“Of course,” said Hans.
They had coffee in a shop Judit had never noticed, a wood-paneled alcove with three round tables, bottles stacked behind the counter, and a weathered Righteous Gentile Certificate that must have dated from the early 1950s. It was a place where Saxons drank. That much was clear, just as it was clear now, in case Judit had doubts, that Hans was Saxon. The men at the bar wore overalls and probably worked as janitors on campus. Hans ordered two coffees with cognac.
The proprietor set those coffees down, and that was when Hans told her that he’d talked his way into the conservatory and had been studying music theory and teaching violin, but he remained distinctly off-the-books.
“So you don’t have to sit for examinations?” Judit asked him. “Not at all?”
“Not at all,” Hans said.
“So you go to lectures just because?” Judit shook her head. “You don’t take them seriously, though. You were smiling the whole time.”
“Some lectures are a pleasure. I take pleasure seriously. Don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Judit said. “I’ve never had a conversation like this before.” She finished the coffee and cognac, and hurried to her three o’clock linguistics seminar, and some of the grace and strangeness of the encounter carried on. No one knew that she was a little drunk. She heard herself decipher a particularly tangled bit of Aramaic in a way that made Professor Romarowsky say, in a startled voice, “Well, that’s a way to look at it, Judit, if one were trying to be original.”
Afterwards, as planned, they met in the library stacks. Hans showed her the libretto of an opera from the ’60s based on the life of Rosa Luxemburg, and he confessed why he had smiled as the professor detailed the specifics of her assassination. “I was thinking about the music.”
“Is it the sort of music that makes you smile?” Judit asked. “It shouldn’t be. Not if it’s telling the truth.”
“I’ll play it for you. There’s a listening booth downstairs. I’ll bet you never even knew the library had one.”
But Judit persisted. “You need to know this about me. I believe in facts. I believe in documentary history, in things that really happen. And I believe there’s such a thing as justice.”
Hans didn’t answer for a moment. His face was very close to hers. His shaggy, light blond hair was pushed back from his forehead. It was a long face, in every sense. The face was more serious than he was, really, or than he had seemed to Judit. Yes, his eyes were gray and narrow. They held her own. He said, “You need to know this about me. I believe in facts too. But I’m not sure I believe in history. And I know I don’t believe in justice.” Then, he kissed her.
The kiss didn’t come suddenly. After all, their cheeks had been touching as they paged through the libretto, and ever since that morning, she had felt the touch of his fingers in her hair. She had met him in the stacks, knowing that this would happen. Yet to have his mouth on hers just after he’d said he didn’t believe in justice made her light-headed. She pulled back to catch her breath.
6
UNTIL the day Hans Klemmer kissed her, Judit had few distractions. She was a few years into a graduate degree in library science and had just curated her first exhibition on postwar Leipzig. She loved choosing the images, laying them side by side on a long, clean table. Should the picture of the concrete mixer by the ruins of the Cathedral go next to the picture of a paint-spattered worker listening to a phonograph?
The exhibition had come off well, and now she was at loose ends, keen to find another project. There was nothing she liked more than sitting in the library all day with a bunch of documents no one had bothered to touch in twenty years. With her pencil between her teeth, she’d decode chicken-scratch until a little bell announced the library was closing. Then she’d find her way back to her dorm with a head full of the past.
But now, Leipzig was about the present. In 1972, Judenstaat had just started getting exports from the West, French and American films, translation of poems by Allen Ginsberg, and of course the kind of music that throbbed through the floor. Everyone smoked marijuana. Young border guards bragged about gathering hallucinogenic mushrooms in the woods by the Protective Rampart. They’d make tea out of them, get sick, and brag about that too.
Of course, there were courtyard parties every night, but after a while, girls stopped inviting Judit. They wrote her off as a prig, the sort of girl who’d belonged to the Junior Bundist League until she was old enough to be a Youth Leader, and kept all her badges and trophies. They would be right. One of those trophies was from Archeology Camp. It was a small brass spade in a block of sandstone: “Junior Excavator: First Class.” She brought it to college.
She’d earned her Junior Bundist history badge by following the path of Elsa Neuman, a martyr from the Churban. The path began at Elsa’s home on Budapester Street. Each Junior Bundist had a different address and picture of a martyr, and some of the more ambitious girls brought cameras and handed over their photographs to Mr. Rosenblatt, the guard, who took those pictures with great ceremony and promised to make sure they’d find their way into the Churban wing of the National Museum.
Judit loved the museum: exhibits on the Golden Age of Ashkenaz, and the portraits of Moses Mendelssohn and the Age of Reason, and then, through a passageway of glass, there’d be the Hall of the Churban, stuffed floor-to-ceiling with mementos, photographs of martyrs, accounts from the concentration camps and death camps, all lit by candle-stubs in cheap tin boxes. It was only by climbing out of that hall, and crossing an outdoor terrace, that they could reach the third wing and the final exhibition on the founding of the Jewish state. That moment on the terrace, where they shook away the horror and gazed across Stein Square to the clean, familiar Dresden skyline was like coming back to life.
Elsa Neuman had been forced from her home to a Jew-house just south of the park and soon after, she’d been deported by train from Dresden to Thereisenstadt, where she was murdered. It was weird and moving how Judit and the other girls engaged in following the paths of different martyrs converged on the Dresden train station. Old Saxon ladies sold violets for the girls to leave on the tracks.
Afterwards, there was a final ceremony at the Great Synagogue, an empty lot that—according to the photograph from a book held up by Youth Leader Charlotte Kreutzberger—had once been a magnificent nineteenth-century structure with a hexagonal dome and Moorish interior. The synagogue was burnt by fascists in 1938 on Kristallnacht, and then—Charlotte closed the book for emphasis—when British and American airplanes rained incendiary bombs on Dresden in 1945, the fire returned.
Charlotte was a tall, stern girl with straight black hair and a sonorous alto voice that managed to carry even in the open, in front of the rectangle of grass where the synagogue once stood. She asked the group: “Why wasn’t the synagogue rebuilt?”
Few of those girls had been inside a synagogue. They were for old people and black-hats. The question was obviously rhetorical, but Charlotte had the answer.
She swept her arm across that empty rectangle and said, “This is our prayer-house. This is our monument.”
When Judit found treasures buried in odd places, when she reproduced the past without amendment, it was as though she raised the dead. Back then, she kicked a little of that synagogue grass and wondered what the dirt contained.
Summers in Archeology Camp had been the high point of Judit’s life. To scrape away coarse sand and clean a fragment of blue tile engraved with oriental patterns common to Jews who traveled with Charlemagne, to fit it seamlessly into a fragment someone found two years ago, nothing could match it. The Jewish settlements were buried under Saxon barns and pigsties and even fascist bunkers. They had been waiting for her for a thousand years.