And on that card, the sword crossed behind the shield with its blue stripes and yellow star.
On the right-hand corner of the desk, beside her pencils and her sharpener, were a stack of those cards from the past three and a half years, the ones she had accumulated as a way to mark that time had passed at all. They were the physical evidence that she was three and a half years older, three and a half years alone. Her hand on the desk looked alien to her, with its short nails, skin hardened with the cold, the wedding ring.
She picked up a card and turned it over. On its back, in Yiddish:
Judit flipped the card back over and laid her hand on top of it. She sat there for a while. Her first thought flew by too quickly to name. Then: it’s an agent’s trick. Then she thought: Yiddish, in Hebrew characters, how did he learn to do that?
Finally, and fully, it was clear: he was somebody else. It was all too confusing. She could never call him now.
THE BATTLE OF THE LANGUAGES
1
EVERYONE understood spoken Yiddish. Reading and writing were another story. Aside from black-hats and a few scholars like Judit, young people couldn’t do much more than slowly sound out the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The assumption was that Yiddish would die a natural death, and by the time Judit was old enough to go to school, that seemed to be the case.
Back in those days, Leonora used to pick up a Yiddish magazine called The Book Peddler that published fiction and poetry, but when the corner store stopped carrying it, she didn’t complain. “It was nonsense—fairytales about goblins and loose women, rabbis making deals with the devil. Better we should forget those stories.” A scholarly periodical called Studies in the Mother Tongue hung on until the mid-’60s, when it got into trouble for a piece attributed to no single author: “A Stylistic Analysis of the Manifesto of Stephen Weiss.”
The article contained no more than a few passages from the manifesto, the same ones that the prosecution read into the transcript of Weiss’s trial-in-absentia. In a public statement, the editors insisted, “We quote the passages for one reason alone, to analyze their Yiddish, the syntax, the absence of Hebraisms, the choice of Slavic rather than Germanic synonyms, and most of all the impossibility of accurate translation into any language other than Yiddish.”
Maybe that’s when it began: the rumors. Had the magazine taken it upon itself to translate the entire manifesto into French, German, and English just to prove that it couldn’t be done? Was the full document still in circulation? It got around that if you held Studies in the Mother Tongue to a pane of glass, you’d see the whole of the manifesto written in flowing Yiddish script. Copies disappeared from public libraries, maybe taken by the authorities or maybe taken by someone else and duplicated.
And some say Weiss himself had never died in exile. No, a dummy had been sent to the morgue in Buenos Aires, or one of his notorious apprentices was buried in his place after allowing his face to be reconstructed by a plastic surgeon. Or Weiss had died but not before he had arranged for his successors to disseminate his manifesto and carry on his treachery worldwide. Under the guise of so-called neutrality, they would sell Judenstaat to the highest bidder, sabotage the Protective Rampart, and put the country in German hands again.
Judit’s father Rudolph would say of Weiss, “He should have found a different line of work.” Then he would smile in his abstracted way. Nobody else’s father talked like that. Leonora said, “You’ll scare the girl.” But Judit wasn’t scared. She was disgusted.
There was no story too wild in 1967. Maybe it was because of stirring in the east, across the Polish and Czechoslovak borders. Judit was a young girl then, impatient and judgmental. She sang the Bundist songs and knew the story of her country. She thought her ideological education was long over. The chaos forming around her seemed absurd, and she had every reason to believe she could wear her certainty like a magic cloak and stride forward in good Bundist fashion. How would she know that in six years, she would meet Hans, and nothing would make sense again?
2
AFTER she’d introduced Hans to her mother, Judit had looked forward to giving him a tour of Dresden. She’d dragged him all over town, to her old school, to the site of martyred Elsa Neuman’s house on Budapester Street, to the neighborhood community center where the Bundist Youth Group met, a former church with fabulous acoustics for their concerts. They took the little steam-train that ran through the park, and Hans managed to stifle his amusement as a grim little boy in a uniform and visor told them that their tickets were invalid and they’d have to get off at the zoo. Then they visited the Hygiene Museum, and she showed him the drawers full of foreign objects children swallowed.
“And there’s a slice of a person under glass, a real slice, head to toe, so you can see everything, the brain, the bones, the bowels, the organ systems,” Judit said. “But it’s not here. It must be closed for renovations.”
Hans said, “What are they renovating? I hope they don’t want volunteers.”
“I used to dare myself to look at it,” Judit said. She blushed without knowing why. She couldn’t explain why it felt so important for Hans to see everything, and for her to look at those places through his eyes.
Finally, she led him to the site of the Great Synagogue, that lush green rectangle not far from Parliament, and she said, “This is our monument. This is our prayer-house.”
Hans gave her a strange look. “I know this place.”
“I should hope so,” Judit said pedantically. “Fascists burned it down in ’38. But the fire returned.” Then she felt foolish. “So when you were at the orphanage, they talked about it?”
“Sometimes,” Hans said. “They said it was a graveyard.”
“Who said?”
“I can’t remember,” Hans replied. “Lamb, let’s move on.”
Of course, Hans insisted that they go to a concert at the Opera House. He had made an extravagant gesture: two box seats for a program of Liszt and Schumann with Vladimir Ashkenazy, a guest conductor. He’d bought the tickets well in advance, and took along a copy of Schumann’s First Symphony so he could follow along as they played. He was too tall for that little box, and he folded himself in half and propped the score on his knees, making notations with a pencil.
Judit felt visible and vulnerable. She knew she ought to be enjoying the performance, but the box creaked every time Hans moved, and she was afraid they’d fall into the orchestra. She was relieved when intermission came and Hans whispered, “We don’t have to stay for the Liszt. I really wanted to know how Ashkenazy would handle ‘Spring.’”
“So how did he handle ‘Spring’?” Judit asked when they were safely outside once again, walking across Mendelssohn Bridge with their arms around each other. The train for Leipzig left at ten, and of course, they had to be on it. They couldn’t very well stay with Judit’s mother.
Hans said, “He’s just finding his way as a conductor. You can tell. But it’s moving to see him up there. He knows Schumann inside and out. He’s a master pianist, and in ten years, he’ll be a master conductor.”
“And will it take you that long?”
“Probably,” said Hans. Then he whistled something that Judit didn’t recognize, and he had to tell her that it was the theme of what they had just heard. He said, “You know, he wrote that right after he finally married Clara. Over her father’s objections. Clara’s father was very protective of her. She was a virtuoso pianist and a pretty good composer too. They lived in Leipzig when Schumann wrote his best work. Their house is a museum now. I’ll take you there.”