Now, the public bus passed by. Judit flagged it down and boarded before she had to say what people were trained to do.
Judit hadn’t seen the last of Shaindel. The next day, the girl appeared in the archive. Judit had been trying to concentrate on the Anniversary Project, and began by sorting through her earliest material, a 1922 Ernst Lubitsch spectacle about the life of Moses Mendelssohn, and faded Dresden footage that included incidental glimpses of the Great Synagogue before its destruction. No historical reckoning. Nothing explosive. She knew that Kornfeld would reject it all, and the futility was a great comfort to her.
Maybe Judit would be fired. Then she would melt away somewhere untraceable, and she could stop looking over her shoulder every time she turned a corner or walked through that isolated underpass by her dormitory. She was edgy, rattled, and at the same time stubborn about interruptions. Thus, it was no surprise that Shaindel had been knocking insistently for at least five minutes before Judit—who’d assumed it was Sammy Gluck—opened the door.
“Shouldn’t you be at school?” Judit asked.
Shaindel shook her head emphatically. She thrust a bulging plastic bag at Judit and said, “For your movie.”
Judit had no choice but to put the bag down on the worktable and remove what was in it: twenty videotapes, including Rambo II, Nine to Five, and The Breakfast Club. Most of them had no slipcovers at all.
“He watched these too,” Shaindel said. “Can you use them? Are you mad at him? Why is it so dark in here?” Then, “Who’s that?” She’d seen the ghost.
The ghost saw her too. It stared back with detachment. Judit fully expected it to sweep the tapes to the floor, but it just receded in its smooth, uncanny way and assessed the titles Shaindel had deposited. Judit watched Shaindel watch the ghost and fought her own sense of utter violation.
The girl’s eyes followed the specter with curiosity, and she repeated her question. “Who’s that, Judit?”
“My husband,” Judit answered.
“Do you work here too?” Shaindel asked the ghost. Judit was so sure the ghost would answer, or do something worse, that she broke in.
“He’s not alive.”
“Oh,” Shaindel said. Her mouth tightened. “So he’s a dybbuk. I’ve heard of them.” She turned back to the ghost and started to say something else, but Judit interrupted.
“He doesn’t talk. He’s just here.”
“Why?” Shaindel asked.
“He just lives here,” Judit said savagely.
Shaindel didn’t look convinced. “When a dybbuk comes back, it’s because it forgot something. Or because it wants something. Unless you visited the grave and looked back. You should never look back. Did you call out to the Evil One?” she asked as though it were an ordinary question.
Maybe it was an ordinary question for those people. After all, they believed the dead would rise from their graves and want their bones back. They considered Judenstaat a massive cemetery, so it was only natural that Shaindel would see the ghost and speculate about its motives, but Judit didn’t care. “He’s just here,” she said. “He lives here. And you’d better leave before he hurts you.”
Shaindel departed with reluctance. She said, “You’d better find out what he wants or he’ll end up inside you. That’s what dybbuks do, if you’re not careful.”
When the Stasi agent appeared for his November visit, before he rose from his couch in the sitting room, Judit said to him, “So I guess you know I was in Loschwitz.”
He was on his feet now, courteous as ever. “I know. Good afternoon.”
It was impossible to throw that man off-balance. Deflated, Judit sat down in the couch without his invitation. If that struck the agent as unusual, he gave no sign. He asked the usual questions about the bus line to the dormitory and her detour through the underpass.
“You realize,” he said, “we’d sooner you didn’t risk it. It’s an enclosed area and not as secure as we’d like.”
“What? You think someone’s going to shoot me down there? Who? The old Saxon lady who sells violets?”
“Not her,” said the Stasi agent. He smiled a little, or at least the edges of his mouth turned up. He had on his winter coat. Over the past three and a half years, Judit had seen the man so often that she could mark the changes of season by the brown corduroy, the black wool, the tan worsted, the beige trench coat. He went on. “In reference to the earlier matter, I must remind you that when you leave our jurisdiction, it makes our work very difficult.”
“Surely you could have followed me,” Judit said. “You’d just need the right kind of hat.”
“Mrs. Klemmer, if you want to make a joke at my expense, I certainly won’t stop you. But I’m sure you’re aware that the residents of Loschwitz are not like us.”
“I’d say they’re a lot like you,” Judit said. “Dead certain. Except when they’re not, if you know what I mean.”
He shifted in his seat. Why was she playing with him? She had no proof that he’d been Hans’s bodyguard, but his very discomfort fueled her own suspicions. He had not protected Hans. What made her think he could protect anyone else? She could just hand him that note, and his reaction would tell her more than she knew now.
The agent had run through his list of required questions and had to get on with the rest of his miserable day. Where did he go after these monthly interviews? Did he walk to the phone booth on the corner and file a report? Did he take a taxi to an office full of surveillance equipment and watch somebody else? No, improbably, she sensed she was his only case, and he was stuck with her.
Still, he certainly seemed unusually anxious to move on, and finally, he got up, and for the first time in three and a half years, he was the one to end the interview.
“So any time I need you? Is that what you’re going to say?”
“Any time you’ll let us help you,” the agent said.
“Well, I needed you that night,” Judit said. She didn’t elaborate, but she looked right at him.
He bowed his head and buttoned his coat. “It’s cold out, Mrs. Klemmer. I hope you don’t have any great plans. If you don’t mind my saying so, get some rest. Your health hasn’t improved since my last visit. You may not realize you’re sweating. Do you own a thermometer?”
“I don’t,” Judit said. She took his card, and held it in her hand as she watched him go.
If she ran, she could catch him. The wind swept across the windows, and the hallway was so bitter cold that Mrs. Cohen the porter wore her coat indoors. As Judit walked past her, she looked up and said, “You’d better put on something warmer if you’re braving what’s out there.”
“I don’t have anything warmer,” Judit said.
She looked surprised. “What do they pay you where you work? I’ve seen Saxons who dress better than you do.”
The statement had no answer. Judit was suddenly aware of how she looked to Mrs. Cohen: the cotton trousers from college, the sweater that had belonged to Hans, the duffle coat that had belonged to Hans. She looked deliberately vagrant, homeless. How long had it been since she’d just sat down and made herself something nice on her sewing machine? It was as though she wasn’t worth the trouble.
She walked up to her room and switched on the light. That evening, it felt too small. She sat and laid the agent’s card on the middle of her desk.