Judenstaat (15 page)

But this was just speculation. In the late winter afternoon, her old block looked so empty that maybe no one was there at all. Her body felt empty too, light, heavy, light again, like someone else's. Yes, that graffiti was Cyrillic. So were the fliers tacked onto utility poles. This was no Soviet army base. Why all the Russian? Well, why not? Why shouldn't she have to pass through a gauntlet of obscurity and draw on yet another alphabet she had to understand?

She didn't even see the white van until it pulled right up to her. A woman rolled down the window.

“Let me give you a ride.”

Judit was freezing; her coat was practically pulled over her head. Still, she knew what this was about. She walked a little faster. The van followed at a crawl, and the low, pleasant, female voice trailed behind her.

“Would you deny me the pleasure of doing a favor for a fellow Jew?”

She must have pulled over then. Judit heard the clatter of high heels, and when they caught up with her, Judit turned around and said, “Not interested.”

“In what?” the woman asked. She was unusually tall, and wore a warm, gray coat, and of course a wig like all their women, this one adorned by a yellow knitted beret with a green ornament that made it look like a hand-puppet. Her face was rosy with cold. “Not interested in a ride? Or in something else? Look, we're only offering the ride, Thursday night special, just for you. No lecture. No asking if my husband can say Kaddish for your grandparents. No chicken soup. Look, you're smiling already,” she added, though Judit wasn't smiling. Then Judit sneezed, and the woman said, “
Gezuntheit.
Maybe you do need chicken soup.”

“I don't need anything,” Judit said. “It's just another block. I'm fine.”

“But then you must be going to Chabad!” Now, the woman was absolutely glowing. “You probably don't know it, but a lot of people can't find the entrance on a weekday. You can walk right by it after dark. We only light the dome before Shabbos.” Then, she pushed back the beret a little. She gave Judit a long look. “What do you know. Ginsberg. Don't you recognize your old Youth Leader?”

Now it was Judit's turn to stare. “Charlotte?” The face was rounder and less serious, but once Judit knew it, it couldn't be unknown. She could see signs of the girl that Charlotte had been, the eyebrows and substantial forehead, and the long neck, though most of that was covered by a scarf. Her wig was stiff and glossy but more or less the color of her old, black hair. Judit said, “My God, what are you doing with these people?”

“Living,” said Charlotte. Then, in Yiddish, “
Some make a living and some make a life
. It's Chana Batya now, by the way. Last name's Rabinovitch. Judi, come on. Your nose is running. Why are we standing here like a couple of
schmendricks
? I've got a van full of groceries to put away, and I've got to start cooking Shabbos dinner. We're expecting a whole battalion tomorrow. Come home with me. Meet my husband and my children.”

Judit tried to protest, but Charlotte made cunning use of her sonorous alto voice.

“It's cooooold, Ginsberg. Get in the scaaaaareeeey Mitzvah Tank with the scaaaareeeey black-hat.” She grabbed Judit's arm and pulled her into the van, and they drove around the corner to the Chabad House.

 

2

ACCORDING
to Charlotte's husband, Mendel, Chabad house only had five floors. “Unless you count the dome. That would make six. But nobody would be there on a Thursday. We have a minyan in the lobby twice a day, and
Baruch Ha Shem,
on Fridays we light the dome just before Chana Batya and the girls light candles, and we daven there on Shabbos.” He smiled at her right through his beard and gave her a warm, long look, magnified through his glasses. “Sit down. Please. My wife will bring you coffee.”

Judit did sit, with reluctance, on a worn couch where two little girls were also sitting, a three-year-old who held a sippy cup, and a fragile-looking child in a pinafore who was propped against a pillow and was intently studying a sock she had just removed.

Charlotte picked up the sock-girl absentmindedly, and showed no sign of bringing Judit coffee. “Maybe she's going to be on the radio. They might be adding on a new floor for a studio. Ginsberg, would you believe it? There's a radio tower in the minaret, and as soon as they approve our application for bandwidth, our Rebbe will transmit his teachings all over the world. Every day, there's something new. Even since we moved here from Gorlitz, there's the women's dormitory on the fourth floor, and the theater. There's so much news. I know so much about you, and you don't know anything about me. That's not fair at all!”

