“He has a different story. He said Hans was about to make a public statement about a Soviet massacre in Dresden.”
Bondi said, “That is completely possible.”
Judit said nothing. Bondi’s face was impassive, and a heartbeat later, she burst out: “What massacre? When did it take place? Is there any proof?”
“That’s your work, not mine,” said Bondi.
Those words carried a promise. It would be her work. Even as she took in the implications of what Bondi said, she felt a bright thread of anticipation. She would have access to material that would make sense of things that everybody knew, and no one would acknowledge. A thought came to her with such force that she almost said it out loud. Someone could say it in the film she’s making. For forty years, our country has been buried alive.
She thought those words, but what she said was this: “I don’t believe my husband’s case is closed. Where’s the police report? If he was going to talk about a Soviet massacre, why would a Saxon try to stop him? Who put explosives in those tapes? If they’re from Loschwitz, why would those people even care who killed my husband?”
The rain had stopped by now, and the janitor had long since wiped down the rest of the tables in the cafeteria. Soon, the night shift would appear for supper. Bondi’s overcoat weighed on Judit’s shoulders. He gave her one of his long looks, but there was no calculation in it.
“I don’t know,” Bondi said. “If I knew, I’d tell you. But I also ask you, Judit, what would it serve?”
2
WHAT would it serve? She thought about it in the days and weeks that followed. If those questions had answers, it would serve justice. Justice would be served. These sentences had rhythms that she recognized: a Junior Bundist choral piece. And then she heard her own voice hectoring: justice for whom? A chain of facts was not the same as justice. An answer to a question served no one in isolation. Justice was the organizing principle of history.
And history fell right into her hands now, film stock transferred to video by five smart assistants overseen by Sammy Gluck in the Media Room overlooking Stein Square on rows of screens attached to big, gray boxes. Those screens projected images frame by frame, variants of Judit’s footage for direct comparison, and Judit crossed from one screen to the other, referring to the storyboard. Then there was the new material from Anna Lehmann delivered by the couriers, young girls or boys on motorbikes who brought big, padded envelopes from who-knows-where: film canisters and also documents that verified their contents. The declassified material challenged Judit’s dormant Russian, but she pored over it, fact-checked, and only afterwards passed on the film to Freddi Schumaker.
“This is brilliant stuff,” Freddi said to Judit. She didn’t come in often; most days, she moved back and forth across the border, conducting interviews. “Your old mentor’s got friends in high places. Is she a holy terror?”
“No worse than I am,” Judit said. She’d actually gotten to like Fredericka, who often feigned a charming intimidation. “She’s got a bigger appetite, though. She looks like the Protective Rampart.”
“Well then, I’ll have to take her apart brick by brick,” said Freddi. “I’m good at that.” Then she said to Judit, “Good luck making sense of this office. It’s a wreck. I’m glad we have you upstairs, kid. We need a little terror around here.”
The tapes were in disarray, and Judit sorted through bins and found that Sammy had the sense to label the new videos with her old codes. She did attempt to look for the film that Sammy hadn’t transferred, but although no one talked about the incident downstairs, her questions were met with evasion that implied she ought to let it go. The waste—the enormous waste—made Judit furious, but she had too much else to do.
If Oscar Kornfeld took issue with Judit’s reappearance, he didn’t show it. A month after he’d asked her to resign, he wandered into the Media Room, and such was her absorption that he was standing right behind her before she noticed him at all.
He said, “You need to sign off on this.” He handed her a large manila envelope. She set it aside on the worktable, and several hours passed before she remembered the package, and scribbled her name in a corner without opening the thing or even giving any thought to the nature of her authority. Later, he ran into her in the hall and said, “So you’re pleased with the proofs?”
Judit said, “Didn’t Sammy hand them back to you?”
“Of course,” Kornfeld said. Seeing no sign that Judit wanted to engage in further conversation, he melted off somewhere.
Hours themselves melted now. She no longer had to struggle to complete a puzzle. The pieces were laid out before her in Fredericka’s notes, and she combined the interviews and footage into a coherent whole: “Singing Junior Bundists: 1960”; “Interview #21”; “Pastoral scene: Rathen.” The yellow morning light, the white light of afternoon, and sometimes twilight itself passed over Judit and her screens. Such was her accumulated knowledge that once she’d established a filing system for the tapes, she knew just where to find the missing pieces.
At first, Gluck glued himself to Judit’s side. The keyboard by the monitors was still moist from his fingers when he stepped back to watch her work. He had been clumsy; he erased too much, made everything too clean. He tried too hard. Now, only she was permitted to work with the new material, and he watched her translate Freddi’s notes into visual form, waiting for her to throw him a question so he could pounce on it and tear it with his teeth and carry it around the room before returning it in some gross form. Once, he said, “You know, with pixels, you can increase the resolution, make it consistent, everything in focus.”
Judit said, “That’s no good.”
“Well, then you’re just reproducing a camera lens the way you’ve done it. The background and the foreground get lost.”
“Right,” Judit said, not really looking up from the two scenes she was interspersing, and therefore making Gluck go slightly crazy. He wanted acknowledgment; he wanted credit; he wanted, at the very least, to be needed, and after a while he admitted that he might as well stop pestering her and stick to the technical side of things.
Yet Sammy couldn’t quite believe how quickly Judit mastered what she’d learned. She worked instinctively, often combining two tapes like a bartender muddling two kinds of spirits, mellowing the flat, contemporary interviews, creating continuity with footage decades old. Most days, she worked at an on-screen storyboard without audio, stopping at places only she could understand, and then she’d call in one of the assistants to take tapes back to Gluck for what he knew, frankly, was work a monkey could have done.
Gluck couldn’t help but say, “Are you sure you didn’t take a special tutorial last year? When we were at that conference?”
“What you don’t understand,” Judit said, “is that what I’m doing now is much easier than what I tried to do downstairs.”
“So you finally admit it,” Gluck said. He sounded giddy, but his face didn’t show it. “All that time, you stuck to those old machines, and now look at you. We’ll be done by early March for sure.”
Then he too melted away, and it was only Judit, the videos, and piles of Freddi’s notes. The only sound was the electric heater and the whine of the machines. If she looked up, she would be startled by her own reflection in the blackened windows—face drawn, eyes enormous, hair in her face. Once, she lost control of her hands. She rubbed them together for a while. Then she sat back and gave her eyes a rest. If she wasn’t lucky, something would appear behind those eyes, and she’d have to rub them, hard.