Judenstaat (31 page)

“He has nothing to do with it,” said Bondi. “Why bother an old man who's been dying for thirty-five years, who's already dead? So Soviet soldiers shot a lot of Germans in the head. That's what they always do. The Red Army were savages, and if you think Stein could give orders to men like that, you're just naïve.”

“How could you even know?” Judit asked. Then she understood. Of course Bondi knew. He'd known for years, just as Lehmann had known. There must be thousands of people who knew, and they let history move on. Maybe they dismissed it, or maybe they forgot. Or did they? A generation of survivors lined up at that tent in Dresden. Did her own parents line up at that tent in Dresden? Did Rudolph Ginsberg dig the grave of Hans's parents? The Russians killed them, but her father dug their grave. Would she betray her own father? Would Hans avenge his parents? Would he step forward with the evidence? Who'd stop him? She could not move. She couldn't name what she was feeling, even as Bondi folded her into his arms.

“Sometimes I think that none of this is real to you,” Bondi said. “Not me, not the baby. You're not living in the present. If I could only make you know how meaningless, how stupid it is to bring up that old stuff again.”

“This is why my husband's dead,” Judit said.

The words were buried in Bondi's coat. He was right. None of it was real to her, neither his arms, nor the citrus smell of his cologne, nor whatever had or hadn't been developing inside her since March. Nothing was real but what had happened in the Opera House four years ago.

But no. Bondi was real. He'd been there too. The muscles through that coat were hard, and there was something else she could feel against his thigh. Old grief gave way to instinct and she rubbed herself against it. He pulled back abruptly. It was a gun.

“Are you on duty?” Judit asked.

They looked at each other for a long time without speaking, and what passed between them was acknowledgment.

Then someone knocked. It was the orderly, who announced that the patient was ready to receive visitors.

 

2

JUDIT
hadn't been sure what to expect. In the documentary, Stein had been sitting up, looking right at the camera, lean, but also wiry and vigorous. What she saw now was a figure arranged on a hospital bed, with a leonine head propped on several pillows. His eyes were closed, his wild hair translucent. Bags of fluid and blood-filled tubes extended from both wrists, and his arms were wrapped around a hard, white cushion. His male nurse sat him a little higher, as Judit and Bondi approached.

“Please, he shouldn't strain himself,” Judit whispered.

Stein heard her. “No. No. It's good for me.” And now, Judit was startled; as in the film, that voice remained rich, warm and strong in ways that seemed impossible. Then Stein opened his eyes. They were his own, hooded and liquid, in that ruin of a face. He added, “It's really been an honor, meeting so many young people these past few weeks.”

She knew that what he said required some response, and Bondi gave it. “The honor is ours, sir.”

“You know,” Stein said, “you all surprise me. So formal. Sir. In our day, only martinets used that word. Are you a martinet, young man?”

Bondi blushed hard. Stein seemed to make him anxious, and Judit admitted that the old man's gaze unnerved her too. Already, she was struggling to remember what had brought her here. The questions she'd so carefully constructed months before felt like packages she'd left somewhere.

She did remember one thing. “Anna Lehmann sends regards.”

“Who?” Then something seemed to open up, and he smiled quite warmly. “Anna's still alive? That's something, isn't it. Remember me to her. Who would have thought we'd live this long? We're a couple of old monuments, aren't we?” The words took the wind out of him, and he grabbed the cushion hard and coughed a few rich monumental coughs. He spat into a cup the nurse brought over. That nurse was the same one Judit had seen beside Stein in those countless blurry photographs, ageless and muscular, though his crew cut was a little threadbare.

Bondi was at Judit's elbow. “We shouldn't stay long. It's obviously not a good day.”

Stein broke in. “Son, you don't know what a bad day is.”

The nurse concurred. “This is one of Mr. Stein's good days. He's pleased that you've come. I can tell.”

“So you know Anna. You're the historian. You're the one who made that movie with the German girl.” He wiped his mouth with a shaking hand. “I don't suppose she'll come.”

