Judenstaat (25 page)

When she'd broken the news over the phone, he'd told her to wait, and she said, “Wait for what?”

“Wait until we talk.”

“What's there to talk about?”

The silence on the other end of the phone thickened. By all rights, Judit should have hung up. Instead, she sowed that rich silence with memories, and tried to push herself to say what she was thinking, that the living sensation that she felt above her private parts was telling her a lie, that she would be seduced by that lie if she waited too long, and that when she made the appointment, she would tell him not to meet her there and hope that he would be there. That last piece, he might understand. Then Bondi said, “Turn around.”

He was standing outside the phone booth in the sunshine. He had his old hat on, and a tan scarf, and he was holding a portable phone. They looked at each other through the glass. Below the brim of that hat, his eyes looked clear and bright. He opened the door of the booth and Judit fell right into him and let him hold her. He was strong enough to bear her weight, but she could tell that he was shaken.

When she let go, he said, “Don't do it.”

“I'm going to lose it anyway,” Judit said. “Why fool ourselves? Besides, what about your wife?”

“I'll leave her,” Bondi said. There was something childish about the way he said it, and Judit was aware, maybe for the first time, that she was much older than Bondi.

She said, “I don't think I could take losing another one. I can't risk it. Don't ask me to.”

“You won't lose this one,” Bondi said. “Look at me, Judit. Not at the ground. At me,” for she had been staring at the ground, trying to control herself. Now, they faced each other, and she forgot his age, his story, even forgot his name under the force of his conviction. “This one is different. We won't lose it. I promise you.”

“How can you know?” Judit asked helplessly. “My body—”

“Your body is perfect,” Bondi said.

He backed her into that same phone booth and arranged her against the glass. He took off his hat and put it on top of the telephone. Then, he hesitated.

“How does this work?” When she didn't answer right away, he clarified. “I don't want to hurt the baby.”

“My God, Joseph,” Judit said, “I love you.” She started breathing hard, and tears ran down her cheeks. She was blushing. Bondi looked startled and awkward, very unlike himself, and she laughed and said, “I do love you.” Then, she realized she had frightened him, so she pulled herself together and pressed against him. “Everything works. Everything is fine.”

*   *   *

She did believe that everything was fine. And then she didn't. She cramped and bent at the waist, got up in the middle of the night and checked her underwear. She dropped an expensive camera on the floor. She went to the bathroom five times in a single afternoon. Fortunately, the film was edited and ready because many times, her hands stopped working now. She would turn them around and around at the wrists and then she'd think about the clinic and know Bondi would find out before she could so much as schedule a procedure. There was the abortionist in Loschwitz, but that was a rumor. That was a rumor and death was real. How could Bondi understand what it meant, to face this down?

Bondi hadn't been there when Judit sewed the same pattern over and over again afterwards. He hadn't seen the battles and the compromises and the hard-won resignation. Or had he? Hadn't he stood by her bed the weeks after the murder and watched the pieces of Judit's heart stitch themselves back together imperfectly? Those seams still showed. Maybe Bondi even loved those seams. Who knows? For years, he'd been the only constant in her life. And maybe now, there was another.

*   *   *

When Judit took off whole afternoons, she had expected someone to complain. No one did. Rather, they seemed to accept her absence, even welcome it, as the heavy machinery of the anniversary project went forward. All of her instincts told her to get out of the way. Sometimes, she was with Bondi, but most of the time, she walked and walked, just as she had before the age of taxi cabs and Media Rooms. She walked from Stein Square along the promenade and saw that, indeed, swallows once again dipped below the Bridge Between East and West, but she didn't stay to watch them. She didn't believe in those swallows. They were a product of someone's calculation, deliberately lured to reconstructed nests that an environmental artist designed on a computer. Or maybe it was just spring now, and the swallows knew it.

