Judenstaat Read Online Free PDF Page B

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.
    At night, the campers would toast bread over an open fire, and eat it with honey that would scorch their lips and tongues. Nothing could match the sensation of burnt honey mixed with sand that got into their bread and even into their knapsacks, and the August moon doing crazy things to the black and yellow cliffs of Saxon Switzerland as they sat at the mouth of a pit they’d spent the summer excavating.
    So yes, she brought the Junior Excavator trophy to college. She also brought her sewing machine, a graduation gift from Leonora. It fit into its own suitcase. She sewed her own clothes. She would have mended other people’s clothes if they’d bothered to ask her. No one asked her. That was the sort of girl she was, at least until Hans Klemmer kissed her.
    *   *   *
    In 1984, Judit would be using that same machine in the apartment she and Hans had purchased after they’d moved to Dresden. The place was new, and still felt raw and strange, not fully furnished, not their own. When Hans conducted, she liked to stay in her little sewing room, the one they’d hoped to make into a nursery. That’s where she was, in her robe, at nine o’clock when the doorbell rang.
    It couldn’t have been Hans. She sat at the machine for a moment, running a seam down the edge of Hans’s new dress shirt. Then she got up and pulled her robe a little tighter. She walked to the door. It was already open. The agent stood there, in his brown hat, with his mild face. He just looked at her. That’s when she knew.
    *   *   *
    Judit had always suspected that the Stasi agent had been Hans’s bodyguard and he’d been delegated to her case as a perverse demotion. She could never see him again without reliving that night. Thus, when Mrs. Cohen said, “That man’s in the sitting room,” they exchanged a look of resigned complicity that made Judit grateful, yet again, that she lived in the dormitory, particularly when Mrs. Cohen added, “Don’t let him go too long. It’s common space, after all. The other girls don’t like it.”
    The sitting room was another artifact. It was supposed to be for gentleman callers. Its big glass partition faced the hallway, and it contained a square modernist chair and two uncomfortable couches. The Stasi agent sat on one of those couches. At some point in the past three years, he’d stopped wearing the hat. Rising, he began, as ever, “Just a courtesy visit.” Then he said, “How are you, Mrs. Klemmer? You look tired.”
    â€œIt’s the lighting in here,” Judit said. “It makes everyone look tired.”
    The agent motioned for her to sit in the chair. She kept on standing. She looked at her watch. She’d found that if she stood and looked at her watch, he’d usually leave sooner, but sometimes he would just say, as he did that day, “Please sit down.”
    Then she would have no choice. She’d sit down as he went through his litany of questions about her schedule, her route home, and any changes in her routine.
    The agent shook his head. “It’s not just the lighting. You’re worn out. I believe you’re under pressure at work and it’s interfering with your health.”
    There was a probing quality to this