“You don't like Germans, do you?” Judit asked, cautiously.

“Young lady, I am a German,” Stein said. “A historian should know better. All Jews are Germans to the bone, not like those fascists. That's the whole point of the project.”

And one by one, all of Judit's questions came back to her, the questions she had compiled so carefully after they'd screened the rough cut of the documentary. What had happened in Moscow? Had he, in fact, been in a coma? Who had arranged for him to be transferred to this facility? How was it kept a secret? All of this had felt pressing and important once, but now it felt irrelevant. Who needs yet more evidence that Soviets were brutal occupiers and that Stein, the visionary, had survived them?

“So,” Stein said, “let's see it.”

“See what?” Judit asked. She had lost track of where she was.

Bondi broke in. “Surely you've already watched it, Mr. Stein.”

Stein laughed. That made him cough again. “Of course I have, young man. What an idea! But not with the girl who made it. I suppose,” Stein said, “she wants to tell me everything she left on the cutting room floor.” He said to the nurse, “You remembered the projector?”

“Of course I did,” the nurse said. “But it's an old one. I'm not sure it'll work.”

“Then bring it in,” said Stein. “We'll have to see for ourselves.”

While they were waiting, Bondi drew Judit aside and whispered, “What do you think will happen when he sees that gift you brought him?”

“I don't know,” said Judit.

“What if he has another stroke? What if it kills him?”

“What does that matter to you?” Judit asked.

She raised her voice in a way that drew the attention of the nurse, who said, “Mr. Stein requests that he and the filmmaker have a little privacy. That is, if you don't mind.”

“What if I mind?” Bondi said.

His tone was frankly confrontational, and the nurse was surprised. Then he assessed the situation, and addressed Bondi as a Stasi colleague. “The old man gets his way. He can't do much these days, but at least he can look.”

Bondi said to Judit, “Come back to the room.”

“Afterwards,” said Judit. “I'll be there afterwards.”

“That's too late,” Bondi said.

*   *   *

She didn't know what he meant. She also wasn't sure what the nurse meant until both men had gone, and Judit set up the projector and took the canister out of her bag. Stein watched and she could feel his liquid eyes all over her. The quality of his attention was so profoundly sexual that it didn't seem connected to the wreck in bed. It was hard to thread the film into that antique projector, to check the light. The machine worked, but it made an awful sound and smelled like something burning.

Stein said, “Sit by me, honey. So you can tell me what you see.”

Judit did, on the edge of the mattress, and she watched Stein rather than the film, and gradually, he must have known it wasn't what he'd expected because he turned towards the projection on the wall. His arms tightened around the pillow, and he leaned forward. That was when Judit said, “I see a pit. I can't see its bottom. It's on the site of the Great Synagogue of Dresden, the one left as an open field. White things are falling into the pit, one at a time.”

“We couldn't shoot the film close up,” Stein said. “Too risky.” He sounded thoughtful, as though he were talking to himself. After a few minutes, he cupped his chin, a gesture so embedded in his iconography that Judit lost track of the room and the projection as the screen-Stein cupped that same chin through a growth of beard.

“I see you with young people,” Judit said. “Survivors. You're speaking Yiddish.”

“The mother tongue,” Stein said.

The rest of the film passed before them both in heavy silence. Judit hadn't realized that Stein had taken her hand until she felt his fingers tighten. The celluloid flapped in the old projector, and Judit made a move to switch it off and turn the light back on, but Stein wouldn't let go of her hand.

“That takes me back,” he said.

Some quality had gone out of his voice. Judit couldn't make out the contours of his face now; it was as though his features had lost focus. It felt like a retreat, and Judit couldn't help but let her anger show. “That's what you have to say?”

“I wish I were young again.” Stein stroked her hand, even as he held it, and he said, “Those days can't come back. It all felt clear, didn't it, the way forward.”

“To make them bleed,” said Judit.

