Judit felt moved to ask her mother, “Why do you keep plastic covers on the furniture?”
“What a question!” Leonora said. “Since Daddy died, I’ve always kept it covered so I don’t have to bother cleaning it. You know that.”
“Well take the covers off,” Judit said. Then, “I mean, if you don’t mind.”
Speechless, Leonora sat, watching her daughter finish the coffee. Then she said, “Did the television people tell you I should? Will they film here too?”
“Maybe. I don’t know,” Judit said. When she came back twelve hours later, Leonora had been waiting up for her and had removed each slipcover, revealing crushed velveteen the color of mustard, and blue silk that appeared to glow in the dark. Judit had simply come to change her clothes, and she walked past this display without a word. It was two in the morning. Leonora followed her into the hallway.
“You can’t go out now. It’s not safe.”
“There’s a taxi outside,” Judit said, and of course, Leonora had to run to the window to confirm this information. There it was, waiting. A light was on inside, and the driver was reading a newspaper. Then, Leonora couldn’t say anything at all.
The television people never came to the apartment. They did film Judit at work, as part of a news broadcast. She’d had her hair and nails done and had shimmied into the same skirt that had struck Leonora as too short. As it was February, Lenora had insisted that she change out of the tweed blazer she’d chosen and instead put on a tawny-brown jacket and matching shoes. “Tweed is for autumn. Besides, these are better television colors,” she’d said, and then she stopped speaking and watched in fascination as her daughter put on lipstick. “I never thought I’d see the day,” Leonora said. “You never did a thing but wash your face.” Then, with a different note in her voice: “Judi, is there something you want to tell me?”
“What should I tell you?” Judit asked, innocently enough.
“Are you seeing someone special?”
Judit blotted the lipstick, not very expertly, and slipped on those shoes. Her silence was an affirmation.
“I’m happy for you,” Leonora said, though she didn’t actually sound happy. In fact, when Judit told her she’d be moving back home, she’d been over the moon, but her exhilaration had drained away, leaving her with a daughter who was a stranger. Leonora watched that daughter’s back, as she walked down the hall in high heels, and she called after her, “It’s about time you moved on! It’s past time, sweetheart!” By then, Judit had already gone.
An hour later, striding between monitors and followed by a camera, Judit spoke in the most general terms about the project, stating that the film would not reveal new information. There was no such thing as new information, Judit said. The facts had always been there. It was a matter of being capable of seeing what was right before their eyes. And what was the response she hoped the film would generate? She stopped, positioning herself in front of the Media Room’s wall of glass, in her red-brown costume, against the landscape of Stein Square, and beyond it, the gleaming Bridge Between East and West, the gleaming Elbe. Her hair was shorter, feathered around her chin in a way that softened and obscured her face. She said, “I hope we recognize ourselves. That’s all.”
“You know,” Sammy Gluck said to Judit one day, “you’re bound to replace Kornfeld.”
“Why would Kornfeld be replaced?” Judit asked.
“Well, you must know he’s resigned.”
“I didn’t know,” Judit said. She wanted very much to get back to her work, but Gluck was determined to complete this particular conversation. In a voice that was too loud, and with an air of knowing that it was too loud, he went on.
“He was pretty upset about the book. But you must have known that.”
“What book?”
“You signed off on the proofs.”
Judit tried to remember what this loud young man was talking about, and then she managed to say, “Well, didn’t he want me to sign off on them?”
“You’d better talk to him about that,” Gluck said, with some importance. He seemed to be aware that he was playing a game that was far more interesting than transferring film to video.
So Judit took the bait. She pushed herself out of her seat, and for the first time in three months, she walked to the administrative wing and the office she’d entered so many times before only to leave with so many varieties of frustration. She hadn’t thought of Kornfeld since December and was surprised at the force of her reluctance to approach him now. His secretary wasn’t there. His door was open.
Kornfeld’s enormous desk was piled with odds and ends, old photographs, boxes full of reels of audiotape. He was actually on the floor, sorting through files on a low shelf, and he seemed genuinely surprised to see Judit standing there in her sleek trousers and heels. He got up with difficulty and said, “I suppose you’re getting ready to move in.”
“Why would I?” Judit asked. The response couldn’t help but feel dismissive, as though she didn’t want the room itself. In fact, she didn’t. It wasn’t a room where someone worked; it was a showplace. Kornfeld took the statement in that spirit. He walked right past Judit and closed the door.
“Fine,” he said. “You get to decide what you want now. You get to decide what we all want. But maybe we’re not buying what you’re selling. We’ll see.”
“What are you talking about?” Judit asked. Her tone was mild; the pity she felt was real. Kornfeld, with his boxes of audiotape, with his little bald head and his suit-coat and cufflinks, he had been on his way out for years. But was that her fault?
“I’m talking about this,” Kornfeld said. He pulled an enormous handsome volume from where it rested on his shelf and flipped it open. “This garbage. These Nazis. They’re the new heroes?”
It was a photograph of a haggard man, dressed like a hunter. He was posed on a black and yellow sandstone cliff, shielding his eyes from the sun with the flat of his hand. Below: white type on black, a caption:
We stored weapons in the caves and attacked the Reds by night. The Soviet troop trains heading to Dresden all passed our camp, across the Elbe, in the Bastei cliffs near Rathen. Our proudest moment was the fire of ’54. With nothing but an old grenade and a pint of kerosene, we forced a whole battalion to retreat.
“Fascists,” Kornfeld said, “sabotaging the work of liberation. I don’t care what name they want to call it. It was liberation. The Soviet Union gave us our lives back. They liberated Auschwitz. They liberated Treblinka. They pushed those bastards out and gave us a country. The people I talk to, they know it’s liberation.”
“Oscar,” Judit began, but he didn’t let her say more.
“I don’t even know why you bothered coming in here. What do you have to prove to somebody like me? When the book comes out, when the film comes out, though, there’ll be hell to pay. People do remember, Judit. And not all of them are dead.”
He was right. She shouldn’t have bothered to come in here. What did she want? Some kind of blessing from that petty little man? Sure, it would make a lot of people angry: brutal descriptions of Soviet rapes and murders of Jews and Saxons both, interviews with partisans and their fight against the occupation. She also knew that she was telling the truth. Maybe Oscar Kornfeld couldn’t see it, but his children would. Then she realized that she didn’t know if Kornfeld had children.