She crossed the bridge to the Neustadt, where construction on the bypass was complete, and a line of rational traffic signals eased her way across the road to her old dormitory. There were blue and white fliers plastered on the wall. “Future Site of Long-Term Corporate Solutions.” A lot of dust had accumulated on the glass door, and when she cleared a little circle with her hand, she could make out the porter's desk, just barely, with its old-fashioned ink-blotter and the telephone that tenants couldn't use. If she had stayed, the porter would still sit behind the desk, the dormitory would be open; nothing would have changed. Her body wouldn't be a trap, following its own logic. It would not be owned by something else. She would be sad, but free.

If history was a machine and rolled its way interminably forward, people didn't matter. If they cross it, then they're crushed. They'd better ride on that machine or get out of the way. And even if they ride it, then they'd better watch their backs; they might think they were on the side of history, and end up with a bullet in the head.

“Hans,” Judit said out loud. “Stop it. I have to trust him.”

Yet it wasn't Hans. Hans lived in the archive. He'd given her instructions, and she'd failed him. She couldn't help it if he felt betrayed.

 

2

NOT
long before Hans died, Judit had begun to look into adoption. Initially, she'd refused to believe rumors that there'd been a loosening of restrictions on applications to orphanages in Poland. In fact, she refused to believe she was interested at all. Then she surprised herself by walking into a social worker's office, and walking out again with a thick envelope full of fliers from international adoption programs, government foster-care agencies, and local children's homes. As she spread them on the table, she knew she was out of her depth. How could she evaluate these agencies? A brochure's production values? The copyediting? She tried not to look at pictures, but of course, she looked at pictures, and maybe that's when she realized that the hard, complicated thing she was feeling was hope.

Hans was home less frequently. Since he'd been appointed conductor, at least half of his schedule had nothing to do with music, and once the season began, he worked seven days a week. Left to herself, Judit pored over those brochures: photographs of dark-skinned children from Romania, from Poland, from Albania, probably gypsies. There was a Dresden orphanage that, from its wording, appeared to involve a home for wayward girls and to be affiliated with Chabad. She threw it in the trash. But time and time again, she would return to a brochure that described a hospital in Zeitz where young Saxon women would be offered special care throughout their pregnancies and know their children would be placed into a “loving home.” The program was unique in that the girl herself would hand the infant over from the hospital bed.

One night, one of the few nights Hans was home for dinner, Judit tried to figure out a way to broach the subject. Hans was exhausted. The moment he'd come through the door, he'd slipped off his coat, thrown all his clothing on the bedroom floor, and emerged in pajama bottoms. She'd made a curry. He ate half of what was on his plate without looking up. It had been a struggle, the past few months, and for all the honor of his new position, Judit couldn't help but wish it could be undone. Some nights, he never seemed to sleep at all. She'd find him propped on the couch, surrounded by his music, scratching notes on a little pad. Maybe he wanted to be the one who fielded those late-night phone calls. The ones with no one on the other end.

Yet Hans had wanted to conduct the Dresden orchestra. It was the culmination of his life. He was doing the work he'd been born to do; that was clear even through the mask of his exhaustion. It was hard to ask more of him, but after a few glasses of wine, she did.

Hans said nothing for a moment. Then, “Lamb, I don't think you really know much about this.”

Judit couldn't help but feel defensive. “I just started looking into it. I mean, there are so many ways to go.”

“Like buying a car,” Hans said.

Judit stared at Hans. He filled his wineglass again. Although the response seemed casual, surely he'd known the nature of what he'd just dismissed, and if he didn't know it, he could read Judit's face. He started to fill her glass too, but she put her hand over it and finally said, “You, of all people.”

“You mean because I'm an orphan? Well, of course, no one ever bought me.”

“That's not fair,” said Judit. “That's not what this is about.”

“Then what's it about?” Hans sat back and hooked his arms behind his head, the way he did when he was stating a conclusion. “I know the rhetoric. I grew up with it. Honestly, if you want to go that way, I'll go that way, but don't expect me to be enthusiastic.”

