A Master Plan for Rescue (13 page)

“So you do not have to break down any more doors?”

“That would be one reason.”

•   •   •

Rebecca and I
were all the other had. Except for the prostitutes and drug addicts in her building, Rebecca avoided other people. “If you have friends, you have to be willing to accept their sympathy,” she told me. “That is a tiring proposition.”

Her parents were alive. Still living, as far as she knew, in Frankfurt. She told me they were wealthy Jews with Communist leanings. “You know the type.”

“No,” I told her. “I have no idea.”

“My father’s department store makes considerable money, which he donates to Jewish charities. My mother is a surgeon who has a way of not performing the abortions the Nazis want, and then performing the ones they don’t.”

“I do not know what you mean by that either.”

Rebecca explained that her mother refused to force abortions on women the Nazis determined had a chance of passing on a hereditary illness. And that she was willing to perform them on the healthy Aryan women who wanted them.

I told her they sounded like good people.

“It would be better if they were less good.”

Rebecca had turned herself into an orphan. “It is best if the last memory they have of me is of a nineteen-year-old girl who is not much paler than she should be getting onto a train they believe is bound for Stuttgart.”

I was a true orphan. My mother died the day after my sixth birthday, as if she had been holding out, waiting for me to reach an age where I would not miss her too much. We lived in Oranienburg then, a not-so-scenic town north of Berlin. It was winter and influenza swept through the town, taking someone from nearly every house. The person it took from our house was my mother.

This was the same winter my father taught me the trick of fixing things. That happened two months after my mother died. I was playing with an electric train set, making the cars go around on the tracks beneath our Christmas tree, which had been dropping needles for weeks. My father had tried taking the tree out—it was so dry, he could no longer risk turning on the lights, no matter how much I begged him—but the moment he put his hands on its trunk, I’d throw myself against it and push my face into the brittle needles, sending the glass balls my mother had hung with her own hands smashing to the floor.

“You must let me take the tree,” my father said. “It is long dead.”

But I would hold onto the rough trunk, unable to explain that as long as the tree stood dropping needles in the parlor, I could believe my mother was only out on an errand.

On the day two months after my mother died, the coal car that belonged to the electric train set stopped moving, and I went to the bedroom looking for my father. It was afternoon and the sun had already set in that northern city, but my father hadn’t gotten up to turn on the light. He was sitting in the wooden chair placed beside the bed where my mother had died two months earlier, looking into the empty air as if he could still see her.

“Fix this, Papa.” I dropped the coal car into his lap.

My father looked into his lap for a moment, then he picked up the coal car and handed it to me. “See if you can fix it, Jakob.”

My father had not gone into his repair shop since my mother died, and I decided then that my mother’s dying had taken away his ability to fix things, and that this had happened because they had fallen in love over a broken bicycle.

“It was a terrible bicycle, and not worth fixing,” my father would always say when he told the story.

“Still I loved the thing,” my mother would tell him. “Because it belonged to my aunt Ida, who was an anarchist.”

“Which explains the condition of the bicycle.”

I could never figure out the connection between anarchists and terrible bicycles, but even at six, I believed I could understand the connection between my father losing my mother and losing his desire to fix things.

“Picture what makes the coal car move around the tracks,” my father said to me. “See it inside your head. Then look for what might be stopping it.”

This was the method I used to find the dried pine needles caught in the wheels of the coal car. And the following day, in the wheels of the engine.

Two days later, I allowed my father to take the dead Christmas tree out into the yard and burn it.

My father died thirteen years after my mother. The day I buried him, I turned my back on the shop he left me in Oranienburg and took the train for Berlin, where I had a friend.

But he’s gone now, too.

