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“What’s in here, anyhow?”
    â€œThree dictionaries,” Judit said. “A compilation of Aramaic translations from Hebrew. And of course my notebooks.”
    â€œOf 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.
    â€œSo you don’t have to sit for examinations?” Judit asked him. “Not at all?”
    â€œNot at all,” Hans said.
    â€œSo you go to lectures just because?” Judit shook her head. “You don’t take them seriously, though. You were smiling the whole time.”
    â€œSome lectures are a pleasure. I take pleasure seriously. Don’t you?”
    â€œI 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.”
    â€œIs it the sort of music that makes you smile?” Judit asked. “It shouldn’t be. Not if it’s telling the truth.”
    â€œI’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