Judenstaat (20 page)

She gave him the note. He got up from the table and walked towards the window where the light was better. He looked at the slip of paper with the same deductive focus that he'd turned on Judit, examining both front and back. Then, he took out a little notebook from his pocket and wrote something down with a pencil; he filled a page, flipped it over, and wrote more. Then, he walked back to her. “How long has this been in your possession?”

“Maybe three months,” Judit said.

“More than three months? Less than three months?”

“Why does it matter?” Judit said. “I went to that address. He lured me there so he could stop the project—”

“Arno Durmersheimer doesn't want to stop the project,” Bondi said. Now it was Judit's turn to be under that gaze. She could feel him watching and recording what his statement did to her face. “Of course, we have his handwriting on file.”

“He lured me there. And Chabad black-hats locked me in a room for a week!”

“Chabad goes its own way,” Bondi said. “Sometimes they're useful, but only by coincidence.”

“Why don't you ask me how the videotape with the explosives got into the archive? It came from Loschwitz.”

“Not my jurisdiction,” Bondi said.

“Durmersheimer was in Loschwitz. Why don't you ask me what he had to say?”

“That doesn't interest us.”

“He's an unrepentant fascist, an enemy of the Bund!”

“Mrs. Klemmer,” Bondi began.

“And you people let him go!”

Bondi said, “Judit.” At the sound of her given name, Judit stopped talking. Then Bondi said, “Arno Durmersheimer works for us.”

Judit stood up. The coat dropped from her shoulders. The sound of the power-cleaning ceased, and all she could hear was her own raw breath expelling and contracting, the rain hitting the window, the buzz of the fluorescent lights.

Bondi said, “I'll get you a cup of soup.”

“You planted those explosives and then tipped them off,” Judit said, “to get me off the project.”

Bondi paused for a moment before saying, “That's faulty logic. We want you on the project. Very much. There's important work to do.”

“Then why is my archive locked?”

“Standard procedure.” He turned around, picked his coat up off the floor, and set it on an empty chair. “The area has been cleared. The contents have been transferred or discarded. Now sit down.”

Judit did not sit down. “If you want my help, get me back in there!”

Bondi shook his head. “That's not how it works. Those aren't the terms. First of all, if you cooperate, that means you're under our protection.”

“I don't need protection,” Judit said.

Bondi said, “You do. You've been mourning for almost four years. It's made you—”

“What? Unhealthy? Has it affected my complexion? Should I take a vacation? Should I drink more soup? You sound like my mother.”

“It's made you into a child,” Bondi said. He said it, and Judit wanted to strike him, but he did not back down. Rather, he set a hand on her shoulder to steady her, and said, more gently, “Your nose is running.”

“I'm not a child,” Judit said.

“I know,” said Bondi.

“I don't need protection.”

“You do,” Bondi said. He handed her a handkerchief, and she took it. She didn't blow her nose, but she did wipe it, and also her eyes. “Judit, you do. You say you work best independently. Judit, no one works independently. You've put yourself in vulnerable situations that have led to consequences you did not intend, but they're real consequences. Frankly,” he said, “you need protection from yourself. As things stand, you have no choice.”

“I can't listen to language like that,” Judit said.

“I thought you weren't a child,” said Bondi. He made a move to brush the hair out of her eyes, and she flinched. He retreated, as though he were taming a fox. “Understand,” he said, “that what I tell you will always be in your best interest. Arno Durmersheimer killed your husband.”

“And I suppose he was working for you then,” Judit said.

Bondi ignored the interruption. “He served his time. He is a bitter man, and drinks too much, and sometimes he gets confused, but he would no more try to stop this project than he would blow himself to pieces.”

“What about those explosives?”

There was a pause. “That's still under investigation, and it's sensitive. At this time, as you are well aware, Loschwitz business is still officially beyond our jurisdiction. I must ask you to steer clear of it. We don't want you distracted or embroiled in any needless controversy. Your teeth are chattering.”

“Don't get me soup.”

“Then take my coat again,” Bondi said. “If we're going to work together, you will need to face facts, and face them courageously. Maybe someone was a fascist yesterday. He's not today. Times change.”

“Facts don't change with them,” Judit said.

“That's right. And that brings me back to my earlier point. You have no choice. Facts don't change, and choices are illusions. If you're lucky—and you happen to be very, very lucky—you can have opportunities, but they're not the same as choices. You are obliged to take any opportunity that has social utility. You have the power to use your gifts for the greater good.”

She could foresee the room in Johannstadt, closer to the museum, the warmer room. It would be up a flight of stairs, and there would be a single lamp on a night table and maybe a desk, a chair, a bed. They'd meet, and what would come to pass would be of a piece with Judit's promise of cooperation and submission. That promise and its consequences made her feel as though she'd stepped across a border. That afternoon, though, she believed something else would happen too. She said, “Mr. Bondi, maybe I don't have a choice. But if I do what you say, what do I get in return?”

“You serve justice,” Bondi said.

“Which means?”

“Which means you use your considerable gifts to tell the truth.”

“That Russians killed my husband,” Judit said.

Bondi said, “Arno Durmersheimer killed your husband. As I said, he's a bitter man. But I believe he has reason to be. He's been used, just as we've all been used. Now we have a chance to tell the true story of our country.”

Somehow, what Bondi said was not bombastic. The new material from Moscow would soon be followed by yet more tapes and footage, and the direction it was leading would change everything. If she resisted, what was she resisting? Was she still the willful Bundist girl who wanted time to stand still? The stories that she'd grown up with had been comforting, but she'd been vomiting up pieces of those stories for so long that there was nothing left. And what could fill those empty spaces? Empty spaces weakened you, and predators would scent that weakness, circle, and move in. She thought of Charlotte.