“Chana Batya,” Mendel said to her. “Calm down.” His manner was a little like the old Charlotte's, solemn and slow. He pushed back his black fedora, which made him look wistful and beleaguered. Those tolerant brown eyes met Judit's own in a way that felt like a recruitment tactic. Wasn't he supposed to look away from women? Maybe Chabad men got special dispensation. He asked her, “Was she always like this?”

“No, actually,” Judit said carefully. When she'd last seen Charlotte twenty years ago, she was studying at the Polytechnic, engrossed in some work too complicated to explain to someone Judit's age, but she'd spent one final summer at Archeology Camp out of what she'd called “a sense of duty.” Judit could still hear those words. She had both admired and feared her, and assumed she'd either end up finding a cure for cancer or designing a deadly weapon.

The Rabinovich apartment had been completed just that year, with funding from a source in Montreal. Until then, the couple and their children had lived in Gorlitz and before that, Halle, moving wherever Rabbi Schneerson had told them they were needed, but never in such a place as this, where donors from North America and England had opened their pockets and their hearts to bring about the Messianic Age.

Charlotte went on. “It wasn't easy at first, but since Prime Minister Sokolov eased restrictions on foreign transactions, the money just keeps pouring in. And Judi, these people are so hungry for what we offer—especially the new arrivals from the Soviet Union. You didn't know? But it was in all the papers when the prime minister made that agreement with Gorbachev. Those Russian Jews, they suffered so much. Their souls are empty and we fill them. Did I tell you? Mendel came from Russia. He was one of the first, and he was born
frum
too, a regular Talmud Torah scholar, a prodigy, and speaks German like a native already. Then, just last year, he brought his mother. Wait till you meet her! What she's been through. Talk about stories to make your hair stand on end!” She interrupted herself. “I forgot to tell you. Do take off your shoes. House rule. You don't wear heels? Well, I have to make sure I'm as tall as my husband, or he won't respect me.”

“I'm not staying,” Judit said.

From another room came a high-pitched scream. Charlotte pivoted with the little girl in her arms and called out, “Dov! Let your sister work in peace.” She turned to Judit and said, “Leah's cutting vegetables for tomorrow's soup, and that boy thinks he's helping but he shouldn't be anywhere near a knife. That girl's got a healthy set of lungs. And the one next to you's Rebecca. You look like she's about to bite you, Ginsberg. She's offering you her cup. Such a little hostess. The one I'm holding's Dahlia, my miracle child. Born under a kilo and on a breathing machine for six months. She still takes oxygen at night.” Then Charlotte said, “What do you mean, you're not staying?”

“You say there's no seventh floor,” Judit said. “I must not have the right address.”

“Nonsense,” said Charlotte.

Mendel, as though roused from a reverie, said, “Perhaps I can help. Do you have the address in writing?”

“Let's see it,” Charlotte said.

Judit shook her head and shook it hard. It was difficult to remember what she'd hoped to find. Some kind of answer? These people had all the answers, sure, and now it was clear she'd walked into a trap. “I need to go, Charlotte,” she said.

“I'm Chana Batya,” Charlotte said. “Look, we're not holding you prisoner, but it's a cold night. At least take my coat. You can bring it back tomorrow when you come for Shabbos.”

In a voice louder than Judit had intended, she said, “I'm not coming for Shabbos.”

Charlotte stared at her. The sippy-cup girl stared at her. Dahlia, the miracle baby, turned up her dull blue eyes in her direction. A door swung open, and there was big-lunged Leah with her hair pulled back like Shaindel's, and behind her was a pudgy boy who must have been the brother. Then, like a pendulum, their full attention swung to Mendel.

Mendel folded his hands and addressed the room: “According to the Sages, if every Jew just once properly observed the Sabbath, the Messiah would immediately arrive.”

Mendel's ponderous voice, his presence, was so exactly like the old Charlotte's that Judit wondered if she'd taught him how to do it. She said, “I have to work. I'm on a deadline.”

