A Master Plan for Rescue (12 page)

We were near the ocean, and because of the threat of German U-boats floating beneath the black waves, no lights were left on at Coney Island. I moved through the blackness, listening for the sound of the Nazi’s factory shoes on the pavement, like following footsteps on the radio, my hands splayed in front of my face to keep myself from walking into anything. There was no one on the streets, no one driving on the road. There was only the Nazi’s footfalls and the sound of the waves breaking on the beach, like endless card-shuffling.

I was surprised by how fast the Nazi could move in the dark, certain he’d come out here before. A gust of wind blew in from the ocean, full of salt that bit at my cheeks. It rattled something ahead, something that sounded like ice knocking together in hundreds of glasses, as if a horde of Nazis were ahead in the darkness sipping on cold drinks. I squinted into the black night and saw bits of light, glinting. As I came closer, they turned into a glittering wall of ice illuminated by the downward-casting bulb of a single lamp.

Another salty gust of wind blew in, and the glittering wall shook, sounding once again like ice in the drinks of a hundred Nazis. I squinted. It was not ice, but a chain-link fence catching light in the cold, clear night.

The Nazi continued toward the fence, not breaking stride, as if he believed he had the power to walk straight through it. At the last second the fence slid back only enough for him to pass through, and the instant he did, it slammed shut behind him. He raised his arm in what at first I thought was the Nazi salute, but was only a wave. I looked back at the fence, and only then noticed the small building—no more than a box—near where the Nazi had entered. A man’s head was outlined in its dimly lit window.

The Nazi disappeared into the darkness beyond the fence.

But I knew these fences—some version of them were around every playground and schoolyard in New York City. Staying away from that small building and the man inside, I crept up to the fence, ran my hands along its icy diamonds. After a few feet, I found what I was looking for, the place where the sections of fence joined together, the narrow gap between the metal pipes.

I squeezed an arm and a leg through, but got stuck on the reindeer sweater. I didn’t know how far ahead of me the Nazi was.
Far
, I thought. I slipped back through the fence and yanked off the sweater. Cold air blew through my T-shirt, but without the sweater, I fit easily through the fence. It wasn’t until I was through and running in the dark that it occurred to me that I could have held the reindeer sweater in my hand.

I ran blindly into blackness. And then I wasn’t running anymore. I was on the ground, tripped up by something colder than the air, something that was hard beneath my hands. Train tracks, crisscrossing the pavement in every direction.

I sat up and listened. The heavy footsteps of the Nazi were gone, but I heard buzzing, as if there were hives of bees somewhere out in the darkness. I got to my feet and ran toward the sound, feeling the tracks merge and split beneath the soles of my shoes.

The buzzing led me to a hulking building. The sound was deafening, even through its walls, even with its big sliding doors pulled closed. There was no light anywhere. If the building had windows, they’d been painted over. I moved along its side, looking for a way in. Turning a corner, I saw a narrow rectangle of light hitting the pavement. One of the wide doors hadn’t been pulled all the way shut.

I crept closer to it. Here the buzzing was joined by loud clanging—metal against metal—and a low electrical humming that made me jittery.
This was a factory. A Nazi factory building things for Hitler right next to where the rest of New York came to ride the Cyclone and splash around in the ocean.

I slipped through the opening in the door.

In the air before me hung a floating subway car.

Its metal wheels hovered above the floor at the height of my head, and shining out of the car’s undercarriage was a blindingly bright white light. A light so powerful it had carved a deep hole into the cement floor beneath the car in its own shape. There was a man—a Nazi—moving around inside that hole. He wore a hard hat and had goggles over his eyes, and he knew some trick that let him stand in that powerful white light and not be harmed.

I pressed myself against the wall where the shadows were thickest and looked about the cavernous room. There were at least a dozen of these floating subway cars hovering in the air, all of them shooting out blinding white light, all of them with a Nazi who knew the trick of staying unharmed in it moving around beneath its undercarriage.

I was in 1942, at the very end of the age when it was possible for me to enter a place like this and imagine I’d entered a world that belonged more in a comic book than at the southernmost tip of Brooklyn. But as I say, I was at the very end of that age, and as I stood with my back pressed against the wall of that room, I began to notice that the wheels of all those subway cars were resting on raised tracks, and that all that blinding white light was more probably shining up into their undercarriages rather than down from them. And not long after those two realizations slid into my brain, I remembered my father telling me about the Coney Island Yards, the true end of the line for broken subway cars.

But in 1942, I was still young enough—and had lost enough—that the real world didn’t possess a fair chance of impressing itself on me. And once I understood where I was, I also understood what the Nazi was doing there. He had come to sabotage the New York subway system. And all I had to do was catch him at it.

