprised to hear from her. “He can see you tomorrow afternoon.”

“No. Today,” Judit said.

“He's out of the office, but I'll page him,” the woman said. Who was she to Bondi? Did she work a switchboard? Was there a location? The call could have been answered anywhere in Dresden, or in another city altogether.

“Tell him,” Judit said, “that I'm prepared to cooperate completely. I'll be outside.”

She put the phone back on the hook and turned around. She half-expected Bondi to be standing behind her, looking through the glass of the phone booth with that intensity and seriousness that might have a second meaning. But he wasn't there. She didn't know what to do with herself. She walked back to the dormitory entrance. A cold rain started falling. The air was raw, and she was trapped with no umbrella. She felt in her coat pocket. What if Charlotte had cleaned out the contents? No, it was there, that note from last October, wadded up, almost impossible to unfold. She should have handed it to Bondi the day she'd gotten it, but she had refused to let herself be used by him, so instead she had been used by everybody else.

The rain turned to sleet as she reviewed those meetings with him, from the night he'd stood in the apartment doorway in that hat until the recent afternoon when he'd taken her pulse with such terrible intimacy, to their last awkward encounter. He would assume she'd read what he had written on the back of his card and had dismissed it. He wouldn't show up. Not now.

Then, she saw a figure under an umbrella coming towards her, and her heart caught. She felt hot inside her clothes.

Bondi said, “There was no need to wait outside.”

“Take me somewhere,” Judit said.

He gestured her under the umbrella, and they walked in silence just long enough for Judit to be impressed by both his tact and the way his heavy coat gave off real heat. She didn't ask where they were going. There were a number of office complexes straight ahead, sleek and colorless as the rain and sky. They walked against a raw wind that logically should have turned his umbrella inside out, but it held steady. After a while, he guided her down a few steps through a passageway, closed that umbrella, and unfastened the first two buttons of his coat.

“We should sit down,” he said. They were standing at the entrance of an employee cafeteria for an Austrian corporation. Lunch had ended hours before. A janitor ran an electric sweeper. Bondi led Judit to a round white table stained with coffee, and he pulled out a chair for her. Then he said, “There's another place. A room. But it's in Johannstadt. Closer to your museum. Some other time, if you'd prefer.”

“Is it warmer?” Judit asked.

“Yes,” said Bondi.

“Do I need to tell you what you already know?” It was impossible for Judit not to sound angry, even though she wasn't sure that she was angry anymore. “That's what happens next, isn't it?”

“Mrs. Klemmer,” Bondi said, “what happens next?”

“You know I'm backed into a corner. And you must have a hand in it.”

“A hand in it?” Bondi leaned towards her, and his voice dropped, though its diction was precise enough for it to be heard over the sweeper. “We've always kept a hands-off policy at your own insistence.”

“Well somebody has their hands all over me,” Judit said. Then, stupidly, she blushed. She said, “It's really cold in here,” just to say something.

Of course, Bondi removed his coat and laid it across her shoulders. He wore a sweater under it, not a cheap one. She'd been right about the hair; it was thin on top and short around the ears. The coat smelled like expensive cologne.