It might have been then that Fredericka glanced outside and started walking towards the glass wall with the view of Stein Square. “Judi. Please come. What do you call those people, the ones with the hats and beards?”
In spite of herself, Judit joined her and looked down. The glass was soundproofed, but it vibrated with what was happening three stories below: the whole of Stein Square from the Elbe to Parliament literally packed with black-hats, yet more of them streaming in from the embankment, literally blackening the sideways and the streets.
“I’d film them, but isn’t that against their law?” Freddi looked at Judit for guidance. “No? Maybe I will, then. It’s quite a novelty for us, over on the other side.” She ran to get her little video camera, and then asked, “Is it one of their festivals?”
“They’re protesting,” said Judit.
“But I thought they didn’t get involved in politics. They just keep to themselves and pray. Isn’t that right?”
In fact, it wasn’t clear what the black-hats were doing. They might have been praying. Some sects had done it years ago, in the early battles for state-funded Yeshivas when their presence would postpone sessions of Parliament for hours or even days. This time, though, it seemed to be a united front: all kinds of hats, broad-brimmed, flat-crowned, high-crowned Chabad fedoras, black suits and caftans, wool and gabardine. Young men were climbing the sandstone pillars of Parliament, nimble as spiders, and suddenly, a Yiddish banner was unfurled, in clear Hebrew characters Judit could read a hundred yards away:
“Do you understand that jargon?” Freddi asked Judit.
Judit surprised both herself and Freddi by dodging the question. So did Sammy Gluck and another girl who’d joined them at the window who at the very least had enough Yiddish to understand Hitler. All were transfixed by the spectacle, by the sheer number of men who filled the streets and sidewalks and brought traffic to a halt. If police had been called in, there’d been no visible effect.
The phone in Kornfeld’s office started ringing. No one had occupied that office for a month. It was just down the hall. Everyone looked at Judit. She stayed where she was, and on the fifth ring, Sammy Gluck ran off to answer it.
They could hear him even from a distance. “Who?” His voice sounded too high. “Well, do you think it’s a good idea?” Then, he set the receiver down, walked back, and stood in the doorway. “There’s one of them, wants to come upstairs.” He looked at Judit.
“It’s not up to me,” Judit said.
“Who’s it up to, then?” Sammy asked savagely. “She says she knows you.”
Judit hesitated. Then she said, “I’ll go meet her.” Turning to the others, she added, “It’s just a woman from Chabad.”
Still, she admitted some anxiety as she walked towards the elevator. Nothing was less appealing than facing Charlotte in a state of panic, and with any luck, Charlotte would take one look at her and know that she was pregnant. The elevator door opened. It was Shaindel.
Shaindel tore down the hallway like she was on fire, pulling Judit with her and then suddenly, they were both in the Media Room surrounded by staff and their blinking screens. Shaindel’s hair was out of her hair-band, wind-blown over a face fixed with terror. She’d lost one shoe and carried the other, leaving her in muddy stockinged feet.
Freddi asked, “Is that your niece?”
Sammy addressed her in Yiddish. “Sit. You want a cookie?”
But someone else said, “It wouldn’t be kosher. Don’t upset her.” They brought her water in a paper cup, and she drank it. She didn’t take her eyes off Judit, and finally, Judit had sense enough to shut the two of them in Kornfeld’s office.
His desk was still there, and like the desk of the porter in her dormitory, it had an ink-blotter on it, and also that telephone, and a box of tissues. Judit pulled out Kornfeld’s padded office chair, and Shaindel kept standing, shivering, holding that shoe and looking at Judit with her big, clear eyes. She whispered in Yiddish, “Are you in charge?”
Judit addressed her in German, hoping the shift to a rational language would calm her down. “You can stay here a little while. Then we’ll find someone to take you home.”
But Shaindel had forgotten her German completely. “Are you in charge?” she asked again, in crude Galician Yiddish. “Is it my fault? I was the one who brought them. I didn’t know they were bad.”
Judit’s hand went up to smooth Shaindel’s hair, and Shaindel recoiled, but then she seemed to gather herself up again and suffered the affection. Judit asked, “What are you talking about?”
“I thought they were what you wanted.”
“Are you talking about those video tapes?” Judit asked. The question was unnecessary. This time, her voice was stronger, and she felt the hand that stroked Shaindel’s hair rest on her neck, not very gently.
The girl burst into tears and said, “I know there were naked people in them. I thought that’s what you wanted. Now Uncle Moishe is in trouble. Don’t send us all away because I did a bad thing, please. Have mercy on us.”
“So did you know what you were doing? What did you think would happen?” Her own voice sounded strange to her, too harsh, and Shaindel wrenched herself away and backed into Kornfeld’s desk. “Shaindel, what are you people after?”
She stopped asking questions. What was the point? She just let Shaindel sob into tissue after tissue. Her breasts hurt. Her bladder began to fill with urine. She moved to touch the girl again, and Shaindel gave a cry and said, “Don’t hurt me!”
Someone knocked on the door. It was Mr. Rosenblatt himself, who’d come to retrieve Shaindel. Shaindel seemed glad to see him, and even took his hand. In turn, he put his cap on her head. She looked at Judit with terror and suspicion. He said to Judit, “She’s been here almost every day, wanting to see you. I didn’t have the heart to turn her away now, with all the trouble out there. You really ought to tell her that we don’t let kids into the administrative offices unless they’re relatives. She’s not, is she?”
“Not what?” Judit asked.
“A relative. No? Well, she looks like you,” he said, “or like you looked when you were her age. I still remember. You looked just like a little lamb, back then.”
It wasn’t until Judit returned to her mother’s apartment that she learned what was behind the demonstrations. A copy of A Home lay open on the kitchen table: “Museum Bomber Arrested.” Apparently, an investigation traced the explosives found in the archive to a Loschwitz location, and for the first time in Judenstaat’s history, the case would not be handled by a rabbinic court. There was a photograph of Kravitz—untrimmed beard over his prison jumpsuit, velvet skull-cap on his head—a seedy, ignominious man whose shop was full of trigger-wires and timers and who faced arrest without resistance.
The arrest of Moses Kravitz took place early that same morning, and the scene when the police van parked in the heart of Loschwitz was apocalyptic. The van was overturned and set on fire, and the police shot in the air, but rather than dispersing, the mob poured down the street, and it was only when reinforcements arrived that they’d managed to plow right through a wall of men in caftans and put the suspect behind bars.
Well, it was about time, of course. Why should those people have a separate court and separate laws? The paper’s editorial pressed the point and took it further. Isn’t it about time to end the forty-year policy of subsidizing a community that didn’t hold to common standards? Their schools produced paupers with no written knowledge of the national language. Their housing blocks were never up to code; the concrete foundations had been crumbling for years, and it was amazing that their children hadn’t been electrocuted on the exposed wires that dangled from those ceilings.