The islands of white light around the floating subway cars were the only light in the big room. The rest was in shadow. I pushed myself off the wall, heading toward the nearest raised-up car. One of these men in the hard hats and goggles was my Nazi; I would skirt the light and find him.

My feet tangled in a snarl of wire and I fell to my knees. But with the buzzing and the clanging and that electrical hum I was coming to believe was the vibration of my own nerve endings, even I didn’t hear the fall. I got back up and moved closer to the white light.

A hand clamped over my mouth.

I knew this hand, recognized its scent—acrid and oily—from the roof on Ludlow Street. I could picture it as perfectly as if I was examining it beneath all that bright white light, black in the places where my father’s hand was white, black in the creases where the ghosts of my father’s photographs lived. But who could say what lived in the creases of the Nazi’s hand?

I threw my body from side to side trying to get free; an arm wrapped itself around my chest like a snake. Then I was being dragged backward.

I dug my heels into the floor, but the cement was smooth and the soles of my shoes slid as if I was being pulled over ice. I yanked at the arm locked across my chest, but it might as well have been made out of iron. The Nazi dragged me until there was no more floor under my feet, until I was falling into one of the deep holes under the floating subway cars, this one dark and unlit. This one empty except for me and the Nazi, his hand on my mouth, his arm across my chest, and the bulk of him pressed against my back.

“I will take my hand away,” he said, in that voice that made everything sound like a lie. “If you do not yell.”

I nodded beneath his oily-smelling hand. It was so loud in this room, there was no point in yelling.

His hand left my mouth, and I backed away from him.

It was dark under the subway car, and my eyes weren’t good in the dark. The Nazi was all shadows, like a person made out of smoke.

“You,” he said, “from Rivington Street.”

I shook my head, thinking if he believed I was only some kid who had wandered in, he might let me go.

“Why are you following me?”

In his undertone, working its way up between the lies, I heard fear, and that made me less afraid.

“I know what you are,” I told him.

I saw him startle in the darkness.

“And what is that?”

“A Nazi.”

He unwound the scarf from around his neck and sighed.

“One thing I am not is a Nazi,” he told me.

I moved away, pressed my back against the cold cement wall.

“Why should I believe you?” I said.

“To begin, I am a Jew.”

“Prove it.”

From out of the darkness, I heard him laugh. Though if laughter had an undertone, his would be saying there was nothing here that was funny.

The Nazi shook his head. “Never before have I been asked to prove that I
was
a Jew.”

“I’m asking you to prove it.”

“Why?”

“I need you to.”

“You have heard of the ship the
St. Louis
?” he said.

“The ship of Jewish refugees?”

From the still way his shadowy figure was standing, the Nazi must have been staring at me.

“I was one of them.”

“That’s impossible,” I said.

“But it is true.”

Over the years I have wondered why Jakob—for that was his name, at least all the name I ever learned—told me this. Why he told me any of what he said that night. For once he realized I knew nothing about him, he could have lifted me out from under that subway car and gotten somebody, perhaps another transit cop, to take me home without ever telling me any of the information it was so dangerous for other people to know. My only guess is that he needed to tell the story. That he had kept it inside for too long, and that I—a twelve-year-old boy out in the middle of the night on a mission of his own imagination—seemed the safest place to put it.

“Sit,” he told me. “Because if I am going to tell you how I got onto the
St. Louis
, how I got here, I am going to have to tell you about Rebecca.”

JAKOB

That she had a bad heart was the first thing Rebecca told me about herself. This was on a warm afternoon of thunderstorms, after the two of us had waited for the hour Jews were allowed on the Friedrichstrasse underground. You, I think, are too young to know this, but most love stories begin in the rain. There is something about sunshine that makes people believe they can stand better being alone.

My clothes were soaked from waiting outside. Still I sat next to her and stared at her dark hair. Later, she said to me that she was making bets with herself on the number of stops we would make before I said something to her. But in the end, it was she who spoke first. That day, I thought it was because Rebecca had no patience. Later, I knew it was because she had no time.

“What do you suppose they did with the Romani?” she said.

“The Romani?”

“The gypsies. Have you noticed the way they have all vanished?”

I thought about how I had not seen the women who wore always three or four dirty skirts, one atop the other, begging for coins outside the cafe on Wassertorplatz the past few mornings.

“Where do you think they have gone?” I asked her.

“Somewhere they will not embarrass the Führer,” she replied.

This was August of 1936, a week before the world would arrive in Berlin for the Olympic Games, and of course the Führer would not wish to be embarrassed.

As the train approached the station at Unter den Linden, Rebecca stood. “This stop is mine.”

I got to my feet. “Mine as well,” I said.

Rebecca smiled, and I am certain she knew that Unter den Linden was not my stop. For a reason I cannot tell you, I am certain she knew I rode the Friedrichstrasse underground all the way to Hallesches Tor.

