Judit’s hand lingered on the vulnerable patch where Bondi’s hair grew thin. She didn’t want to know. Really? Where else could she draw that line? Could leaving well enough alone be a way of life? Maybe for someone else. Maybe for Bondi. From nowhere came a thought that hadn’t crossed her mind in months. Who lied about the murder? Hans wasn’t free. He had known something. Someone was afraid of what he knew.
A disembodied humming note reverberated in her uterus.
“I’m scared,” she said. She said it so Bondi would look up. He did. Those candid eyes, the ones she could see right through, they reassured her that he was really there. It wasn’t someone else.
Maybe five black-hats were outside when she emerged. They smoked and muttered in Yiddish, pointing to one of the pashkevils. Then one of them with a black beard and a high hat and a gold watch on his wrist gave Judit a look like a burning cigarette. In Yiddish, he asked, “Are you a Jew?”
Judit was in no mood for this. In that same language, she said, “Go to hell.”
“You speak Yiddish like a German. Tell me,” he said, “do you fear God?”
One of the other black-hats broke in and said something that stopped him short, and Judit knew she should just walk away and find a taxi, but instead, she said, “I don’t bow down.”
That answer, from the tarted-up woman with the glowing hair, short skirt, and racy stockings was so unexpected that they didn’t hear it. The headline on the pashkevil was about the deportation, but that wasn’t what the black-hats were discussing. They were talking about their Rebbe’s youngest son, a prodigy with mystic powers who predicted that on May 15th of that year, the Messiah would appear. In contrast, the eldest son was building a new Yeshiva in the heart of Loschwitz, and the Rebbe—may he live forever—sided with the eldest son, but it was likely that the prodigy and his followers would decamp to Poland because when the Messiah came the whole of Loschwitz would be swallowed by the earth.
Now Judit couldn’t help it. She called out, in Yiddish, “Who would notice?”
The same black-bearded man with the high hat and the gold watch said, “Do you know something, young lady? You’re a slave.”
“You’re the slave,” Judit said.
“Careful, careful,” an older man said to the younger. “What’s the point? Just walk away from this.”
“I won’t walk away from my own corner,” said the black-hat. “She speaks Yiddish like a German. She doesn’t know she’s a slave. She doesn’t fear God. What does she fear?”
“Not you,” said Judit.
“Jews like her were the cause of the Churban,” he said, not looking at Judit, “and they will be again and again.” He turned in her direction, worked something around in his mouth, and spat at her.
Judit stepped back. It was impossible to untangle anger and humiliation now. Why was she engaging with these people? The school across the street let out, and little girls who looked like Shaindel clustered in the doorway, whispering to each other. Bondi was upstairs, still, and he could hear them. Would he let this play itself out, or would he interfere in what she began to realize was not his business? No, it was someone else’s business, that force that rose up in her with its own voice, and shouted in Yiddish: “You parasites! You think that time stands still? It won’t, and it will crush you!”
They were already walking away, those men. They started for another corner, maybe for Poland, but she couldn’t stop now, and the Yiddish wasn’t the Yiddish of a German. It was rolling and Galician, a Yiddish that she never knew she had, and she called after them:
“You’ll all be crushed like vermin, and no one will even notice because time just doesn’t stop, it rolls on over you and you’re the slaves!”
Now they were laughing. She trembled where she stood, and when a taxi passed by, she was so full of her own thoughts she didn’t hail it. In a few hours, she’d be at the premiere, and whatever filled her now would fill her then and take her captive in a way that made her buckle at the knees. Maybe she was possessed. Maybe a dybbuk was inside her. A rabbi could perform an exorcism. Or an abortionist.
She stood in that luxuriant, oppressive sunlight. It was a lovely afternoon. There were a few hours before the premiere at Parliament. She knew what Shaindel would say. She had to go back into that archive. She had to ask that ghost what she should do, and show she was not afraid. She wasn’t afraid, was she?
6
“NO harm in it,” said Mr. Rosenblatt. “But you be careful. There’s still glass on the floor.”
What harm she’d done was past repeating. Now Judit walked down the stairway she’d descended every day for ten years. There was the light switch just where it ought to be. There was the door, no padlock on it, but closed. The very familiarity pinched Judit’s heart a little. She opened the door.
Mr. Rosenblatt was right. The place was a shambles. Glass plates had been wrenched from their viewing boxes and shattered on the floor; loose film was everywhere; a projector lay in pieces like a wounded dog. That was the first thing she noticed. The second was how small the room looked. It was hemmed in with drawers and drawers, most of which were open. The open ones all looked empty. There was the long, gunmetal gray worktable on the far wall, spotted with rust. Judit felt herself growing grayer and smaller as she took that room back in, and she ran her fingers over the cold handles of those drawers and walked slowly across the room to her old editing machine. She looked down. A wisp of celluloid was caught in its teeth.
Once, she’d known what to cut and what to keep. She waited for a sign. Then, something tightly coiled began unwinding. She opened a closed drawer by the machine; it was empty. Had Kornfeld told the truth when he claimed everything had either been transferred or incinerated? Given this chaos, how could he be sure?
Then she heard a man breathing hoarsely.
She stood very still. “Who is it?”
No ghost. Ghosts never breathe. No, someone had been interrupted in the work of sorting through the wreckage. He rose, not easily, leveraging himself on an open drawer: Arno Durmersheimer.
He’d had a shave for the premiere and it made him look younger; so did the well-made jacket with all the buttons fastened. “I guess we got the same idea. Been here three times already,” Durmersheimer said. “You find it yet?”
Scrubbed, relatively sober, Durmersheimer looked half-tamed. But not completely. Judit had edited those interviews, but this was something else: him, in the flesh again. His hands were full of tangled film he must have scooped off the floor.
She said, “Don’t touch my stuff.”
“Like I said, just cleaning up,” Durmersheimer said, and now he was impatient. “They made a real mess. The way this place looks, anything could be here, and if it’s still floating around, someone might take it the wrong way.”
“You mean about the murder.”
“I mean,” Durmersheimer said, “I never should have left that movie. All I wanted was to set the record straight. What’s done is done. An old man makes mistakes. I drank too much. I got confused.”