Judit sat up. “Don’t you want to go, Mom?”
“Well, to be honest, I just don’t think I’m up to it.” Leonora turned to the sink again, and squeezed out the sponge. “If it means enough to you, of course—”
“Don’t you want to meet the prime minister?”
“I need to get up early for work,” Leonora said. “It’s a weeknight, after all, and there are people counting on me.”
Judit didn’t answer. She kept eating the apple and the chicken leg, turning each in her hands, biting into each in turn, and she didn’t even notice when her mother placed a fork and knife and napkin on the table. Judit had made a purchase at the drugstore. It was in her purse. It wasn’t so far to the bathroom, yet the distance through the hallway seemed impossible. That kitchen chair, with its hollow metal legs and plastic back, was like the cockpit of an airplane. If she got up, the world would tip and veer into free fall.
Leonora said, “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Judit said.
“Have things slowed down at work?”
“Actually, they have,” said Judit. “I was thinking that maybe I’d take a vacation.”
“Oh, that’s nice,” said Leonora. “That’s wonderful news. And when will you go?”
“After the film premieres,” she said. “I think, in June.”
“Well, I’m asking you a long time in advance because I know how busy you are,” Leonora said, “but I’m hoping this October you’ll go to the cemetery with me to see Daddy.”
“Sure,” Judit said. She was eating the potato salad. Then, she added, “Just remind me when it’s closer. I’ll make sure I’m free.”
“I appreciate that,” said Leonora. She cleared the dish with the apple core and the chicken bone, and Judit at last forced herself to her feet. She knew already; what was the point? By now, she couldn’t help but know that she was pregnant.
THE DYBBUK
1
“WHEN did you find out?” Bondi asked her. He must have been in the middle of some other project when she’d phoned. He sounded distant.
“I’m sorry I told you at all,” Judit said, “but I figured you’d know when I went to the clinic to get rid of it.” In fact, she’d taken the day off for just that purpose, though she would have been just as happy to stay in bed. Leonora had left for work before Judit had managed to make it to the kitchen, and she’d poured herself an orange drink that tasted like poison, dumped most of it in the sink, and threw on some of her old clothes because the apartment didn’t have a private line and she couldn’t walk to the phone booth in her bathrobe. She didn’t have the clinic number, and her hand had dialed Bondi all by itself.
When she’d broken the news over the phone, he’d told her to wait, and she said, “Wait for what?”
“Wait until we talk.”
“What’s there to talk about?”
The silence on the other end of the phone thickened. By all rights, Judit should have hung up. Instead, she sowed that rich silence with memories, and tried to push herself to say what she was thinking, that the living sensation that she felt above her private parts was telling her a lie, that she would be seduced by that lie if she waited too long, and that when she made the appointment, she would tell him not to meet her there and hope that he would be there. That last piece, he might understand. Then Bondi said, “Turn around.”
He was standing outside the phone booth in the sunshine. He had his old hat on, and a tan scarf, and he was holding a portable phone. They looked at each other through the glass. Below the brim of that hat, his eyes looked clear and bright. He opened the door of the booth and Judit fell right into him and let him hold her. He was strong enough to bear her weight, but she could tell that he was shaken.
When she let go, he said, “Don’t do it.”
“I’m going to lose it anyway,” Judit said. “Why fool ourselves? Besides, what about your wife?”
“I’ll leave her,” Bondi said. There was something childish about the way he said it, and Judit was aware, maybe for the first time, that she was much older than Bondi.
She said, “I don’t think I could take losing another one. I can’t risk it. Don’t ask me to.”
“You won’t lose this one,” Bondi said. “Look at me, Judit. Not at the ground. At me,” for she had been staring at the ground, trying to control herself. Now, they faced each other, and she forgot his age, his story, even forgot his name under the force of his conviction. “This one is different. We won’t lose it. I promise you.”
“How can you know?” Judit asked helplessly. “My body—”
“Your body is perfect,” Bondi said.
He backed her into that same phone booth and arranged her against the glass. He took off his hat and put it on top of the telephone. Then, he hesitated.
“How does this work?” When she didn’t answer right away, he clarified. “I don’t want to hurt the baby.”
“My God, Joseph,” Judit said, “I love you.” She started breathing hard, and tears ran down her cheeks. She was blushing. Bondi looked startled and awkward, very unlike himself, and she laughed and said, “I do love you.” Then, she realized she had frightened him, so she pulled herself together and pressed against him. “Everything works. Everything is fine.”
She did believe that everything was fine. And then she didn’t. She cramped and bent at the waist, got up in the middle of the night and checked her underwear. She dropped an expensive camera on the floor. She went to the bathroom five times in a single afternoon. Fortunately, the film was edited and ready because many times, her hands stopped working now. She would turn them around and around at the wrists and then she’d think about the clinic and know Bondi would find out before she could so much as schedule a procedure. There was the abortionist in Loschwitz, but that was a rumor. That was a rumor and death was real. How could Bondi understand what it meant, to face this down?
Bondi hadn’t been there when Judit sewed the same pattern over and over again afterwards. He hadn’t seen the battles and the compromises and the hard-won resignation. Or had he? Hadn’t he stood by her bed the weeks after the murder and watched the pieces of Judit’s heart stitch themselves back together imperfectly? Those seams still showed. Maybe Bondi even loved those seams. Who knows? For years, he’d been the only constant in her life. And maybe now, there was another.
When Judit took off whole afternoons, she had expected someone to complain. No one did. Rather, they seemed to accept her absence, even welcome it, as the heavy machinery of the anniversary project went forward. All of her instincts told her to get out of the way. Sometimes, she was with Bondi, but most of the time, she walked and walked, just as she had before the age of taxi cabs and Media Rooms. She walked from Stein Square along the promenade and saw that, indeed, swallows once again dipped below the Bridge Between East and West, but she didn’t stay to watch them. She didn’t believe in those swallows. They were a product of someone’s calculation, deliberately lured to reconstructed nests that an environmental artist designed on a computer. Or maybe it was just spring now, and the swallows knew it.
She crossed the bridge to the Neustadt, where construction on the bypass was complete, and a line of rational traffic signals eased her way across the road to her old dormitory. There were blue and white fliers plastered on the wall. “Future Site of Long-Term Corporate Solutions.” A lot of dust had accumulated on the glass door, and when she cleared a little circle with her hand, she could make out the porter’s desk, just barely, with its old-fashioned ink-blotter and the telephone that tenants couldn’t use. If she had stayed, the porter would still sit behind the desk, the dormitory would be open; nothing would have changed. Her body wouldn’t be a trap, following its own logic. It would not be owned by something else. She would be sad, but free.