We came out of the station into torrential rain. Rebecca is the first and only woman I ever knew who walked straight into rain. Let it fall on her like something natural. The two of us stood together looking across the wide avenue of Unter den Linden at a row of stunted lime trees, the rain soaking Rebecca’s hair like it was trying to turn it blacker, which would have been impossible.

“I loved those trees.” She said this more to herself than to me. “The old limes.”

The trees, which had been planted by Friedrich Wilhelm in the sixteenth century, had been chopped under Hitler’s orders, because they blocked his view of the Nazi soldiers marching toward the Brandenburg Gate.

Rebecca turned her face up into the pouring rain. “Hitler is a swine,” she said.

I, too, had loved those big old trees. And I also thought that what Hitler had done to them was a terrible thing. But I would never have had the courage to do what Rebecca had just done, stand on one of Berlin’s most well-traveled avenues with that very black hair, and those very dark eyes, and those very Semitic—yet very beautiful—features and call him a swine.

I tell you that this instant—with the rain falling on us with a force like God Himself was trying to wash us from the face of the earth—was when I fell in love with Rebecca.

We crossed the street with the water dropping on us to the railing where Rebecca had locked up an ancient bicycle. She bent to unlock it, and as she began to push it over the cobbles, I heard that the chain was not moving over the crank in the right way.

“Stop,” I said.

I kneeled at her feet and examined the crank. With the rain pouring over my head, it was like working in a shower. I was so wet I could not tell my clothes from my skin. Still I took my time resetting the chain of her bicycle, stretching it evenly over each individual sprocket until it matched a picture I had inside my head.

When I finished, I stood and pushed the bicycle back and forth so she could hear how it sounded.

“I always wondered what was wrong with that chain.”

“Unevenness.”

“How did you know?”

“I can see how things are supposed to work inside my head. And also how to fix them.”

I did not know which was more unbelievable, that I would stand in the pelting rain and talk to a girl about fixing bicycles, or that she would stand and listen.

“Can I take you for a coffee?” I asked her.

“Is that how you make your living, you fix something for somebody and then take them for a coffee?”

“I have a shop in Hallesches.”

This made Rebecca laugh.

It is possible the two of us would have stood in the rain until we drowned before I thought of something further to say.

“Yes,” Rebecca said when she had stopped laughing, “you can take me for a coffee.”

We went to a cafe near the Universität where the windows were steamed over from the rain and the marble tables so narrow, our knees touched beneath them.

“I have a bad heart,” she told me.

She gave me this information before she gave me her name. “You do not want to fall in love with me.”

“‘Bad’ as in you will treat me badly?” I said this lightly, thinking she was being careless talking about love with a man she’d just met on the underground.

“‘Bad’ as in it’s broken, which when you are not talking about love, means that it is not fixable.”

Rebecca, I would learn, was never careless.

“The doctors tell me I will die early.”

“If things in Germany continue as they are,” I said, “I expect most of us will die early.”

I meant for it to be a dark joke, the only kind of joke we Jews were making then. Although for the short time of the Olympic Games, our jokes—and our lives—seemed maybe less dark. For the Romani were not the only things that had vanished from Berlin’s streets. Hitler had also ordered all the
No Jews Allowed
signs removed from the shop windows, and we Jews had decided to make ourselves as willing to be deceived as the rest of the world.

•   •   •

The following week,
on the day the Games began, I invited Rebecca to meet me.

“You have remembered what I told you about my heart,” she warned, not realizing it was too late for warnings.

I told her I did, and said I only wanted to check on how her bicycle was holding up.

We met in the plaza outside the Dietrich-Eckart-Bühne amphitheater, where the opening ceremonies were being held. Rebecca was taking photographs when I arrived. Shooting the old Berliners who came to the plaza to feed the pigeons that even Hitler couldn’t banish.

“You do not want to wait by the entrance?” I asked her. “Try for a picture of the athletes as they pass?”

“I am not interested in Hitler’s idea of perfection.”

She pointed the lens of her Leica at an old woman standing in front of the massive statues outside the amphitheater. These statues—naked giants sculpted by Josef Wackerle—were a favorite of the Führer.

“See that woman with the shriveled leg leaning against the concrete thigh of the statue?” Rebecca said. “That they can both exist, and that they are both in this moment next to each other, that is my idea of perfection.”

She raised the Leica to her eye. “And if for once I can make this camera focus, I will capture it in light and shadow. An image of perfection shot by a Jewish girl with a bad heart.”

“Let me fix that for you.”

“I’ve already told you, it’s unfixable.”

“The focus.”

She pulled the camera away from her face. “You know about Leicas as well as bicycles?”

“I know about anything mechanical.”

Rebecca shoved the camera into my hand, which maybe does prove she had no patience. Or maybe that she knew even with a shriveled leg, the old woman was not going to stand in front of Josef Wackerle’s concrete thigh forever.

