“You say there’s no seventh floor,” Judit said. “I must not have the right address.”
“Nonsense,” said Charlotte.
Mendel, as though roused from a reverie, said, “Perhaps I can help. Do you have the address in writing?”
“Let’s see it,” Charlotte said.
Judit shook her head and shook it hard. It was difficult to remember what she’d hoped to find. Some kind of answer? These people had all the answers, sure, and now it was clear she’d walked into a trap. “I need to go, Charlotte,” she said.
“I’m Chana Batya,” Charlotte said. “Look, we’re not holding you prisoner, but it’s a cold night. At least take my coat. You can bring it back tomorrow when you come for Shabbos.”
In a voice louder than Judit had intended, she said, “I’m not coming for Shabbos.”
Charlotte stared at her. The sippy-cup girl stared at her. Dahlia, the miracle baby, turned up her dull blue eyes in her direction. A door swung open, and there was big-lunged Leah with her hair pulled back like Shaindel’s, and behind her was a pudgy boy who must have been the brother. Then, like a pendulum, their full attention swung to Mendel.
Mendel folded his hands and addressed the room: “According to the Sages, if every Jew just once properly observed the Sabbath, the Messiah would immediately arrive.”
Mendel’s ponderous voice, his presence, was so exactly like the old Charlotte’s that Judit wondered if she’d taught him how to do it. She said, “I have to work. I’m on a deadline.”
Then she was off—out the door and in the foyer—trying to remember how to get back to the lobby. She’d left her duffle coat in the apartment, and the abstract sense of floating somewhere outside her body had returned. Face it, she was sick and feverish, had been light-headed for days or even weeks, and she was fully aware that it would be insane to get back outside that night. But even more insane was what she did next, what she had to do.
She had to get to the seventh floor, not because there’d be an answer waiting, but because if she left, she would not come back. To leave without walking a few more flights of stairs and seeing what was there—she couldn’t do it. She knew it would not be Hans. It might be that pornographer, a bomb, a Loschwitz black-hat. Whatever was up there was still there, months after she’d received the invitation. She was half-aware of Charlotte calling after her repeatedly, and it was only when she’d started up the stairs in her stocking feet that Judit realized she’d not only left without her coat, but left her shoes behind.
Mendel had told the truth. The stairs went up five flights. She walked into a dark hallway, struggling to recollect the few times in her childhood that she’d been inside the restaurant. There’d been a spiral staircase to the dome—yes, from a lower level—and it could be reached by double-doors she could make out just ahead. She could feel the texture of the hallway rug through her stockinged feet. She gripped a central railing, and carefully pressed each foot on the tread of each step, slow enough to combat vertigo. Then, she reached a door she recognized, and opened it. The air expanded.
Her hand must have hit a switch. All at once, that dome filled with dazzling colors, swirling and jewel-toned. She stopped dead.
Someone else was there. Standing behind her was an old man wearing pajama bottoms and an undershirt. He held a bottle of something. His long, unshaven face was stained all over with the colors of the dome.
“So it’s you knocking around here. I wondered when you’d show up.” There was the high-pitched, too-loud voice.
Judit steeled herself and said, “Who are you?”
“What kind of question is that? You know who I am!”
She recognized him and felt vertigo return. “But you’re in prison.”
“Released for good behavior,” Arno Durmersheimer said. Then he frowned. “Now you look like you’re going to be sick. Nobody told you? Well, that’s no surprise!” He reached for her arm, and she drew back, but he ignored it and tucked his own around her elbow. “You’re freezing too. Where are your shoes? Do I have to carry you? No? A good thing! We got a climb. You just lean on me.”
3
“YOU took your sweet time,” Durmersheimer said. “If you’d shown up next week, I might have been gone. Too bad. They’re alright, these kind of black-hats. At least they speak German.”
They’d reached the room above the dome by way of a pull-down ladder, and he’d set Judit up with a cup of hot rum, and filled his own glass. He sat at an odd angle because, he told Judit, he was deaf in one ear. It happened in ’56, when he’d slipped back across the border after that business in Rathen. He kept a low profile—worked in demolition—was one of the crew that blew up everything that was in the way of the Protective Rampart. He’d blown up houses in Dessau, Gohrisch, Papstdorf, Cunnersdorf, Saxon towns and villages that weren’t even on the map now. That’s how he’d lost his hearing—all those explosives. He couldn’t hear his own voice, half the time.
He made a point of saying that he wasn’t much of a drinker but since he’d been out of jail, he found it helped him sleep. Granted, this place was so small that there wasn’t much to do but sleep between their Sabbaths.
“These Chabad black-hats are alright. But they don’t like me much. I turn on lights for them Saturdays, and they’re not allowed to ask me or it breaks a law or something. Now listen, no offense, but how am I supposed to read their minds? I’m not a Jew.”
Judit pretended to drink the rum and shifted her weight on the folding chair. To see this man she’d heard about so often, to see him in the flesh, leaning back in his chair and scratching himself through that undershirt, the poisonous absurdity of it all worked at her until she just said, “Do they know who you are?”
Durmersheimer frowned. “Of course they do.”
“I don’t know what you want from me. You think I’ll forgive you?”
“For what? You can’t believe that story. Face it, you wouldn’t be here if you did.”
“The bullet came from your gun,” Judit said tonelessly.
“You read the police report? I’ll bet you didn’t. I haven’t fired that gun in forty years!”
“They found the list on you—the collaborators.”
“Collaborators? Right—that’s what they said. We wanted Saxons you people listen to, names Jews know. The ones with family who died in ’46. And he was the only one who was ready to speak out about the massacre.”
This was all going too fast, the back-and-forth, the information that he seemed to think she knew. If she had a gun, she’d kill him, but she had no gun. The ladder to that crawl space was still hanging from a trapdoor. She could probably get past him if she took him by surprise. Then he leaned in and blocked out any chance. His whisper was like gravel.
“Look, I don’t know who killed your husband, but if you ask me, it had to be a Soviet assassin, Moscow trained. And think about it—a Moscow-trained assassin in a balcony shoots your husband in the head and shuts up the other people on the list.”
“What the hell are you talking about?” Judit said.
Durmersheimer said, “The massacre!” When she was silent, he went on. “But aren’t you here because you watched that movie? I know you can’t see much from that distance, but you don’t know how long I had to trade favors in that filthy Loschwitz ghetto to even find it! The Dresden massacre in ’46. The Reds who killed his parents!”
“My husband didn’t know how his parents died.”
Durmersheimer poured himself another drink. “Sure he knew. But the dead can’t testify. That’s why they’re dead. I saw that movie you made—the nice old lady talking about her Russian on the white horse. So-called liberation! It’s a pack of lies. Your husband knew it. You’ve got to tell the story that your man didn’t live to tell.”