It was after just such a night, knocked senseless, beyond exhausted, that she came to herself and realized she’d have to get some sleep. It must have been three in the morning. She tried to hail a taxi back to her dormitory, but the streets were deserted. As she wandered beyond Stein Square, the webbing of orange hazard tape around the new construction rattled and glowed like exotic grasses in the desert. Then she realized she’d reached the edge of Johannstadt, and was two blocks away from an address that Bondi had made her repeat several times when they last made contact. It was on a small street lined with Yiddish pashkevils trumpeting something about a birth or death that wasn’t her concern. All she knew was that he’d told her that the door was never locked.
Up an uneven flight of stairs, she turned the doorknob, and walked into the small, warm room. There was that bed, a daybed covered with a striped synthetic bedspread. Maybe she was still under the spell of the screen, or the sight of herself reflected in the window. Maybe just as her hands and eyes stopped working, something else shut down. She lay on the bed and slept.
An hour passed, maybe two. She woke to find that she had been turned on her back and was in the process of being undressed. Her shoes were off, and her blouse unbuttoned. Someone was unfastening her skirt, and for a moment, she wondered if she’d be slipped into a modest nightgown, but those hands worked the skirt down her hips. They weren’t women’s hands. She kept her eyes closed. Maybe he’d stop there. Maybe he’d put a blanket over her. He paused at the elastic of her underwear. She was awake enough to know that if she moved one way or another, she could determine the direction. She held still. He slipped his hand inside.
The room was in a black-hat enclave, across the street from a school for girls, and above a kosher dairy restaurant. There was a picture of one of their Rebbes over the daybed, not Schneerson, another one, with a salt-and-pepper beard and a black skull-cap above tired-looking eyes. On the desk, there was a row of Yiddish books lined up between two bricks. It would be some time before Judit learned the full story of that room, just as it would take time to find out much about Bondi himself. He mentioned an ambitious father who pushed him to graduate from secondary school two years ahead of schedule. By 1975, he was a student at the academy, aged sixteen, sober and quiet. He had been hand-picked for special training before he turned twenty, and spent a year in Moscow, which he made clear had been an opportunity that “should have been given to someone else.”
“What do you mean?” Judit asked him. It was hard to get Bondi to talk. It was hard to call him Joseph. Even after they’d made love, and his compact, beautiful body was naked on top of the striped bedspread, there was nothing vulnerable about Joseph Bondi. He would seldom answer a question like that in any way except:
“I mean just what I say. It was someone else’s opportunity. As for me, I saw nothing wonderful about Moscow, and I heard nothing worth hearing there, except what is clear now and is not secret, that it’s a dying city. I’m not a morbid man. Some men are. They would have appreciated Moscow in 1979.”
He approached their lovemaking as he approached all things, with precision and sobriety, a quiet resignation. That might have been the only way that Judit could have entered the affair. It was like that doorbell at nine o’clock when she sat at her sewing machine and she knew. Even before she saw the man in the brown suit and hat, she knew. Maybe she even knew then that one day she would be in that bed with the man who’d made a widow of her.
“If you’re not a morbid man,” Judit asked Bondi, “why are you with me?”
He turned his head on the pillow, and pulled her towards him. “Are you warm enough?” Was that his answer? When Judit was with Hans, there were a thousand moments she could conjure when they were tangled into a single, breathing human being. Now she could feel her body against Bondi’s, a few degrees cooler than his own, asserting a distinction.
“Have you ever been married?” Judit asked him.
Bondi said, “I’m married now.”
“Of course you are,” Judit said. “Where do you really live?”
After a pause, Bondi said, “You don’t need to know that.”
“Then don’t tell me,” said Judit. She could imagine the place well enough, an apartment in the Neustadt, though there’d also be a country house outside of Dresden, probably in Dolzchen, in one of the renovated villas. They were certainly childless, maybe saving to move to larger quarters when Bondi was promoted. Meanwhile, the wife worked, probably in a field that involves logic and precision, like bookkeeping. She would expect her husband to keep irregular hours. Something made Judit ask, “Are you on duty?”
Bondi gave her a sharp look. “What do you mean?”
Judit thought: I mean just what I say, but what she actually said was: “Does she think you’re on duty now?”
“I don’t know what she thinks,” Bondi said.
Illogically, Judit did know what Bondi thought most of the time. It felt like a parlor trick, that she didn’t even need to see his face to know what passed across it, sometimes impatience, most frequently deduction, and once in a while a conclusion reached that took the form of triumph or of joy.
She’d never felt that clarity with Hans. Their thoughts were too entangled. There was a loneliness to her hours with Bondi when her body was so satisfied and her mind so engaged and her soul so alienated from her circumstances. She didn’t think he loved her either. Maybe he had, back when he wrote on that card. He didn’t now.
She moved in with her mother. The apartment in the Altstadt had plenty of room, and given the pending demolition of the dormitory, her earlier resistance felt absurd. When she arrived with her suitcase and sewing machine, Leonora waited by the door.
“Judi, did you have any idea?”
“Of what?” Judit asked. Then, she looked past the entrance towards the six long wardrobe-sized boxes in the parlor. “Oh. They thought I ought to have some new things, you know, because I’m going to be a public person.”
“Oh, sweetheart, why didn’t you tell me? I was still in my nightgown when they came this morning, two wonderful men, and I was so embarrassed, I can’t even tell you. They carried all this on their backs, right up the stairs, and all the neighbors opened their doors, and I didn’t even know what to tell them. I wasn’t even sure I had the right change for a tip.”
“They aren’t allowed to take tips,” Judit said.
“Well they took it,” Leonora said. “You really do need to tip people like that, no matter what anyone says. And they seemed to appreciate it.”
So then, of course, Judit had to open all the boxes with her mother looking on and saying things like, “Heels aren’t practical for a working woman,” or “The skirt’s too short—some women can carry it off but you don’t have the right build, sweetheart,” and “Of course, it’ll all have to be dry-cleaned.”
“I guess so,” Judit said. She transferred the clothing to her old closet where her mother had kept everything that Judit had outgrown, from her baby clothes to her Junior Bundist uniform. Judit laid that strange, stale-smelling collection on her old bed without comment. Fortunately, the new clothes were packed on hangers or there wouldn’t have been enough of them. Once Judit’s closet was full, Leonora anxiously offered the one in the hallway, and then her own.
“So,” Leonora began, almost bashfully, “what does that mean, a public person?”
“I think it has something to do with the film,” Judit said.
“Will you be on television?”
“I hope not,” Judit said.
“Don’t be such a snob,” said Leonora. “There are some wonderful things on television nowadays, very educational.” By then, she’d finally made Judit sit in the kitchen and drink terrible coffee that she’d left on the burner in anticipation of her arrival. Judit did try to be a good sport. The kitchen, she suddenly realized, was small and grim, and through an archway, she could see the dining room without the table, just six chairs against the wall, each with a plastic cover on its pad, and further on, the living room where every window had a double-lace curtain and every cushion on a couch or chair was covered in plastic.