“Who else is on the panel?” Judit asked.
“Oh, your old professor, of course,” Freddi said, happy to change the subject. “And those two old partisans—Jewish and Saxon. Very dramatic stuff, really spectacular. Don’t change those stockings, sweetie,” she added. “They’re spectacular too.”
She didn’t change her stockings. But after that conversation, she felt determined to change something. She knew she ought to just go home and get some sleep, but since the film was finished, she’d had troubling dreams. She dreamed that she was buried alive, and burrowed out from underneath, and she emerged, soiled, naked, deeply embarrassed, and had the sensation that she’d given birth not to a baby but to herself, and in another country. She dreamed that there was something in the pocket of the duffle coat—the one she’d worn for years—and she couldn’t remember where she’d put the coat or even why she’d worn it for so long, but she tossed everything else out of her closet, and only then remembered that she’d given that coat to a little girl in Loschwitz. Somehow, Judit had to find out what was in that pocket, which meant she had to find the girl who would take her to a room above a kosher butcher where the uncle screened footage of Stephen Weiss addressing mobs of furious survivors.
Her body was a trap, tightened by mechanisms past her understanding. Yes, Bondi could spring that trap, but then she was wide open, and sometimes, that was worse. The blocks around the dairy restaurant were slated for demolition. She’d seen the first signs a week ago, official yellow notices in German, and almost at once, enormous Yiddish pashkevils, and clusters of black-hats reading them. Angry neighbors packed the restaurant, and the volume of their Yiddish arguments carried through the floor into the room where Judit lay next to Bondi hours later. She was still wearing those stockings, though nothing else.
“Are you warm enough?” Bondi asked.
Judit said, “Sure,” but when he pulled her against him, she felt warmer. “I wonder,” she said, “if they’re really going to knock down all their neighborhoods. I mean, where will they all go?”
“They have a history of resilience,” Bondi said.
“I know. Like cockroaches. You sound like my mother.” Judit laughed, though not happily. “You know, the other day, I tried to find that dollar I’d gotten from Chabad House. I think it’s still in the pocket of my old coat, but I can’t find that either. Will they knock the Chabad House down too? Or turn the dome back into a restaurant?” Without waiting for an answer, she said, “Maybe instead of all that stuff about the Soviets and the partisans, I should have made a film about the black-hats. They’re the real survivors.” She sat up and hugged her knees. “Joseph, how did you learn to write in Yiddish?”
Admittedly, the question seemed to come from nowhere. Bondi said, “It’s not much of a trick. A lot of people do it.” That’s all he said, but now he knew she’d read his note.
Judit went on. “I got something by courier. It’s all in Yiddish, and I’m having trouble getting through it. I thought maybe we could work on it together.”
“Is it a new project?” Bondi asked.
“Maybe,” Judit said. “It’s Stephen Weiss’s manifesto.” It was only then that she returned Bondi’s frankly exploratory look, and watched it deepen and hit something hard.
He said, “What about it?”
“It came from Anna Lehmann. She seemed to think it would interest you.” Even as she said those words, Judit would have given a lot to take them back again, because Bondi got out of bed and picked up his discarded clothing. Still, helplessly, she kept on talking. “Joseph, listen, she couldn’t mean anything by it.” But now he was pulling on his boxer shorts and zipping his trousers. “What’s the harm in reading it?” she asked him desperately. He turned his back before he answered.
“You trust her?”
“Shouldn’t I?” Judit asked.
He said, “It’s a hoax.” Still with his back turned, he pulled his undershirt on, and Judit put her hands on his shoulders and felt them give a little. It was only with effort that he continued. “The manifesto’s fabricated.”
Then he turned around. When she saw his face, she had to say, “How do you know?”
Bondi sat on the daybed, in his trousers and undershirt, and Judit sat beside him, still wearing only those absurd stockings, yet he was the one who seemed disarmed. She was really cold now, and she pulled the synthetic bedspread over them both.
“Don’t trust Lehmann,” said Bondi. “She doesn’t want what’s best for you. This need of yours—to always know and know—she feeds it, Judit.” He turned under the shelter of the bedspread. “My own mother was like that,” he said. “She was the one who taught me to write Yiddish.”
Judit said, “Joseph, you don’t have to tell me a thing.”
“I think I do,” Bondi said. “Or Lehmann will tell you something half-true. My mother was an editor at that magazine, The Book Peddler. Her father was a Yiddish poet. She was very beautiful. I was twelve when she died. She killed herself somewhere in Russia. My father never forgave her, but I did. I suppose that’s a character flaw.”
“What is?” Judit asked.
“Forgiveness,” said Bondi. “I don’t make a cult of her, Judit. But she cared about this country and the Jewish people in ways that cynics like Lehmann can’t imagine. They’re opportunists. They can’t understand a woman like my mother who really did believe that there was such a thing as justice.”
Of course, that was the source of the Yiddish books in the apartment, secular writers from Warsaw and Vilna, the poet who won the Stalin Prize, the notebook with the alphabet in pencil, those carefully drawn Hebrew characters in handwriting that Judit had recognized at once, though even then she didn’t know what to do with what she’d recognized. This room was Bondi’s heart. He’d let her in, and now she couldn’t help but ask, “Why did she do it, Joseph?”
“She found out what happened to her father,” Bondi said. “It was after the magazine shut down. She had nothing to do with her time. She was under suspicion already. She crossed the border. I only found out what happened to her when I got to Moscow. She just kept digging and digging, Judit, and when you dig, what do you find? A corpse.” His voice broke. “Her father disappeared in ’51—sure—like so many others, and the government claimed he’d emigrated, crossed into Germany, that he wasn’t a Bundist, he was a traitor, a Cosmopolitan like Stephen Weiss.”
Judit said, “I still don’t understand. What did she find out? What happened to him? How did he die?”
“Look, I’m not like you. I don’t need to read the fine print. All I know is that I always thought I’d have to think one way and feel another. Now, our country is finally going in the right direction. After forty years, we can live normal lives. If we let ourselves. We can let ourselves.” He pulled Judit down beside him and they lay back in bed. He lowered his head onto her stomach, just at the uterus, and the sensation was both erotic and clinical. “How far along now?”
“I’m not sure,” Judit said. Then, “Maybe I don’t want to know.”
“That’s a first.” Bondi spoke right into her womb, and she knew she ought to laugh. Instead, a thickness welled in her throat. Did she mean it? Did she not want to know? No tests, no sonograms, no sessions with technicians? Could she let those weeks accumulate, let whatever happened take its course? If that was possible, if she could trust sensation, time would stretch out like open country she would enter with no map, and it would carry her along. It felt so possible, to mean just what she said. Bondi’s cheek lay on her belly. He breathed softly. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little open, like a child’s. She stroked his hair. What was it Hans had said to her mother all those years ago? When you don’t know, you’re free.