That was the end of the conversation. Afterwards, Judit passed one of the hardest weeks of her life. For seven days, Hans rose from bed, looked over his sheet music, glanced up at her when she poured him coffee, and raised his hand, still working, when she said goodbye and left for the museum. He probably did speak to her; when she asked a question, certainly, he'd answer. During the night, he'd throw an arm or leg across her in the old way, and she'd lie still, as though a bird had landed and any movement would make it take flight. Then he'd wake up, and he would not be Hans. He would be someone who looked like Hans but didn't love her.

It might have been the seventh morning that Judit caught Hans by the arm as he was getting up to pour some coffee. She said, “I'm sorry.”

“About what?” Hans asked. He knew, though, and maybe it had been hard for him too, because he sat back down and said, “If you really want it, I'll go along.”

“Like you've been?” Judit asked.

“That's the best I can do.”

“Then forget it,” Judit said. She expelled those words like pellets. She couldn't take them back, and yes, she wanted to take them back because it was like a door closing. It was like shutting a door and locking it with her own hand. On the other side of that door was a life she had imagined for them, with its shape, substance, and meaning. She knew she ought to stop, but she went on. “It's so irrational. It feels wasteful, this home, and us, and no child. And if it's the only way—”

“We could try again,” Hans said.

Judit said, “I'd lose it again. We both know it. That would break me. This is a way that wouldn't break me.”

“Listen,” Hans said, “a child we'd have together would be ours. A child we adopt would be someone else's. Even if he never knew his parents.” What he said next was clearly difficult. “They know about my parents.”

“What are you talking about?” Judit said.

“They showed me pictures. Of what happened to them. I'd heard about it, but I never knew the whole story. People expect things from me.”

“What people? What do they expect?” Judit asked, and Hans just shook his head. It was hard for her to fathom such an act of needless cruelty, and it took her out of herself. She didn't press those questions, and he didn't answer. Instead, he took her hand.

Then he said, “Aren't I enough for you?”

 

3

BY
April, the final cut of the documentary had long since left the office, and the staff who were not engaged in writing press releases played with computers and wandered the hallways, gossiping and marking time. Sokolov would give a speech after the television broadcast, and then the news came that the film would be televised simultaneously in Judenstaat and Germany. Freddi said, “You ought to come to my apartment and watch it, Judi.”

“I can't just cross into Berlin like that,” Judit said.

“Sure you can. It's just two hours away. I've got luxuries you people can't imagine—for example, my own telephone. What is it with you people and private telephones? I wanted one in my hotel room and the clerk looked like I'd asked for the impossible.”

“I guess we have nothing to hide,” Judit said.

It might have been then that Fredericka glanced outside and started walking towards the glass wall with the view of Stein Square. “Judi. Please come. What do you call those people, the ones with the hats and beards?”

In spite of herself, Judit joined her and looked down. The glass was soundproofed, but it vibrated with what was happening three stories below: the whole of Stein Square from the Elbe to Parliament literally packed with black-hats, yet more of them streaming in from the embankment, literally blackening the sideways and the streets.

“I'd film them, but isn't that against their law?” Freddi looked at Judit for guidance. “No? Maybe I will, then. It's quite a novelty for us, over on the other side.” She ran to get her little video camera, and then asked, “Is it one of their festivals?”

“They're protesting,” said Judit.

“But I thought they didn't get involved in politics. They just keep to themselves and pray. Isn't that right?”

In fact, it wasn't clear what the black-hats were doing. They might have been praying. Some sects had done it years ago, in the early battles for state-funded Yeshivas when their presence would postpone sessions of Parliament for hours or even days. This time, though, it seemed to be a united front: all kinds of hats, broad-brimmed, flat-crowned, high-crowned Chabad fedoras, black suits and caftans, wool and gabardine. Young men were climbing the sandstone pillars of Parliament, nimble as spiders, and suddenly, a Yiddish banner was unfurled, in clear Hebrew characters Judit could read a hundred yards away: