Judenstaat by Simone Zelitch

Author:Simone Zelitch
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
ISBN: 9781466890008
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

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.

If only she was not deaf in one ear, she would know who killed her husband, but now those words came from a muddled past that showed both sides at once, and in the unforgiving beam of Shaindel’s flashlight, flaws in the film stock, flaws in the bulb, the shadows of her fingers, it showed a deeper mystery.

There was too much she couldn’t know. The truth lay outside of the parameters of her dream, in her own archive, where she retraced that film’s precise location. Now she would wake up. In an hour, she’d be back there. She did not wake up.

* * *

“Will she wake up?”

“Don’t get so close. She’s probably contagious.”

“Will she be sick all over my bed again?”

“Shhh. She can hear you. Can’t you tell? Her eyes are moving under her eyelids.”

They were leaning over her, three girls: the one—was it Leah?—with the long hair pulled back, a taller girl who’d clipped her hair to the side with a butterfly barrette, and Rebecca of the sippy-cup, two tiny hands on the side of that bed.

The barrette-girl asked, “Did we wake you up? I’ll bet we woke you up.”

“You were sleeping for a long time,” Leah said. “You’re in my bed.”

“Leah! That’s not right, saying that,” said the barrette-girl.

“But it’s a mitzvah that she’s in my bed!” Then Leah turned around and shouted, “Momma!” with a force that broke the room to bits and caused little Rebecca to lose her grip on the mattress and stumble back in terror; then she also cried out, “Momma!” and the third girl, whose barrette implied some kind of girlish status, turned to Judit with a look of resignation or complicity. She was holding Judit’s clothes.

“We washed them yesterday,” she said. “The sweater shrank a little. Sorry.”

* * *

The girl’s name was Ruth. She was the oldest, but she was downstairs more than upstairs, helping staff the nursery school. She even slept down there on Shabbos. The oldest boy, Aaron, had left at dawn because he went to a yeshiva halfway across town, the most rigorous one in Dresden.

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