“You don’t like Germans, do you?” Judit asked, cautiously.
“Young lady, I am a German,” Stein said. “A historian should know better. All Jews are Germans to the bone, not like those fascists. That’s the whole point of the project.”
And one by one, all of Judit’s questions came back to her, the questions she had compiled so carefully after they’d screened the rough cut of the documentary. What had happened in Moscow? Had he, in fact, been in a coma? Who had arranged for him to be transferred to this facility? How was it kept a secret? All of this had felt pressing and important once, but now it felt irrelevant. Who needs yet more evidence that Soviets were brutal occupiers and that Stein, the visionary, had survived them?
“So,” Stein said, “let’s see it.”
“See what?” Judit asked. She had lost track of where she was.
Bondi broke in. “Surely you’ve already watched it, Mr. Stein.”
Stein laughed. That made him cough again. “Of course I have, young man. What an idea! But not with the girl who made it. I suppose,” Stein said, “she wants to tell me everything she left on the cutting room floor.” He said to the nurse, “You remembered the projector?”
“Of course I did,” the nurse said. “But it’s an old one. I’m not sure it’ll work.”
“Then bring it in,” said Stein. “We’ll have to see for ourselves.”
While they were waiting, Bondi drew Judit aside and whispered, “What do you think will happen when he sees that gift you brought him?”
“I don’t know,” said Judit.
“What if he has another stroke? What if it kills him?”
“What does that matter to you?” Judit asked.
She raised her voice in a way that drew the attention of the nurse, who said, “Mr. Stein requests that he and the filmmaker have a little privacy. That is, if you don’t mind.”
“What if I mind?” Bondi said.
His tone was frankly confrontational, and the nurse was surprised. Then he assessed the situation, and addressed Bondi as a Stasi colleague. “The old man gets his way. He can’t do much these days, but at least he can look.”
Bondi said to Judit, “Come back to the room.”
“Afterwards,” said Judit. “I’ll be there afterwards.”
“That’s too late,” Bondi said.
She didn’t know what he meant. She also wasn’t sure what the nurse meant until both men had gone, and Judit set up the projector and took the canister out of her bag. Stein watched and she could feel his liquid eyes all over her. The quality of his attention was so profoundly sexual that it didn’t seem connected to the wreck in bed. It was hard to thread the film into that antique projector, to check the light. The machine worked, but it made an awful sound and smelled like something burning.
Stein said, “Sit by me, honey. So you can tell me what you see.”
Judit did, on the edge of the mattress, and she watched Stein rather than the film, and gradually, he must have known it wasn’t what he’d expected because he turned towards the projection on the wall. His arms tightened around the pillow, and he leaned forward. That was when Judit said, “I see a pit. I can’t see its bottom. It’s on the site of the Great Synagogue of Dresden, the one left as an open field. White things are falling into the pit, one at a time.”
“We couldn’t shoot the film close up,” Stein said. “Too risky.” He sounded thoughtful, as though he were talking to himself. After a few minutes, he cupped his chin, a gesture so embedded in his iconography that Judit lost track of the room and the projection as the screen-Stein cupped that same chin through a growth of beard.
“I see you with young people,” Judit said. “Survivors. You’re speaking Yiddish.”
“The mother tongue,” Stein said.
The rest of the film passed before them both in heavy silence. Judit hadn’t realized that Stein had taken her hand until she felt his fingers tighten. The celluloid flapped in the old projector, and Judit made a move to switch it off and turn the light back on, but Stein wouldn’t let go of her hand.
“That takes me back,” he said.
Some quality had gone out of his voice. Judit couldn’t make out the contours of his face now; it was as though his features had lost focus. It felt like a retreat, and Judit couldn’t help but let her anger show. “That’s what you have to say?”
“I wish I were young again.” Stein stroked her hand, even as he held it, and he said, “Those days can’t come back. It all felt clear, didn’t it, the way forward.”
“To make them bleed,” said Judit.
“Back then, it was the time and place. We weren’t angels and we weren’t demons. We were men. We were flesh and blood, and now,” said Stein, half in a whisper, “now we’re all machines.” He released Judit’s hand and raised his loose-fleshed, thin white arms, extending tubes that ran up to clear bags hooked on a gurney. “There’s a machine that keeps my heart beating and a machine that helps me breathe and a machine that takes away my bad blood and replaces it with good blood. I think that young man you brought here came to kill me. I know the type. He’s an assassin.” He lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. The liver spots on those arms looked all the darker in the strange, pale light of the projector. He whispered, “Maybe you could save him the trouble, do me a favor, pull the tubes out yourself.”
“I want to make this information public,” Judit said.
“Sure. Go ahead. Goyim kill goyim and they blame the Jews. It’s who we are.”
“As Stephen Weiss would say,” Judit ventured, and then she thought she saw a ghost of a smile pass across Stein’s face.
“Ah, Weiss. Well, he said a lot of things.”
“He said we don’t bow down.”
“Ah, yes. He did say that. He’s wrong. That’s not how we live,” Stein said. “That’s how we die. Always, we must be on the side of life, of reason, and we must be human and we must be loved. Isn’t that true? Don’t we need to be loved?”
The voice that Judit heard no longer seemed to be coming from Stein at all, but from another place, a place he built a bridge to. It held a familiar note that she was loath to recognize. It was a dead voice, disembodied. The figure stretched back on that bed had nothing to do with what came out of it.
“That’s what’s left. I’m just a man. And I remember what a man remembers. Then, you reach the end, and you take ownership. You own up.”
Judit addressed that man as best she could, though she felt her own voice straining against a current. “I want to take the film across the border. Maybe someone there will know what to do with it.”
“Maybe. And then they’ll mark the place where it happened. That’s a way to lose a memory. Make a memorial. Make it somebody else’s business. He was right there, wasn’t he, our friend Weiss. Is he really dead, Anna? Out there in the galut? In Argentina?”
Long ago, Stein had released Judit’s hand, and as she came back to herself, she realized that she was sitting in the dark. The only sounds were what she’d previously disregarded: the pulsing machines, the motor of the old projector, and the small, hoarse breathing that might just as likely have been coming from her as from the figure on the bed. Although the conversation had come to an end, she stayed there for a while. Then, she got up, rewound the film, placed it back in the metal canister, and switched off the projector. It was almost a shock to find the door still there, and a bright, alien corridor that led into the open.
3