Rebecca and I were happy with only the two of us in Berlin. More than happy. Maybe this is not something I should say to you, it is something you are still too young to understand, but when we came together beneath the blankets of my small bed, I believed Rebecca made us into her version of perfection, that she turned us into the rarest combination of opposites. When we came together there was strength and heat and an overwhelming energy that made me want to cry out,
Let every single jack-booted officer of Hitler’s Gestapo come bursting through the door and I will kill each one without rising from this bed, without lifting a finger. I will kill them all merely with the act of love.
And also because there was a feeling so vulnerable, I felt I had become Rebecca’s fragile heart, that I’d been taken out of the protection of her chest and left in the open, where all it would have taken was the slightest breath for me to cease beating.

•   •   •

The December
after Rebecca moved into my flat, she said she wanted to go to the Christmas Market in the square outside the Berliner Dom, the cathedral near the Spree River.

“Do you think that is a good idea for Jews?”

“I have been going to the Christmas Market since I was a child, and as far as I know, the Nazis have not made believing in Jesus Christ a prerequisite for drinking a glass of glüwein.”

“Yet.”

“All the more reason to go now.”

It was true that the Christmas Market had always been more about drinking cups of hot spiced glüwein and eating handfuls of roasted almonds and baked cinnamon stars than celebrating the birth of the Christian Messiah. In Oranienburg, everyone except the most orthodox of Jews went to Christmas Market. I remembered as a child, seeing the men who prayed loudest in temple devouring slabs of pork knuckle at Christmas Market, rivulets of grease sliding into their beards like the River Nile. And tucked always away in the sellers’ booths, among the hand-carved shepherds and baby Jesuses in their mangers, would be a few painted dreidels.

Still, if we Jews were not allowed on the underground during certain hours, or permitted to sit on a bench in the Tiergarten that was not painted yellow, how could we think we would be welcome at a market to celebrate the birth of the Christian Savior? On the other hand, I could not imagine that either the Nazis or I could keep Rebecca away from Christmas Market if she wished to go.

The day we went was cold, cold enough for me to blame it for the blue of Rebecca’s lips. But still Rebecca made us leave the tram early, so that we could walk the last part over the Spree and watch the walls of the market rise up like a medieval castle.

“I see that the Nazis have gone and annexed Christmas,” she said. And it was true, for pasted onto the turrets of the crenellated walls of the market, alternating with the smiling faces of St. Nicolas, were black swastikas.

The Nazis had annexed the inside of the market as well. Every stand selling hot wine and cinnamon stars, painted toys and roasted meats, had a
No Jews Allowed
sign fixed to the front of it.

“There is no point to us being here,” I said.

“Because they say so?”

I turned to Rebecca, standing in the cold with the beret that was too big for her head, the only other Jew besides myself in the Christmas Market. If I left, I knew I would never see her again.

“What then?” I asked her.

Rebecca walked toward a stand where a stout woman with white-blond hair was waiting, half-hidden behind her
No Jews Allowed
sign. A sign that someone—perhaps she, herself—had written in letters that were thick and dark and pressed deep into the cardboard. As Rebecca and I came closer, the woman puffed herself up, preparing, I was sure, to shout us away. But Rebecca smiled at her, the kind of smile you reserve for someone you expect to do your bidding.

Rebecca pointed to the pot of glüwein steaming on an amateurishly embroidered cloth and asked in perfect French,
“Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

The woman sputtered, unsure of how to answer.

Rebecca let her smile falter the smallest amount.
“Non parlez-vous pas francais?”
In her tone was amazement that any civilized person would be incapable of speaking French.

The stout woman shook her head. Rebecca sighed in a manner that even to me sounded very French. Then she said in careful German—as if the woman might not have a complete grasp of her own language—“We would like two glasses of this drink, please.”

The stout woman filled two glasses with steaming glüwein. Rebecca counted out her money as if it was unfamiliar to her.

“Merci,”
said the stout woman, beaming.

“Je vous en prie,”
Rebecca replied, nodding her head only the slightest amount.

We disappeared into the crowded Christmas Market with our glüwein.

“The pleasure of deceiving her is tainted a bit by letting her have any of my money,” Rebecca said. “And by reinforcing her notion that Jews couldn’t possibly speak French.”

“Do you think you could overlook your scruples with that man selling cinnamon stars?”

