When Hans talked about music, he walked quickly, and Judit had to trot to keep up with him. They should probably catch the trolley to the station, but the night air was gentle and seductive. Maybe they could just sleep on a park bench in each other’s arms. Judit liked the idea just enough to thread her fingers through Hans’s hand and slow him down a little. She asked, “Why don’t you write music?”
Hans said, “Me? I’m not built for it.”
“But you know so much and hear so much, I know you could compose.”
“Why are you so set on my being a composer?” Hans asked, and he laughed and pulled Judit down on a bench by the bridge. He opened the score. “Look at all this. You realize what it takes? All those notes, and Robert Schumann had to choose between them.”
“You know I can’t read a thing,” said Judit.
“Come on. You read the Hebrew alphabet. Music’s not so hard. But that’s beside the point,” Hans said. “I want everything—all the notes and what’s underneath the notes, their history, who’s played them, how well or badly—”
“But we all choose,” Judit said. She had turned serious. It was unbearably wonderful that she could have this kind of conversation in her hometown, and with a man she’d share a bed with that night. That didn’t make her any less determined to press her point. “I mean, when I curate an exhibit like the one on Leipzig, I have all these documents and photographs, whole boxes of them, all that film footage to sort through, but most of the work I do isn’t looking at it. Looking’s the easy part. It’s about figuring out what I can use. That’s what film editors do. Nothing would get done if you kept everything.”
Hans said something unexpected. “Every time you cut a frame, you slit a throat.”
Judit said, “That’s not fair.”
“It’s true though,” Hans said. “What do you leave out of the story?”
It was a pointed question, one Judit knew she couldn’t answer. It was all of a piece with all the questions she couldn’t answer. It struck her like a hammer then. She had spent all day dragging Hans to the sacred places of her childhood, and logically, he ought to do the same. Only, Hans had no childhood. He had the orphan home, before that, his uncle’s tavern, and before that, nothing. None of those places were sacred to Hans. Maybe enough time had passed to let Hans know that Judit couldn’t answer his question, or maybe she had found a way to turn that question back at him. She said, at last, “This Clara, once Schumann married her, were they happy?”
“Very,” Hans said. “At least in Leipzig. They had eight children. Then it gets complicated. There’s a younger man in the picture, a certain Mr. Brahms. But that’s much later, after Schumann went mad.”
“I’m glad you’re not a composer,” Judit said.
“Me too,” Hans said.
After that, they really did have to run for the train. The whole time, Judit thought about the parts of Hans’s life she’d never really know, the names of his parents and their fates, the place where they were buried. For Hans, every rectangle of green would be a graveyard, every cornerstone a tombstone, and for that reason alone, he would have no country. After they’d boarded the train and were in their seats and out of breath, Judit asked Hans, “When is your birthday?”
Hans didn’t seem surprised at the question. “I don’t know, Lamb. Maybe the year. My uncle told me ’44, but there’s not even proof of that.”
“Well, don’t you have a birth certificate?”
Hans shrugged. Then he said, “Why don’t you choose a birthday for me?”
Without hesitation, Judit said, “September fifteenth.” She waited for Hans to ask her why she’d chosen that date, and when he didn’t, she added of her own accord, “It’s when I always wished I had my birthday. No one’s on vacation, so your friends are all in town, and the weather’s wonderful. Plus, it’s an easy date to remember—right in the middle of the month.”
“Then that’s my birthday,” Hans said. He pulled her close to him, and she leaned her head against his shoulder as the Leipzig Express took them home.
3
MAYBE Shaindel was right. Hans haunted Judit because he wanted something from her. Even as he hectored her about her little executions, he wanted to be organized. He demanded his own coherence. If somebody lied about the murder, she must fill in the missing pieces. Hans demanded the truth, a full historical reckoning. Or did he? What could a ghost demand?
Everything. That was the trouble. If Hans had been alive somewhere in Loschwitz, she could have asked him what he wanted, but now there was no limit and no warmth to humanize those harsh demands. Let her take all the facts and organize them, pornographic images that documented genocide, canisters marked “Discard,” and even ordinary footage that no one would find explosive:
February 1949: Leopold Stein and Harry Truman. They walk together at a brisk pace by the Elbe, and Truman stops and points across the moonscape of rubble still in evidence along the banks where American bombs had leveled Dresden not so long ago. According to the German voiceover, Truman has once again repeated his offer of interest-free loans.
September 1951: A riveter is obscured by his overalls. His hard-hat fits badly. He turns off the machine, smiles at the camera, and rolls up his sleeve to show his tattooed number from the camps. His neighbor does the same. Before the not-so-steady camera, worker after worker reveals his number, and they’re held up in a line. The camera pulls in so close that the numbers dissolve into an abstraction. What was the point of that unfocused close-up? Probably there was no point. But she won’t leave it on the cutting-room floor.
November 1950: The first car to be manufactured in the country, the homely Yekke, rolls out of the factory in Zwickau with great fanfare. It is compact, and its body is made of a special lightweight compound developed in Sweden. Leopold Stein climbs inside; he’s too big for the cabin, and his knees are visible over the steering column. He turns the ignition and drives it out of the factory. It is only with effort that the car manages to break the ribbon draped across the door of the garage.
June 1948: A filmed performance of the National Anthem written by Hanns Eisler, the cynical composer who had come to Judenstaat to write a vicious song cycle about the funny little Jewish state. He never left.
The choir performs outdoors, with scaffolding and half-constructed landmarks all over a packed square on the fifth anniversary of Liberation Day. They sing below the Stripes and Star, dressed, as was the fashion of the time, in concentration camp uniforms with red neckerchiefs to honor Soviet liberators.
Much later—1960: More amateur footage, eight-millimeter, surely taken by the father of one of the children in a Youth Group choir as they sing the “Hymn of the Ghetto Partisans,” one of the few Yiddish songs that Bundist children learned by rote: