Kornfeld sat back and took his aluminum worry-balls from their mounted shelf. He rolled them between his hands. “Thank God for the Protective Rampart at least. I’ll tell you, Judit, I’m all for free trade, minority rights, all that stuff, believe me. Sokolov’s the only reason we have a future at all. But a German. From Berlin. Hell. Why would anyone in their right mind choose a German to direct a film about the future of the Jewish state?”
Judit knew Kornfeld would dismiss material about the Saxon Question. Even her mother—who had once told her not to take candy from the Saxon lady who cleaned the hallways—even Leonora said a while ago, “You know, Judi, I have to say that the Saxons show a lot more sense than a lot of Jews when it comes to voting. If it wasn’t for them, Prime Minister Sokolov would never have won, what with the parasites in the provinces”—she meant the black-hats—“and now we’d be so isolated from the world, I wouldn’t even be able to get a television signal.”
Leonora certainly hadn’t felt that way the first time Judit had brought Hans home. Granted, that had happened far too soon, only because Hans had gotten tickets for a concert in Dresden and Leonora had called the dormitory several times and didn’t believe her when she said she’d been out with friends. What friends? Evasion never worked with Leonora. Judit warned Hans that her mother was a handful, but even she was shaken when the first thing Leonora said to Hans was, “What did your parents do in the war?”
Hans replied, “I don’t know, Mrs. Ginsberg.”
“Mom, he never knew his parents,” Judit said. “He’s an orphan.”
“I thought you said he didn’t know if his parents were alive or dead. If he’s an orphan, then they’re dead. So are they dead or alive?” Leonora asked, pursuing the question in a way that amazed Hans to the point of speechlessness. Since he didn’t speak, she went on. “Understand, I have a number on my arm. My husband—may he rest in peace—grew up right here in Dresden, but your people shipped him to a concentration camp in Riga. I have the right to ask anything I want, Judit. Don’t make that face.”
Hans did speak then. “I was told they died.”
“How?” Leonora asked.
Hans said, “I don’t know. And I don’t want to know.”
“What’s wrong with you that you don’t want to know what happened to your own mother and father?”
Hans paused. Then he said, “I think there are some things I don’t have to know. I think, sometimes, when you don’t know, you’re free.”
Now Leonora addressed Judit in Yiddish. “Never trust a man who talks about freedom. They’re the ones who trap you and get you into trouble.”
“Mom, I’m not in trouble,” Judit said. Then, “You know he can understand Yiddish.”
“I can’t speak it, though,” Hans said, in terrible Yiddish.
This disarmed Leonora somewhat, and she offered Hans a glass of cranberry juice and a slice of cake. She said she’d heard he was a musician. The only people more musical than Germans were Jews, and her own husband, Rudolph, being both German and Jewish, had an unusually good ear and sang in the Community Choir. She still had all of his old sheet music. Maybe Hans could take a look and see if there was anything he wanted to bring back to Leipzig.
Later, when Judit and Hans emerged with two shopping bags full of yellowing choral sheet music, Hans said, “Lamb, what else do I expect? You’re Junior Excavator, First Class, and she’s Senior Excavator, First Class.”
What had become of that persistence? She’d lost it when she lost her husband. She’d never seen his body. A month after the murder, his ashes had been scattered over the Opera House. She had not attended. Everyone understood. She was the widow and got to make those choices. Yet would Hans understand what kept her from questioning the circumstances of his death?
She walked out of Kornfeld’s office. She would get no more work done that day, and she left the museum without a real sense of direction. It was late afternoon. A keen, late-autumn wind came up from the Elbe and blew her coat flat against her chest. Her hair was in her face, and she blinked until her eyes teared. The faux-baroque façade of the National Museum threw a dense shadow on Stein Square. Why had they tried to replicate what had been blown to pieces? What were they trying to prove? She suddenly found her whole life repulsive, inauthentic.
Once, revisiting closed cases had been her nature. Since Hans had died, her own life had become like one of the archeological parks where she could revisit old ruins and unearth them a millimeter at a time. Did anyone still go to those parks? They were out of fashion. Now everything moved relentlessly forward, and when all of those roads in Neustadt were widened, no one bothered to sift through all the rubble. No one cared. It was just her. And maybe that stranger who had left the note.
When you dig, you can’t help but work in the dark; that is, if you climb into what you dig, or rather, if you’re stupid and determined and brave enough to climb into what you dig. You climb into dark places. And then, Judit was aware that she’d been walking in circles.
The ghost of Hans Klemmer never spoke. If Hans were still alive, what would he ask of her? What would he say?
Judit pulled her baggy coat a little tighter. She knew where she had to go.
4
THE bus to Loschwitz didn’t have a number. It left the northeast corner of the garment district a few blocks from Stein Square at five-fifteen precisely. Judit had boarded without going home to change, and so she waited in her duffle coat and trousers amongst the black-hats milling at that corner. They stared past her with a hostility so clean and direct that she almost turned back. When she did not, they stubbed out their cigarettes and boarded the bus. The motor was running.
What did the Yiddish on the side of that bus signify? There was a lot of it, in Hebrew characters, a regular list of blessings, curses, and restrictions, like their pashkevils. Judit had read plenty of Yiddish documents in graduate school, but black-hat Yiddish always eluded her. It was deliberately elusive. What if the bus were going to one of their neighborhoods in another district, or the village near Zeitz they’d named after one of their rabbis? The center door opened. One of their women—stone-faced, hair covered in a turban—got on board. So did Judit.
When Judit was a little girl, she’d sometimes see them around the garment district. Her father always said, “Don’t be afraid. They’re just ghosts. They can’t hurt people who are still alive.” Nobody else’s father talked like that. She hadn’t been afraid, though. If Rudolph had let go of her hand, she would have followed those angry-looking men in their long black coats and high black hats across Stein Square to see where they were going.
Now, the bus pulled away from the center of Dresden. It filled with black-hats like a net fills with fish: jewelers carrying heavy cases, caftan-wearing men with low-crowned hats and broad, aggressive shoulders. There must have been one of their girls’ schools not far from Parliament because the middle doors swung open and girls poured on—at least a dozen of them—bundled up in sweaters, with their legs encased in thick brown stockings, all carrying identical cheap knapsacks and angling for seats next to their friends. They whispered girl-secrets in Yiddish. So they had taken over that neighborhood too.
Of course, Chabad was different. They had always been in cities. Their headquarters was the Yenidze, an ostentatious mosque-shaped former cigarette factory in Dresden, and they made it their mission to get all Jews to perform mitzvot and speed the coming of the Messiah. Judit herself was often accosted by a woman in a wig who tried to get her into a white Mitzvah Tank. The woman spoke good German and promised her an audience with Rabbi Schneerson, who would receive her like his own child and give her a dollar—a real American dollar from the United States. Frankly, Judit was allergic to Chabad. The people who fell in with them always looked like they’d been hit on the head too many times and started to like it. Chabad were the friendly black-hats.