It was Judit’s turn to stare. “What are you talking about?”
“They opened it yesterday. It’s a mess, I hear. Lots of stuff on the floor. They say they cleared everything out and sent it upstairs, but it sure doesn’t sound that way.”
“You mean it’s open?”
“Didn’t I just say that?” Sammy looked amused. “I didn’t go in myself. Still has that yellow hazard tape everywhere. But you should check it out, Mrs. Klemmer. Maybe you’ll find something really explosive down there. Who knows?”
For the rest of the afternoon, Judit wandered through the National Museum. She could have entered the archive more directly and bypassed the exhibitions, but something made her take the long way round. When she’d first started working there, she’d always visited those rooms she’d known from childhood. She hadn’t done it for a while. A corridor led from the Media Room to the third floor of the museum exhibition wing: the Golden Age of Ashkenaz.
Worms, Mainz, Cologne, the three great centers in their medieval splendor, each had its room; fragments of prayer-houses, of ceremonial goblets, artifacts from more recent excavations, ornaments and tile work set in velvet, like precious stones. A diorama of a dance hall where a wedding took place, replicas of period instruments like lutes and tambourines, maps charting the routes of Jewish spice merchants both east and west, bags full of saffron, pepper, precious salves. Isaac of Navarone, Charlemagne’s emissary, Isaac of Gans, Daniel Itzig, court Jews and bankers. Jacob of Franconia. These rooms had long been marked for renovation, and some of the panels were too faded to read. A sleepy female guard in a blue uniform stirred, looking up to wonder who this woman was who stepped quietly through the corridor in her high heels.
A room devoted to Moses Mendelssohn, who entered Brandenburg through the gate reserved for Jews and cattle, personal artifacts like the pocket watch he gave to his son-in-law, his china plates, portraits of his children, his translation of the Torah into German. A portrait of the man himself, whose homely, pale, clean-shaven face was dominated by benevolent brown eyes. Then onward through portraits of early heroes of the Bund, bearded socialists and trade unionists, the writer Peretz lit from below in a way that made his bushy mustache glitter, old publications under glass. No guard sat in that room. No one dusted. At one point, it went dark, and Judit had to fumble for a switch, only to discover that the light was movement-activated. She caught a glimpse of herself in the glass display. She was stunned as a rabbit, blinking at whatever was inside.
If she took the stairs down one flight, she’d reach the glass corridor that led to the Hall of the Churban. She couldn’t count the times she’d been there as a girl, far more than the other exhibitions. At first, she’d explored the artifacts and testimonies left by survivors, and when she’d followed the trail of her own martyred Elsa Neuman, she’d added her own impressions. Those rooms had been so dense with papers, photographs, shelves holding a spoon someone had used in hiding before capture, improvised cloth shoes that took a woman through a death-march she did not survive, a hair of a beloved son in a transparent package, it seemed impossible that more could be added or that anyone could pass through that dark place and climb out on the terrace. The very claustrophobia was the horror of it, and its real intention. Did anyone still take children there? Even when Judit was a child, it hadn’t seemed a place where children ought to go.
Of course, there were exhibits like that everywhere in Judenstaat, and Judit knew from her own studies that they were deliberately homemade. In Dresden’s own Churban Hall, Leonora’s story was posted on the south-most wall; she’d written it in her ungrammatical and fearless German in 1951, five years after Liberation and the year Judit was born. Judit’s father had laminated it to ensure a kind of permanence. As time went on, though, it would all decay, and yet this decay was more like a fermentation, turning what was there into something more volatile: the handwriting of the dead, the spoons of the dead, the crammed shelves full of suitcases of dead people, or survivors soon to die of other causes. Where did the dead travel? To their death.
It had been years since Judit had walked through that glass corridor to the first-floor, Churban wing of the museum. She’d concentrated on her own exhibits on Judenstaat’s early history, on the far side of the terrace. Below it was her film archive. Such was the evolving nature of the Churban Hall that hundreds of items might have fallen off the shelves or been replaced with other artifacts or testimonies. She could only imagine what she’d find. She brushed her hair out of her eyes before she remembered that it was cut short now. She walked downstairs, through the glass entryway, and stopped.
The rooms were empty. Judit was so certain she was dreaming that she actually turned the light off and on again. There was nothing on the walls. She could still see places where things might have been, chipped paint, nail-holes. The floor had been swept recently. She walked through room after empty room, hardly knowing what she was doing, and she opened the door at the far end. Yellow hazard tape blocked the passage to the second-floor terrace, and the entrance to the permanent exhibition on the founding of Judenstaat.
Instantly, she was back upstairs in the Golden Age exhibit and she shook the guard who’d gone back to sleep. “What happened to the Churban Hall?”
The guard looked cross. “Closed for renovations.”
“But I need to get through there.”
The guard rolled her eyes. “Ma’am, the Churban Hall and the other permanent exhibit on the first floor are both closed until September. You’ll have to go back the way you came, and take the elevator in the Administrative Wing. How did you even get in here?”
“I work here,” Judit said.
“Well, if you work here, then you should know.”
Judit knew many things at once, and felt many things at once, and just as the guard now doubted her authority, she doubted her own. She was in somebody else’s clothing, with somebody else’s haircut. The guard just shook her head, and picked up her newspaper, which had the following headline: “Sokolov Announces New Policy of Open Border.”
“You’re home early,” Leonora said. She was washing the dish on which she’d eaten dinner. “I’ll heat something up.”
“Don’t bother,” Judit said. She threw her blazer on a chair, and opened the packed refrigerator. Without much thought, she dislodged an apple.
“Let me wash that,” Leonora said, and Judit obediently handed her mother the apple, sat on a kitchen chair, and stared at nothing. “How about a nice piece of chicken?”
“Alright,” said Judit. Her mother gave her a long look.
“Sweetheart,” she said, “how are things at work?”
“Well, to be honest,” Judit said, “I’m pretty much used up. I might sleep in tomorrow.”
“Shouldn’t you call and let someone know?”
“I don’t even know who I’d call,” Judit said.
Leonora handed Judit a plate with a cold chicken leg and some potato salad on it, and Judit took a bite out of the chicken leg and then a bite of the apple, holding one in each hand, her skirt hiked up well above her knees, her shoes half-kicked off, hanging from her toes. “Listen, I’ve been thinking,” said Leonora. “I shouldn’t go to the premiere. It’s bound to be a late night, and if I need to leave before it’s over, you’ll have to figure out what to do with me.”