The men and women on the bus were not Chabad. They looked through her as confidently as Sammy Gluck had looked through the ghost of Hans Klemmer. They believed in ghosts, the spirit world: demons, angels, the raising of the dead. They did not believe in Judit.
Judit wasn’t sure where to get off the bus. The first time she found the junk shop, it had been below street level, down a short metal stairway. Then, when she’d returned a few months later, it had moved, and she wandered for hours until the same old man appeared two blocks away, pulling a heavy grate across his door to lock up for the night. It seemed to move less by design than by necessity.
Was the junk shop a going concern? Had it simply appeared when she appeared? More and more now, she suspected that all the discarded footage hadn’t found its way to her by chance. The shopkeeper never seemed surprised to see her. Still, if he had an opinion about Judit or her work, he didn’t show it. He took her Judenmarks and passed the merchandise without meeting her eyes.
Every time Judit went to a black-hat neighborhood, she crossed into another country. The note in her pocket felt like an imperfect road map. Like any map, it looked different every time she traveled in a new direction. It might lead her astray. But one thing was certain: if someone wanted to disappear, to be erased from public record, there was no better place than Loschwitz. A room above a junk shop, say, a bed in one of their rooming houses, and no one could trace you.
Could she even allow herself to attach Hans’s name to these speculations? To do so felt too dangerous, like stripping herself naked. But someone might disappear. Then years would pass. He’d send an emissary.
Or, at the very least, someone had sent the stranger with the note. She hadn’t seen a face—just a shape that pushed her into that table in a way no black-hat would have done. But the film had come from Loschwitz.
As the bus progressed through Dresden, it passed by the nursing home where Leonora worked. The neighborhood had taken on an aggressive theological ugliness. All those cheap concrete houses, the fat women with their baby carriages, gawky beardless boys in white shirts, hurrying somewhere. Pashkevils plastered everything, marking territory. No street signs were necessary. Judit couldn’t help but wonder how she’d found that junk shop in the past, and that was in the daytime. It was getting dark.
Someone tugged at Judit’s coat. At first, she thought she’d imagined it, but the tug was insistent. She turned and craned her neck. A girl sitting behind her had attached a hand to Judit’s sleeve. She addressed Judit in careful German.
“Are you lost?”
“Shaindel, Shaa!” That must have been her mother who was standing in the aisle holding a bag of groceries, and when she turned to reprimand her, the babies in her double-stroller started bawling, and she tried to find a way to balance the groceries and somehow pick up one of the babies. Every seat on the bus was occupied except the one next to Judit.
Shaindel’s hair was pulled back severely, and her sweater was buttoned to the neck, but she had a sly expression. A little boy sat next to her—probably her younger brother—and he sucked his hand. She pulled the hand out of his mouth and addressed him in German too. “That’s dirty!”
The boy snatched his hand away and said in Yiddish, “Stop showing off.”
Shaindel cheerfully replied, “You’re the big show-off. Hashem knows every filthy thing you do. That lady paints her fingernails when she meets a man. She isn’t modest. But at least she doesn’t stick her fingers in her mouth. She has more sense than you.”
Judit hesitated. Then she leaned over and whispered, “Excuse me. How well do you know this neighborhood?”
The girl peered up at her. “I know everything.”
“There’s a shop. It’s got a lot of junk. Old movies.”
“Oh, I can take you right there,” Shaindel whispered. “I know where it is. Just get off when we do, but walk a little behind, okay?”
At Shaindel’s signal, Judit pushed her way through the center doors. She should have gone home and changed. In her trousers and duffle coat and her loose hair, she couldn’t have been more conspicuous, and she felt all the more on display as she waited for Shaindel’s family to disembark. They took a while: the girl, her brother, the mother with the double-stroller, two more toddlers. They headed down an alley in ragged formation, and Shaindel made a great show of pausing to tie her shoe. Then she looked up, and motioned Judit over.
Shaindel said, “You’re Stasi.”
Judit said, “I’m afraid not. Nothing that important.”
“Then why do you want to find that shop? The owner’s a bad man. You should arrest him.”
“Your German’s very good,” Judit said, by way of changing the subject.
“I’m the best girl in my class,” Shaindel said. She led Judit up a steep passageway. “The boys don’t even study it in school. They just learn Talmud Torah. I’m glad I’m a girl even though I can’t clean and I hate babies. We have so many babies that I’m not home half the time and no one misses me. They’d miss a boy.”
Judit knew that they were heading in the wrong direction. She was in a different part of Loschwitz altogether, residential, dull-yellow blocks of flats. They climbed yet deeper into a labyrinth of housing blocks, criss-crossed by hanging laundry, littered with overturned wagons and tricycles. Judit almost tripped on half-embedded stairs, and actually had to pick her way along like a mountaineer.
Shaindel looked down and laughed. “You’re out of breath. I’m not. I don’t even feel it. We’re used to climbing because you people won’t fix the elevators. You must be my mother’s age. Why don’t you cover your head? Aren’t you married? Why are you wearing a man’s coat? Are you a man? No? Follow me through the playground.”
Judit wouldn’t have called it a playground. There was a rusty metal frame from which hung two lengths of chain and a single precarious swing. Shaindel planted herself right on the swing and rocked a little.
“The man you want to see, he has a little room in back.”
“A room in back?” Judit struggled to keep her composure but she switched to Yiddish to make sure the girl understood. “Is there someone living there, a tall man around my age? He has blond hair.”
The girl gave her a ruthless look and answered in German. “What are you talking about?”
Judit paused to collect herself. Then she tried again. “What’s in the room in back?”
Shaindel let herself be sidetracked. “A screen. It’s a place to watch”—she struggled for the word in German—“the sexy.” Then she blushed. “Is that what you want? Those kinds of movies?”
Judit hesitated. The sun had set an hour ago. The lights in the blocks of flats winked on behind closed shades, and she was pretty sure she’d never find her way back to the bus stop. They were nowhere near the street where she had always found that junk shop. Maybe it no longer existed. During her old forays into Loschwitz, the prospect of a store selling forbidden films that was supplemented with a screening room would have made her heart beat faster. It beat fast now. She felt it, almost heard it knocking in her chest.