“Mom, where am I supposed to put all this? My fridge isn’t big enough to hold it.”
“Then get a bigger one. Really, I don’t see why you stay in a dormitory at your age. You could move back here. It would make a world of sense. You’re getting so thin, a strong wind would blow you away.”
“I was always this size,” Judit said.
“It’s an observation, not a criticism. Maybe it’s the coat. It swallows you, Judi. I know why you won’t give it up, but take a look at yourself in the mirror and you’ll admit. It’s a man’s coat. And an old one too.”
“I know it’s old,” said Judit. “And I know it’s a man’s coat.”
“You take everything I say the wrong way today. What’s the matter? You’re so pale. Have a banana. You know they used to be impossible to get, and just today they were on sale. It’s just a little bruised.”
Judit told her mother that nothing was the matter, but in the end, of course, she took the banana, along with the striped bag full of food she knew she wouldn’t eat, and once she was outside, she put her free hand into the enormous pocket of the duffle coat that had belonged to Hans and put the banana there. Next to the note.
4
What she should really do is give the note to the Stasi agent who visited her dormitory once a month. That agent was unfailingly polite, so tactful and insistent that he was there for her protection that he would probably just take that note and pursue the matter without further questions. After what happened in the archive, how could she doubt that she needed protection?
Yet she remembered the form that protection took, the constant presence of that agent by her bed, the oppression of that tact, the way she felt all of the air pumped out of her and something else pumped in. No—it had been more than three years since the murder and not once had she asked a thing of that man. She would be vulnerable. So what?
Her silence didn’t make her complicit in a crime. No matter what lie they told her, Hans was just as dead. He might as well be murdered by the Saxon fascist with his forty-year-old gun. He might as well be on a list of Saxons who collaborated with the Jewish state. The case was closed. She’d throw the note away. She did not throw the note away.
The bus took Judit from Altstadt, where she worked and where her mother lived, to Neustadt, gray with concrete, glass, and steel. There was a new bridge across the Elbe: the Bridge Between East and West. That bridge had been called Augustus Bridge before the war, and then Mendelssohn Bridge, and its most recent incarnation was white and sleek, with a translucent crest of cables. Judit used to see swallows dipping and soaring below. She never saw them now. Somebody must have cleared their nests away.
What happened to the fabric store with the embroidered butterflies in the window, or the coffee shop where she and Hans used to get pancakes on Sunday mornings before rehearsals? Once there had been electric trams that took you everywhere. There used to be a little steam train in the park run by children dressed as conductors and engineers. Like every child in Judenstaat, Judit had longed to be an engineer on that train. The chosen few asked for tickets solemnly and pulled levers in signal boxes even in the rain. Those trains were gone.
As recently as last year, Judit liked to get herself ice cream at a little stand on Joseph Roth Square, and the last time she’d tried to find it, the stand had been torn down and replaced by a glass door stenciled with some acronym: DonReDox or RonDexDo, maybe a Danish corporation or one of those upstart companies financed by Soviet Jews who’d started emigrating in the past few years. That was Sokolov’s doing—some trade agreement. It was easy to get past the checkpoints now.
Since Prime Minister Sokolov had taken office, the homely, hopeful Dresden that had been rebuilt after the war had disappeared. They were still tearing up the trolley tracks, and half of the streets were disemboweled and crosshatched with orange safety fencing. Lanes were widened, cables buried, thoroughfares constructed over the rubble of what Judit still remembered.
Because of the construction, Judit had to get off her bus early and walk the last half-mile to her dormitory, through an underpass, around the engineering building of the Polytechnic, and across a complicated intersection where cars waited five minutes for a signal change. She liked passing all those cars on foot. Her mother always wanted her to take a taxi home. That was out of the question. Why put herself at some driver’s mercy? She could cross against the light, walk against traffic on a one-way street, and if she wore herself out, that was nobody’s business but her own.
Judit’s dormitory was built in the ’50s when everything was painted the same Judenstaat yellow. There was an old-fashioned coffee bar and canteen in the lobby, and the only available telephone was in a booth outside. Even the porter, a snarling lady in a hairnet, had been on the job since the building opened.
“Hello, Mrs. Cohen,” Judit said as she arrived. She feigned a brightness she didn’t feel.
Mrs. Cohen responded by flipping a page of a movie magazine. Richard Gere was on the cover. Even the magazine was coated with dust. Her cousin in America had sent it over, and although she probably couldn’t read English, she always had it in front of her so she would look occupied.
Judit asked her, “Would you like some brisket?”
“Don’t keep food in your room. It’ll spoil,” said Mrs. Cohen, and she took the brisket for herself, and left Judit a few jars of stewed carrots and prunes and the honey-cake. That dormitory couldn’t last. It was bound to be demolished. Judit was amazed it had been overlooked this long.
5
JUDIT had lived in just such a dormitory fifteen years ago at the University of Leipzig, but back then, the porter was a crone who liked spy novels. She’d never look up from that book when Judit slipped past her after a night with Hans.
Hans couldn’t live in a dormitory. He was distinctly unofficial. Some colleges did admit Saxons, but it was understood that the few spots in elite institutions had to go to Jews. Yet there he was, sitting next to Judit in the middle of a lecture on the Jewish revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg. He didn’t look so very different from the other students, though there was nothing on his desk but his elbows. He leaned forward with a distant smile.
As ever, Judit was taking notes like a madwoman, and her hair kept falling in her eyes. She pushed it away compulsively. Then someone pushed it for her. She stopped short and blushed. There was Hans, looking right at her. She couldn’t decide if his eyes were gray or blue. She couldn’t take any more notes after that.
Later, he said, “I’m glad you’re not one of those girls who uses hairspray.”
“I should,” said Judit. “Or I should get it cut short.”
“It’s like lamb’s wool. The golden fleece. Or not golden. Soft, though.”
She gathered that fleecy hair in one hand and twisted it up in a way she’d seen other girls do. It stayed in place.
With that same grace and ease, they walked together. Hans had a loping, unapologetic tall man’s walk. He didn’t carry any books. He took her own substantial knapsack, slung it on one shoulder, and said, “What’s in here, anyhow?”
“Three dictionaries,” Judit said. “A compilation of Aramaic translations from Hebrew. And of course my notebooks.”