“Back then, it was the time and place. We weren't angels and we weren't demons. We were men. We were flesh and blood, and now,” said Stein, half in a whisper, “now we're all machines.” He released Judit's hand and raised his loose-fleshed, thin white arms, extending tubes that ran up to clear bags hooked on a gurney. “There's a machine that keeps my heart beating and a machine that helps me breathe and a machine that takes away my bad blood and replaces it with good blood. I think that young man you brought here came to kill me. I know the type. He's an assassin.” He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. The liver spots on those arms looked all the darker in the strange, pale light of the projector. He whispered, “Maybe you could save him the trouble, do me a favor, pull the tubes out yourself.”

“I want to make this information public,” Judit said.

“Sure. Go ahead.
Goyim
kill
goyim
and they blame the Jews. It's who we are.”

“As Stephen Weiss would say,” Judit ventured, and then she thought she saw a ghost of a smile pass across Stein's face.

“Ah, Weiss. Well, he said a lot of things.”

“He said we don't bow down.”

“Ah, yes. He did say that. He's wrong. That's not how we live,” Stein said. “That's how we die. Always, we must be on the side of life, of reason, and we must be human and we must be loved. Isn't that true? Don't we need to be loved?”

The voice that Judit heard no longer seemed to be coming from Stein at all, but from another place, a place he built a bridge to. It held a familiar note that she was loath to recognize. It was a dead voice, disembodied. The figure stretched back on that bed had nothing to do with what came out of it.

“That's what's left. I'm just a man. And I remember what a man remembers. Then, you reach the end, and you take ownership. You own up.”

Judit addressed that man as best she could, though she felt her own voice straining against a current. “I want to take the film across the border. Maybe someone there will know what to do with it.”

“Maybe. And then they'll mark the place where it happened. That's a way to lose a memory. Make a memorial. Make it somebody else's business. He was right there, wasn't he, our friend Weiss. Is he really dead, Anna? Out there in the
galut?
In Argentina?”

Long ago, Stein had released Judit's hand, and as she came back to herself, she realized that she was sitting in the dark. The only sounds were what she'd previously disregarded: the pulsing machines, the motor of the old projector, and the small, hoarse breathing that might just as likely have been coming from her as from the figure on the bed. Although the conversation had come to an end, she stayed there for a while. Then, she got up, rewound the film, placed it back in the metal canister, and switched off the projector. It was almost a shock to find the door still there, and a bright, alien corridor that led into the open.

 

3

IT
wasn't easy to find the way back to her room. Without a guide, she walked down the wrong hallway, passing open doors and beds with no one in them. Of course, the whole wing was unoccupied. How could it be otherwise? The spa existed only to house Stein. It would be instructive to reproduce the chain of circumstances, from the supposed stroke in Moscow to the elaborate creation of a prison staffed with medical professionals, and finally to the reason why he had been kept alive at all. Yet that was not her task. Rather, she thought about the view from the window of her room. Could she find that river and bridge, and Poland? She'd have a week.

But she'd have to buy time. Bondi would never let her out of his sight. She knew that now. What if she just gave him what he wanted? It was no great loss. After all, the footage meant nothing on its own. She would need witnesses who would come forward, who could confirm events, not Stein, but others she might find if she crossed Poland and made it into Russia, if she gathered transcripts and authentic documents, the canister of film would be irrelevant. Finding all of this would be lonely work. Still, it would be her work, again.

She would have to be careful, though. Even as she knew this, something in her beat it back. She didn't want to be careful. She wanted to be honest. By the time she finally ran into a young man in scrubs, she said, “I'm lost,” and the man recognized her and politely led her back to her room. Bondi had already unpacked both suitcases and sat on the bed, looking grim. Outside, the meadow and the woods were blue with twilight.

“You're angry,” Judit said.

“No,” said Bondi. “Just disappointed.”

“Here,” Judit said. “Just like I promised.” She handed him the canister, and he took it without a word. She added, “You know, he thinks you're here to kill him.”