“Only because I am about to become your concubine and will have to get used to doing your bidding.”

“As pleasant as that sounds, why?”

“I have to give up my job at the end of the year.”

“Is that what Dr. Lieberman says?”

“It is what Hitler says.” She said this as if Hitler was one of her least promising students, as if no matter how long she worked with him, he would never master the future tense. “As of January, Jews will no longer be allowed to teach Germans.”

“What will you do?”

Rebecca put her hand in my pocket. She never remembered to wear gloves and her hands were always so cold I would believe she had slipped something else in there—a stone, a turnip, a lump of ice.

“First I will get you your cinnamon star. Then I will advertise for private students who do not mind learning French from a Jew.”

Rebecca pulled me by my pocket toward the man selling cinnamon stars.

“What does it matter? All this teaching of French has only been to keep me in practice for when I go to Paris.”

Going to Paris was the only lie Rebecca ever told herself. Though I do not think it began as a lie, I think it began as a dream. A dream that had made her go to university and study French. This, when she lived in Frankfurt and had parents and knew nothing about her heart. Now she lived in Berlin and had turned herself into an orphan, and knew enough about her heart to have killed off every dream except this one. The best she could with this one was turn it into a lie. A lie that needed to be fed from time to time.

She would begin, “When I go to Paris,” and then she would tell me what she would do there, who she would see—most often the Jewish photographer Gisèle Freund, who had escaped from Berlin three years ago with her negatives strapped to her body. Always I would listen, even if she talked for an hour. Because the lie of going to Paris was the one thing Rebecca allowed herself that wasn’t a brutal truth. It seemed so little to help her feed the lie.

•   •   •

That winter,
Rebecca advertised for private students. But no private students were willing to learn French from a Jew, and Rebecca had no one with whom to speak French except herself.

And that turned the lie ravenous.

On a frigid night near the end of January, I came home from the shop and found Rebecca wrapped in blankets on the sofa. The heat in the building was unpredictable and she’d forgotten to light the fire in the tiled stove, which we used for a backup. It was nearly as cold inside as out, yet her face was flushed and feverish-looking.

“When I go to Paris,” she said as I stepped through the door. Not, Hello. Not, Why are you late? Because I was late. Because five minutes before closing time, an officer of the Gestapo had come into the shop with a broken gramophone, and you do not tell an officer of the Gestapo that it is five minutes before closing time and would you mind very much coming back tomorrow. Not if the name on the door of your shop has a Semitic ring to it. No, you bow your head as if you are grateful for the business, and you accept the gramophone, and you stay as long as it takes to fix it, and then you arrive home late.

“The first place I go will be the Sorbonne,” Rebecca was saying as I built the fire. “And I will sit there until Gisèle Freund agrees to see me.”

“Is there food?” I asked her. “Have you thought about supper?”

“I will explain that I, too, have escaped Hitler, and that even though she does not know me, she does. Then I will show her my photographs.”

“Stay here. I will go and see if the butcher on Fraenkelufer is still open.”

The butcher’s shop was shuttered, and I had to resort to making a watery soup from what I could find at the bottom of our vegetable box. I do not believe Rebecca noticed. She barely stopped talking long enough to put the spoon in her mouth, hardly ceased speaking long enough to swallow.

She told me about the photographs Gisèle Freund had taken for
Life
magazine, pictures she had heard of in rumor, because the Nazis would never have allowed
Life
magazine into Germany. “She has put photographs of the poorest of England’s working class in the middle of a story on the British aristocracy,” she told me, soup spilling down her chin. “She will understand my woman with the shriveled leg leaning against Josef Wackerle’s concrete thigh.”

While I tried to get her to eat the sorry soup, she explained how Gisèle Freund would take her to meet all of her bohemian friends—Jean-Paul Sartre, who Rebecca claimed was never cheerful, and Colette, who she believed always was. She told me this in such detail that I saw it all inside my head, the way I saw how mechanical objects worked, and I began to believe in it myself. Only when her voice became hoarse and started to crack did I remember that this was her lie.