I twisted off the range finder at the front of Rebecca’s camera and looked inside, and closed my eyes to see better the way it worked without anything distracting me, like Rebecca’s very black hair. When I had a clear picture of how all the mechanisms fit together, I opened them again.

“Do you have a safety pin?” I asked Rebecca.

She turned over the hem of her skirt. Most of it was held up with safety pins.

“I hate sewing,” she said.

She gave me a pin, and I felt around the inside of the camera with it until I found the small spring that had come loose. I reset it, spun the range finder back on, and handed the Leica back to her.

“Tomorrow I will bring you a new spring.”

But I was speaking to her narrow back, Rebecca being already gone, shooting the picture of the woman with the shriveled leg. I think Rebecca fell in love with me the instant I fixed the focus on her camera. I think this because she said nothing about her bad heart when I spoke about meeting again the next day.

And because in the time we were together, she printed that photograph a hundred times, in a hundred ways. More grainy, then more blurred. With more shadows, then with more light. Small, so its world became condensed. Large, so that it became abstracted. After she moved in with me, I found versions of that photograph all over the flat, tucked into the corners of mirrors and windows, taped onto the backs of cabinet doors, sliding around in the bottom of drawers.

“Why so many?” I asked her.

“It is my definition of perfection.”

“But all over the apartment?”

“Maybe I need reminding.”

When she left me, it would be the only thing of hers I would find. One version, perfectly sharp, exactly the size to fit between the pages of a passport.

•   •   •

It was Rebecca’s tooth
that pushed her into my flat. A molar that developed an abscess because she could not find a dentist to treat her. Every Jewish dentist had left Berlin—had left Germany—once the rumors started that the Nazis would forbid Jews from practicing dentistry, even on other Jews.

“Cannot you find a German dentist who will see Jews?” I said to Rebecca when she turned up at the cafe near the Universität with the left side of her face swollen like a child with mumps.

It was autumn by then, the Olympic Games had ended and both the visitors and the
No Jews Allowed
signs had returned to their usual places. Oddly, the Romani remained vanished, and no one knew where they had gone.

“Just thinking about asking the question makes my tooth ache more.”

What Rebecca did not tell me was that a tooth infection can travel to the heart. If she had, I would have forced her out of that small cafe and taken her to every dentist in Berlin—every dentist in Germany—until one agreed to treat her. Instead, she told me she was bathing the tooth in salt water and peroxide, and so it was a full week before I wound up banging on the door of the room she rented in the Alexanderplatz, rousing the prostitutes and drug addicts who liked to sleep late, but not waking Rebecca.

Unlike her neighbors, Rebecca was not a prostitute or a drug addict, but a teacher of French in a gymnasium. When I pointed out that she could afford to live in a better section of Berlin, she explained that then she would be spending her money on rent instead of film.

“Also here,” she said, “almost nobody complains that I am a Jew.”

If it had been someone other than Rebecca I had been waiting for in the Tiergarten that afternoon, I might have believed she’d forgotten we had arranged to meet so she could photograph the October light on the dead leaves and then explain to me why this golden sunlight shining on a dry and brittle leaf is the most perfect thing in the world. But it was Rebecca, so I broke down her door. Because Rebecca never kept a spare key hidden anywhere, and though I had known her for three months by then, she would not give me a key, “because then you will begin to think of me as someone you should get used to.”

I found her feverish in bed. Twisted up in sweaty sheets, surrounded by rolls of exposed film, like she had been trying to develop them with the heat of her body. She was wearing a damp slip and a beret made out of wool felt that I never had the heart to tell her was too big for her head. Although she did not seem to know who I was, she also did not seem at all surprised to see me standing there with splinters from her shattered door on the shoulders of my coat.

She could, however, recall the name and address of the doctor who treated her for her bad heart. I wrapped her in a blanket and took her there in a taxi.

It was Dr. Lieberman who explained to me how easily an infection can travel from an abscessed tooth to a heart.

“That tooth must be pulled,” he said.

“Can you do it?”

“I am a heart specialist.”

“Have you tried to find a dentist who will treat Jews in Berlin?”

After Dr. Lieberman pulled Rebecca’s tooth, I asked him to tell me what was wrong with her heart.

He ran a hand over his hairless head. “The simple explanation, which I suppose is as good as the complicated one since they amount to the same thing, is that no part of it is strong enough to last very long. Over time it will begin to work less efficiently. Then it will give out.”

“How long?”

“Are you asking me how much time you will have together?”

I nodded.

“You are Jews in Hitler’s Germany. The answer to that has nothing to do with anybody’s heart.”

Because her door was broken, I brought Rebecca to my flat and put her into my bed. When her fever came down some days later, I suggested she stay.