“I’m glad,” Hans said.
“They’ll have to put me in the Hygiene Museum,” Judit said, and when Hans looked baffled, she added, “Because I swallow foreign objects.”
Then Hans said, “Why don’t you move in with me?”
Judit had a thousand objections. The apartment was too small, the bed was terrible, they’d never be able to stop talking and making love and therefore he would get no chance to practice violin and she would get no chance to study.
Hans said, “I’ll buy you a desk.”
“And I’ll buy you a bed.”
“Us a bed,” said Hans. Neither stated the obvious, that Judit couldn’t leave the dormitory without making their relationship public, and that was why Hans wanted her to move into the apartment. He tried to prove that he was capable of practicing the violin while she re-copied notes on index cards. He played half an hour’s worth of scales and intervals and trills, and she bore this patiently, until he kept moving closer and giving her comical looks over the bow, and then it all dissolved into its natural element and there was nothing to prove at all.
Of course, everyone knew about the two of them already. In the eyes of certain students, it made Judit a much more interesting person. Some girls from the dormitory asked her, shyly, if she’d like to have a drink with them sometime. One of them said, “We’re going to a little place by the train station. They make their own wine from a local vineyard. It’s Saxon-owned.” Another added, “Is it true they don’t use pesticides? That’s so authentic.” They were earnest, and in no way mocking. When she begged off, they looked sad, and wandered away, talking about how indigenous cultures can’t really be revived, only replicated, stealing a glance at her over their shoulders as though they’d hoped she’d overhear the conversation.
Others were less sympathetic. One boy planted himself in front of her as she was crossing campus: “So I hear you like to be punished.”
“Excuse me?” Judit said.
She tried to sidestep him, but he wouldn’t let her pass and shouted in a voice that carried: “You like your men with swastikas and pistols. You like to be pistol-whipped. Let me give you a history lesson, baby.”
“Let me give you one!” She’d raised her voice to match his own and pushed her way forward. “It’s 1974. I can do whatever the hell I want!”
He hadn’t expected her to shout like that, and he let her pass but called out after her: “They shaved the heads of girls like you in Paris—shaved their heads and paraded them down the fucking street!”
He stood there all alone, looking crazy and stupid in his tight T-shirt and blue jeans, an artifact of another time, and as she walked quickly towards her linguistics tutorial, warmth flooded through her body, half-relief and half-gratitude. She was living in the present, and she was free.
Maybe it was that same impulse that made her consider changing her major to history. Old things were only interesting if she could figure out how they led to who she was and who the awful boy was, and who Hans was too. Hans may insist he had no history, and she would just laugh and let him keep insisting. In the end, she knew that her life’s work would be getting to the bottom of Hans Klemmer.
Not that she said this when she went to Anna Lehmann’s office. Lehmann had told her students that she had an office—“a dreadful place, no reason for you to go there”—as she did have official business such as writing course waivers and requisitions from the library and so on. When Judit arrived, the door was open. The professor hadn’t lied. Her office was, in fact, dismal, small and overstuffed with books that were clearly of no importance. The light was so poor that it took Judit a while to make out Lehmann herself, who appeared to be writing something at her desk.
Judit stood in the doorway. Then Lehmann noticed her and said, “Oh. Yes. Come in, Ginsberg. Sit down if you can manage to remove what’s on the chair.”
This, Judit did, not carefully enough, as half a page of something stuck to the varnish. “I ruined it,” Judit said. She was afraid she’d start to cry.
“Ruined what? Child, that’s just some bureaucratic nonsense that’s been on that chair since August and stuck to it. Some travel fund application. No one will miss it. You’re overwrought, dear.”
“No, I’m fine,” said Judit. “I just wanted to ask you about that paper I presented. Should I rewrite it? Keeping in mind what you said about ideology and principles?”
Lehmann asked, “What paper?”
Judit tried not to show that she was hurt. “The one about the 1949 construction contracts.”
“Oh yes, carefully researched,” Lehmann said. “Very fine work.” Judit began to protest, but then Lehmann interrupted. “I’ve been meaning to tell you, last spring I saw your exhibit on a similar subject. Those photographs. Very well done. Particularly the arrangement. Very little context.”
“I’d meant to do more,” Judit said quickly. “I could have written something up.”
“Pft. Words on a wall.” Lehmann’s Yiddish took Judit so much by surprise that she answered in that same language.
“So you like pictures. Why? Because they can mean anything. But isn’t that just lazy, Professor?”
“Rather the opposite,” said Anna Lehmann. Her German was deliberately distancing, and Judit felt embarrassed by both the initial intimacy and the shift back to formal discourse. Lehmann went on. “You have a talent in that direction. Make people work. Create mysteries. Let others solve them. Never solve the mysteries for them. Which is of course…”
She was going to say that of course that was the problem with the seminar paper, but instead, she sank deeper into the chair, and Judit realized it wasn’t a desk chair at all, but an elaborate velveteen armchair that almost matched the pattern on Professor Lehmann’s dress. She disappeared into that chair, and something sparked. She’d lit a cigarette.
Then she said, “Which is of course the beauty of archival work. Its power is insidious. Its hand is light. You have a light hand, Ginsberg.”
Not sure how to respond, Judit said, “Thank you.”
“Keep it nimble and precise. And keep it off his putz, young lady.”
Judit thought she’d heard wrong. She hadn’t. Lehmann stared out from the depths of that armchair, smiling lasciviously and pulling on that cigarette. It looked—was this possible?—as though she’d winked. Judit watched all of this as from a distance, her own cheeks burning, Lehmann’s cigarette held between two fingers as she blew a trail of smoke in her direction. Judit finally said, “Professor Lehmann, I don’t know what to say.”
“Then don’t say anything at all,” said Lehmann.
“I don’t want to get in trouble. I don’t want to get expelled.”
“Nonsense,” Lehmann said. “Who gets expelled for that these days? It’s practically a degree requirement. And a pretty girl like you, I’m surprised the wolves have kept away for this long.”
“He’s not a wolf. He’s a musician.” Then, “And he’s a Saxon, Professor, but you know that already.”
“Do I?” Lehmann stubbed out her cigarette. “I can hardly keep track of everything I know. The Saxon Question. Fascinating. There’s a dreadful piece in last year’s Journal of Historical Inquiry. No one has really done justice to the Saxon Question. Perhaps you will, my dear.”
Judit retreated from that office, angered, flattered, belittled, and fascinated. She felt dirty. She also felt like rushing back to the apartment and telling Hans that Anna Lehmann had seen her exhibition, and that was probably the reason why she’d been admitted to her seminar. Also, on a level she couldn’t quite acknowledge, Lehmann had given the two of them her blessing, but that, she wouldn’t tell him.