Then she was off—out the door and in the foyer—trying to remember how to get back to the lobby. She'd left her duffle coat in the apartment, and the abstract sense of floating somewhere outside her body had returned. Face it, she was sick and feverish, had been light-headed for days or even weeks, and she was fully aware that it would be insane to get back outside that night. But even more insane was what she did next, what she had to do.

She had to get to the seventh floor, not because there'd be an answer waiting, but because if she left, she would not come back. To leave without walking a few more flights of stairs and seeing what was there—she couldn't do it. She knew it would not be Hans. It might be that pornographer, a bomb, a Loschwitz black-hat. Whatever was up there was still there, months after she'd received the invitation. She was half-aware of Charlotte calling after her repeatedly, and it was only when she'd started up the stairs in her stocking feet that Judit realized she'd not only left without her coat, but left her shoes behind.

*   *   *

Mendel had told the truth. The stairs went up five flights. She walked into a dark hallway, struggling to recollect the few times in her childhood that she'd been inside the restaurant. There'd been a spiral staircase to the dome—yes, from a lower level—and it could be reached by double-doors she could make out just ahead. She could feel the texture of the hallway rug through her stockinged feet. She gripped a central railing, and carefully pressed each foot on the tread of each step, slow enough to combat vertigo. Then, she reached a door she recognized, and opened it. The air expanded.

Her hand must have hit a switch. All at once, that dome filled with dazzling colors, swirling and jewel-toned. She stopped dead.

Someone else was there. Standing behind her was an old man wearing pajama bottoms and an undershirt. He held a bottle of something. His long, unshaven face was stained all over with the colors of the dome.

“So it's you knocking around here. I wondered when you'd show up.” There was the high-pitched, too-loud voice.

Judit steeled herself and said, “Who are you?”

“What kind of question is that? You know who I am!”

She recognized him and felt vertigo return. “But you're in prison.”

“Released for good behavior,” Arno Durmersheimer said. Then he frowned. “Now you look like you're going to be sick. Nobody told you? Well, that's no surprise!” He reached for her arm, and she drew back, but he ignored it and tucked his own around her elbow. “You're freezing too. Where are your shoes? Do I have to carry you? No? A good thing! We got a climb. You just lean on me.”

 

3

“
YOU
took your sweet time,” Durmersheimer said. “If you'd shown up next week, I might have been gone. Too bad. They're alright, these kind of black-hats. At least they speak German.”

They'd reached the room above the dome by way of a pull-down ladder, and he'd set Judit up with a cup of hot rum, and filled his own glass. He sat at an odd angle because, he told Judit, he was deaf in one ear. It happened in '56, when he'd slipped back across the border after that business in Rathen. He kept a low profile—worked in demolition—was one of the crew that blew up everything that was in the way of the Protective Rampart. He'd blown up houses in Dessau, Gohrisch, Papstdorf, Cunnersdorf, Saxon towns and villages that weren't even on the map now. That's how he'd lost his hearing—all those explosives. He couldn't hear his own voice, half the time.

He made a point of saying that he wasn't much of a drinker but since he'd been out of jail, he found it helped him sleep. Granted, this place was so small that there wasn't much to do but sleep between their Sabbaths.

“These Chabad black-hats are alright. But they don't like me much. I turn on lights for them Saturdays, and they're not allowed to ask me or it breaks a law or something. Now listen, no offense, but how am I supposed to read their minds? I'm not a Jew.”

Judit pretended to drink the rum and shifted her weight on the folding chair. To see this man she'd heard about so often, to see him in the flesh, leaning back in his chair and scratching himself through that undershirt, the poisonous absurdity of it all worked at her until she just said, “Do they know who you are?”

Durmersheimer frowned. “Of course they do.”

“I don't know what you want from me. You think I'll forgive you?”

“For what? You can't believe that story. Face it, you wouldn't be here if you did.”

“The bullet came from your gun,” Judit said tonelessly.

“You read the police report? I'll bet you didn't. I haven't fired that gun in forty years!”

“They found the list on you—the collaborators.”