Still, Judit said, “I don't believe that Durmersheimer killed my husband.”

“The case is closed,” said Bondi.

“He has a different story. He said Hans was about to make a public statement about a Soviet massacre in Dresden.”

Bondi said, “That is completely possible.”

Judit said nothing. Bondi's face was impassive, and a heartbeat later, she burst out: “What massacre? When did it take place? Is there any proof?”

“That's your work, not mine,” said Bondi.

Those words carried a promise. It would be her work. Even as she took in the implications of what Bondi said, she felt a bright thread of anticipation. She would have access to material that would make sense of things that everybody knew, and no one would acknowledge. A thought came to her with such force that she almost said it out loud. Someone could say it in the film she's making. For forty years, our country has been buried alive.

She thought those words, but what she said was this: “I don't believe my husband's case is closed. Where's the police report? If he was going to talk about a Soviet massacre, why would a Saxon try to stop him? Who put explosives in those tapes? If they're from Loschwitz, why would those people even care who killed my husband?”

The rain had stopped by now, and the janitor had long since wiped down the rest of the tables in the cafeteria. Soon, the night shift would appear for supper. Bondi's overcoat weighed on Judit's shoulders. He gave her one of his long looks, but there was no calculation in it.

“I don't know,” Bondi said. “If I knew, I'd tell you. But I also ask you, Judit, what would it serve?”

 

2

WHAT
would it serve? She thought about it in the days and weeks that followed. If those questions had answers, it would serve justice. Justice would be served. These sentences had rhythms that she recognized: a Junior Bundist choral piece. And then she heard her own voice hectoring: justice for whom? A chain of facts was not the same as justice. An answer to a question served no one in isolation. Justice was the organizing principle of history.

And history fell right into her hands now, film stock transferred to video by five smart assistants overseen by Sammy Gluck in the Media Room overlooking Stein Square on rows of screens attached to big, gray boxes. Those screens projected images frame by frame, variants of Judit's footage for direct comparison, and Judit crossed from one screen to the other, referring to the storyboard. Then there was the new material from Anna Lehmann delivered by the couriers, young girls or boys on motorbikes who brought big, padded envelopes from who-knows-where: film canisters and also documents that verified their contents. The declassified material challenged Judit's dormant Russian, but she pored over it, fact-checked, and only afterwards passed on the film to Freddi Schumaker.

“This is brilliant stuff,” Freddi said to Judit. She didn't come in often; most days, she moved back and forth across the border, conducting interviews. “Your old mentor's got friends in high places. Is she a holy terror?”

“No worse than I am,” Judit said. She'd actually gotten to like Fredericka, who often feigned a charming intimidation. “She's got a bigger appetite, though. She looks like the Protective Rampart.”

“Well then, I'll have to take her apart brick by brick,” said Freddi. “I'm good at that.” Then she said to Judit, “Good luck making sense of this office. It's a wreck. I'm glad we have you upstairs, kid. We need a little terror around here.”

The tapes were in disarray, and Judit sorted through bins and found that Sammy had the sense to label the new videos with her old codes. She did attempt to look for the film that Sammy hadn't transferred, but although no one talked about the incident downstairs, her questions were met with evasion that implied she ought to let it go. The waste—the enormous waste—made Judit furious, but she had too much else to do.

If Oscar Kornfeld took issue with Judit's reappearance, he didn't show it. A month after he'd asked her to resign, he wandered into the Media Room, and such was her absorption that he was standing right behind her before she noticed him at all.

He said, “You need to sign off on this.” He handed her a large manila envelope. She set it aside on the worktable, and several hours passed before she remembered the package, and scribbled her name in a corner without opening the thing or even giving any thought to the nature of her authority. Later, he ran into her in the hall and said, “So you're pleased with the proofs?”

Judit said, “Didn't Sammy hand them back to you?”

“Of course,” Kornfeld said. Seeing no sign that Judit wanted to engage in further conversation, he melted off somewhere.

Hours themselves melted now. She no longer had to struggle to complete a puzzle. The pieces were laid out before her in Fredericka's notes, and she combined the interviews and footage into a coherent whole: “Singing Junior Bundists: 1960”; “Interview #21”; “Pastoral scene: Rathen.” The yellow morning light, the white light of afternoon, and sometimes twilight itself passed over Judit and her screens. Such was her accumulated knowledge that once she'd established a filing system for the tapes, she knew just where to find the missing pieces.

At first, Gluck glued himself to Judit's side. The keyboard by the monitors was still moist from his fingers when he stepped back to watch her work. He had been clumsy; he erased too much, made everything too clean. He tried too hard. Now, only she was permitted to work with the new material, and he watched her translate Freddi's notes into visual form, waiting for her to throw him a question so he could pounce on it and tear it with his teeth and carry it around the room before returning it in some gross form. Once, he said, “You know, with pixels, you can increase the resolution, make it consistent, everything in focus.”

Judit said, “That's no good.”

“Well, then you're just reproducing a camera lens the way you've done it. The background and the foreground get lost.”

“Right,” Judit said, not really looking up from the two scenes she was interspersing, and therefore making Gluck go slightly crazy. He wanted acknowledgment; he wanted credit; he wanted, at the very least, to be needed, and after a while he admitted that he might as well stop pestering her and stick to the technical side of things.

Yet Sammy couldn't quite believe how quickly Judit mastered what she'd learned. She worked instinctively, often combining two tapes like a bartender muddling two kinds of spirits, mellowing the flat, contemporary interviews, creating continuity with footage decades old. Most days, she worked at an on-screen storyboard without audio, stopping at places only she could understand, and then she'd call in one of the assistants to take tapes back to Gluck for what he knew, frankly, was work a monkey could have done.

Gluck couldn't help but say, “Are you sure you didn't take a special tutorial last year? When we were at that conference?”