“I think they will surprise some people,” Judit said.
“I don’t see why,” said Lehmann. “Did they surprise you?”
“Yes,” said Judit. “That Stein would say that. And it happened under his orders.”
“Ginsberg,” said Lehmann, “it’s time we lost our illusions about how this state was founded. What was it Weiss wrote? The very thing that makes men brothers makes them butchers. Of course, Weiss didn’t think that Jews were human beings at all. No. Jews are demons.” She seemed about to laugh, but thought better of it.
Judit went on. “You knew about this.”
“There’s nothing to know,” Lehmann said. “It was the only possible statement Leo could have made back then. And so he made it. And maybe,” Lehmann said, adding the next words slowly, “it made him.” She stubbed her cigarette out in a portable ashtray she kept in her purse.
After all, what is a founder? Who is the embodiment of the age? When Lehmann knew Stein in Berlin, he was young and full of life. One could not help but give way to his enormous appetite. He gobbled people up, even the trim, hard little beast that Lehmann had been back then, and she’d allowed herself to get caught between his big, white teeth. With time, that appetite had grown, and everyone and everything was gobbled up, but after the Churban, the nature of the beast—the nature of all beasts—had changed.
She’d been in Switzerland, working as a caretaker for an old blind lady, and after breakfast, she would read her ten pages of a novel by Émile Zola and ten pages of a novel by Thomas Mann. The lady’s house overlooked the mountains, and Lehmann’s bedroom was as big as the apartment she had fled in Heidelberg. Every afternoon, when she’d received her five newspapers and sat reading them on the deck while the lady napped, she’d taken her remorse and sharpened her wit against it until the remorse wore down and the wit could cut through steel. Such was her late girlhood, and she thought she’d hardened. She used the woman’s large library to review her Latin and teach herself Greek, and sometimes she would walk to town to have coffee with the Russian expatriates—Whites of course—who tried to sleep with her. She perfected her Russian in those years, both spoken and written, and had her first affair with a woman, a former ballerina, but that wasn’t what Judit wanted to know. That was another story.
What Judit wanted to know was about Stein. But why did Judit want to know about Stein? Why didn’t she want to know about the ballerina who was a few years older than Lehmann, a free spirit whose father perished in the Russian Civil War? Why didn’t Judit want to know about the other expatriates, awful middle-aged men, self-parodies with monocles and Tsarist medals? Why didn’t she want to know about the blind lady? She was elderly and gentle, a dear family friend who happened to have a house where Anna could live safely and study in peace, and who had no children, and thus left her a portion of her estate when she died, the balance of which allowed her to spend the first few months after the war in London and Paris until she received a telegram. “Why travel? Work here. Indeed.”
Lehmann received that telegram as she stood in a kimono in the hallway of a gorgeous hotel, with a cup of coffee in her hand. Her hair was very long then, the only time she’d ever worn it long. That “Indeed” got her smiling. Why not? What was she going to do in Paris aside from lounge around and play with a couple of ballerinas? “Indeed” for all practical purposes meant “In bed.” With her current connections, it wasn’t hard for Lehmann to book a ticket to Berlin and show her passport and documents, and before she could change her mind, she was standing in the rubble of Dresden, with dust and mud all over her expensive shoes, and a scrawny Jew leading her past Soviet barracks to a big, gray tent.
The tent was open. There was a desk inside, really a plank between two filing cabinets. She recognized Stein’s back; it was a recognizable back, wide and meaty, and of course there was that famous hair. She could not remember now if she was the first to speak, or maybe say, “In fact.” Such details were erased when the man turned around.
He had that beard. That was the first thing anyone noticed. But then she saw what was behind that beard, a mouth half-sunken, and eyes like lead. He got up and said, “I’m glad you came, Anna.”
“My God,” said Anna.
He gestured her over, and she’ll admit that she approached him with hesitation. Then he kissed her on the mouth and told her to sit down. “You’ve come to work. Good. You’ll get your fill of facts. I’ll get you a secretary.” When she started to speak again, he interrupted. “She’ll be pretty. I have a girl in mind.”
“What sort of facts?” she asked, although she already knew it was the wrong question. She was thrown by the way he looked at her, by the efficiency of the exchange, and by the chastity of that kiss.
Stein brushed the question aside and continued. “There are thousands—thousands in this place alone who will give you all the material you need. And don’t be sparing. You’ll use all your languages, including Hebrew. Then you’ll translate and the secretary will write everything down, every description, every name, but in good, clear Russian, Anna. That’s important.”
Before Anna Lehmann could ask about the room that she’d been promised, before she could so much as leave her suitcase at the door, Leopold Stein rose from his seat and took her arm and told her to leave her suitcase in the tent. He had something to show her. His arm felt hard and cold. All of the flesh he’d worn so wonderfully as a young man had worn away. She noticed that he stank. But she’d come this far; she had come far enough to let him lead her across the mud and cold and the ridges of the tracks from tanks. This was in 1946.
He walked to the edge of a great pit. It was a quarter of a kilometer wide, and she couldn’t see its bottom. He said, “Our people dug this. By hand. Imagine, Anna. They could barely lift their feet a month ago. But they did this by themselves, and in a week. In midwinter. That’s what it means.”
“What what means?” Lehmann asked him.
“The work you’ll do,” Stein said. He told her that men would be lining up, come daytime, and women too. She ought to get some sleep. He implied that she would share his bed that night, and although she’d traveled there for just that purpose, she wondered if it was in her interest to decline. Stein must have felt it. Perhaps that’s why he said, “How strong is your stomach, Anna?”
“Strong enough,” she replied, with some of the bravado that had brought her to him in the first place.
“Strong enough to fill that pit?”
“Indeed.” Anna hardly knew what she was saying. He stood close to her now, enclosed her in his decomposing overcoat. She couldn’t know what Stein knew. She hadn’t been with those survivors and seen them return to life for the sole purpose of digging that pit because they knew it would be filled. And she couldn’t know what her work would be for the next six months, through the spring, as she took down names and descriptions of Germans and turned those descriptions over to the Soviets, who rounded them up and shipped them to Dresden. No, not six million. But enough to fill that pit and others across liberated territory. Each of those Germans had a history, and based on the testimony of the Jews who named them, those Germans would be shot in the head and thrown into the pit.
“Don’t say you’re surprised,” said Lehmann. “You’ve heard much worse. Seen worse. You’ve documented this century, and now we’re near the end of it. Imagine that.”
Judit said, “There are documents.”
“There are always documents, somewhere,” Lehmann said. “These are probably in Moscow. After all, we didn’t fire a shot. Perhaps if we’d been in Palestine, we’d be the agents of our own salvation, and we would have had guns of our own. But that is just speculation. No, all we did was dig, my dear. Just tell the truth and dig. Is that a crime?”