Judenstaat Read Online Free Page A

had to see the caretaker and get it replaced. Those things don’t just take care of themselves.” She wrapped a hunk of brisket in heavy foil and loaded a striped plastic tote bag with honey-cake, stewed carrots, and a dozen other things that Judit hadn’t asked for.
    â€œMom, where am I supposed to put all this? My fridge isn’t big enough to hold it.”
    â€œThen get a bigger one. Really, I don’t see why you stay in a dormitory at your age. You could move back here. It would make a world of sense. You’re getting so thin, a strong wind would blow you away.”
    â€œI was always this size,” Judit said.
    â€œIt’s an observation, not a criticism. Maybe it’s the coat. It swallows you, Judi. I know why you won’t give it up, but take a look at yourself in the mirror and you’ll admit. It’s a man’s coat. And an old one too.”
    â€œI know it’s old,” said Judit. “And I know it’s a man’s coat.”
    â€œYou take everything I say the wrong way today. What’s the matter? You’re so pale. Have a banana. You know they used to be impossible to get, and just today they were on sale. It’s just a little bruised.”
    Judit told her mother that nothing was the matter, but in the end, of course, she took the banana, along with the striped bag full of food she knew she wouldn’t eat, and once she was outside, she put her free hand into the enormous pocket of the duffle coat that had belonged to Hans and put the banana there. Next to the note.

 
    4
    They lied about the murder.
    What she should really do is give the note to the Stasi agent who visited her dormitory once a month. That agent was unfailingly polite, so tactful and insistent that he was there for her protection that he would probably just take that note and pursue the matter without further questions. After what happened in the archive, how could she doubt that she needed protection?
    Yet she remembered the form that protection took, the constant presence of that agent by her bed, the oppression of that tact, the way she felt all of the air pumped out of her and something else pumped in. No—it had been more than three years since the murder and not once had she asked a thing of that man. She would be vulnerable. So what?
    Her silence didn’t make her complicit in a crime. No matter what lie they told her, Hans was just as dead. He might as well be murdered by the Saxon fascist with his forty-year-old gun. He might as well be on a list of Saxons who collaborated with the Jewish state. The case was closed. She’d throw the note away. She did not throw the note away.
    *   *   *
    The bus took Judit from Altstadt, where she worked and where her mother lived, to Neustadt, gray with concrete, glass, and steel. There was a new bridge across the Elbe: the Bridge Between East and West. That bridge had been called Augustus Bridge before the war, and then Mendelssohn Bridge, and its most recent incarnation was white and sleek, with a translucent crest of cables. Judit used to see swallows dipping and soaring below. She never saw them now. Somebody must have cleared their nests away.
    What happened to the fabric store with the embroidered butterflies in the window, or the coffee shop where she and Hans used to get pancakes on Sunday mornings before rehearsals? Once there had been electric trams that took you everywhere. There used to be a little steam train in the park run by children dressed as conductors and engineers. Like every child in Judenstaat, Judit had longed to be an engineer on that train. The chosen few asked for tickets solemnly and pulled levers in signal boxes even in the rain. Those trains were gone.
    As recently as last year, Judit liked to get herself ice cream at a little stand on Joseph Roth Square, and the last time she’d tried to find it, the stand had been torn down and replaced by a glass door stenciled with