“I’m not hungry,” Judit said. She tried to pull the covers up again for emphasis, but felt resistance. Maybe they’d caught on something. Maybe Charlotte had stepped on them. Judit went on. “Listen, you’re confusing me with someone else.”
“You know, Rabbi Schneerson studied at the Sorbonne. In France,” Charlotte added, to clarify. “He speaks a dozen languages. He’s not like they are in Loschwitz, though he’d never say a word against them because they’re all fellow Jews. Honestly, most people, they don’t understand how open he is, and how he wants to reach out his hand to everyone.”
“Look,” Judit said, “I’m sorry I caused so much trouble. But honestly, just tell me where you put my stuff.”
“I know why you’re here,” Charlotte said. “It was only a matter of time. After all, with everything you’ve been through, all your tragedies.” Now she sat down on the other bed and faced Judit. Her face softened under the wig. “It’s human nature, wanting to confront the man upstairs. But then you realize that’s not the point. It’s not the point of living. And it’s not the point of all those tragedies. Honestly.”
“Tragedies have no point,” said Judit.
“You sound just like I did, when I first came,” Charlotte said. “After I failed my exams and my father died so suddenly, I was just drifting. When I lit the Shabbos candles, they told me, just go through the motions and the rest will follow. I said it was dishonest. But face it, we can’t know what’s honest. And we can’t judge. We have to stop being afraid of the dark.”
Judit looked at Charlotte. “Don’t tell me what I shouldn’t be afraid of.”
Then she lay back in bed and turned to face the wall. It was so easy that it was amazing that she hadn’t done it as soon as Charlotte walked into the room.
There was always a time after she’d lost each of the girls when Judit would sit in her sewing room, and she’d be grateful that there were no clocks or windows. She’d find a length of dull blue cotton and a pattern that she’d gotten years before, and she would cut and sew and mess up all the seams, and have to pick the stitches out; there was never enough light, and she didn’t care.
The third time they tried, she’d injected herself with heparin every morning, and on Thursdays, she arranged to leave work early to take the express to Leipzig for a sonogram that was performed by that technician with the gray hair and the gray smock who checked her progress week by week. At week sixteen, the pattern had repeated. Judit didn’t wait it out. She took two days off to have a procedure under anesthetic. Maybe a month later, the doorbell rang. It was early evening. Judit had been sewing the same piece of cloth over and over again with an intensity that was so like her rhythm as a film editor that it felt like real work, like salvation. The stitches were so neat that they were almost invisible, and she couldn’t explain why she didn’t ignore the doorbell, but instead, got up, and when she opened the door, there was a woman in a wig who smiled across the threshold and handed Judit a little booklet of psalms.
“These bring comfort,” the woman said. “After all, Ha Shem will give us nothing that we can’t endure, as long as we know we’re not alone.”
“My God!” Judit shouted at Hans later that night. “Does Chabad have spies in the hospital?” He looked beleaguered. She suspected that he’d told them himself.
Then, one night, when they lay a distance apart in bed, Hans reached out to touch her. His hand moved through her nightgown, and slowly, against the protest of her spirit, she could feel her body rise to meet him, and then something broke in her, and she began to cry.
He didn’t ask if he should stop, and she didn’t pull away. She kept on sobbing, even as he touched her in the ways they knew, and she responded, and when she moved with him, she realized the period of mourning had an end, and they had reached it. Afterwards, Hans’s long, familiar body lay against her own, breathing, letting out a faint and rhythmic snore, the way he always did after they made love. She wished he were awake. She wanted to talk, but she had no idea what she’d say. Mostly, she knew she had to go on living.
Hans was dead. Judit dreamed that the dome of the Yenidze was lit from within, full of floating islands, red, yellow, and blue. She dreamed of miracle babies with dull blue eyes, baby girls embedded in stained glass the way a fetus is embedded in the womb. She dreamed she was in her archive, and all the drawers were open. There was one drawer like a deep, long bed, and she climbed inside. Although she knew the archive’s footage, reel by reel, the metal canisters under her feet and hands were unfamiliar. She rooted through the drawer, opening first one canister and then another, taking from her pocket Shaindel’s plastic flashlight. The cells of the film glittered like leaves of gold. Imperfectly, she could observe the outlines of what she’d never seen before. If she pressed on, she could find films that had even more promise; they winked up from the depths. Yet she wasn’t searching for something new. She was searching for something that was in her hand. How could she have held it for so long, for her whole life, and never thought to turn it over and see what was on the other side?
And now she turned over what she had been holding. She turned everything over. Reel after reel contained another side, mysterious and maddening, and under the cheap, faint bulb of Shaindel’s flashlight, she could start to parse it out, an old-new thing that told a story part of her already knew. She lifted out each canister, took out what it contained, and flipped the old reel over, stock footage or discarded, and she saw the different story, faint but undeniable, and she may not like that story, but she could define its structure. And that was when she knew that the drawer she’d climbed into had been locked.
Someone had closed it. Someone had locked it with a lock of iron. A metal padlock snapped into place, and even as she’d fixated on what she saw, she had ignored what she had heard. She’d heard the drawer close and the key turn. Although she was deaf in one ear, she’d heard it all.
Not until now did she realize she was deaf in one ear. It had happened during the explosion when she fired the shot that killed her husband. Her hands were soaked in blood. There was nothing behind her now, not even the closed drawer. Did she have a choice? She had to move on. She must take that cheap flashlight, and she must shine it on everything she saw because it was all vividly important. She must move on because the drawer was locked behind her.
6
AND Judit dreamed she looked at reel after reel; they lied about the murder. She couldn’t voice the nature of the lie, only that it was profound, and it was one of countless lies that threaded through her consciousness and met each other like a string of pearls. Some of the footage that she watched was half-familiar, the ruins of ’46, those men with spades. But as she shined Shaindel’s flashlight on those spades, they became translucent. What was clear became unclear. The rifles aimed right at the camera lens; they fired, and it shattered. Light merged front and back until there was no front and back at all.
And Stein, at the crater of the Great Synagogue of Dresden, his enormous head, those hands cradling his chin, it all had swollen to the proportions of a mountain or a monument. A monument to what? His mouth moved. Words were forming. It was the very frame that had fixed her attention when Durmersheimer left that note.