A Master Plan for Rescue (14 page)

I took the empty spoon out of her hand. “It’s late,” I said. “You can tell me the rest tomorrow.”

Rebecca did. She told me about Paris the next day, and the day following. Until I realized that she never went out, never left the flat, only moved from the bed to the sofa, where she waited for me to come home from the shop so she could begin talking.

“When I go to Paris, I will live in the Latin Quarter on the Rue Saint-Jacques, and I will have an apartment where all the windows face west and south, and none of them face east, so I will never have to look toward Germany.”

“Rebecca, have you eaten today?”

“I will invite over all the people I have met there, all the people Gisèle Freund has introduced me to. James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. Marcel Duchamp and Virginia Woolf.”

“Let’s go around to the cafe that serves the sheep stew you like.”

“In Paris, I will eat
coq au vin
, and
cassoulet
, and
steak frites
, and I will eat them in any cafe I wish. Because no one on the Boulevard Saint-Germain or Rue de Rivoli or the Champs-Élysée will care that I am a Jew or an existentialist or a Hindu or a lesbian.”

“Are you planning on becoming a lesbian in Paris?” I smiled.

“I might. In Paris, I might become something different every day. A lesbian on Monday, a Negress on Tuesday, a devout Catholic on Wednesday. In Paris, I shall become whatever I want and there won’t be a single Nazi to tell me that I can’t because a quota for it has already been filled.”

“And what about me?”

“You?” She wrapped a thin arm around my neck. “You, my darling, will come and fix the typewriters and cameras and bicycles of all my famous bohemian friends. Because, of course, they are artists and incapable of fixing anything for themselves. And they will adore you and call you
indispensable
, which, of course, you will be.”

Listening to Rebecca talk was like falling into an opium dream. It was much easier to stay with her inside the lie of Paris than to go outside into the reality of Berlin. But I saw how the lie was feeding off her. How purpled the skin beneath her eyes had turned—a color I could not blame on the early sunsets of February. And at night, after the nervous energy of feeding the lie had finally exhausted her, I would reach under the sweaters she wore to bed and count her ribs with my fingers, a task that got easier each time I tried it.

•   •   •

During the first week
of March, I knocked on the door of our downstairs neighbor, Frau Nowak. Frau Nowak was a brown-haired, buxom woman with a tired face who disapproved of Rebecca and me. Not because we were Jewish, but because we were not married. However, Frau Nowak had a twelve-year-old daughter who had impressed me as quick-witted and also, I suspected, many things in her flat that needed fixing, as Herr Nowak had taken off two years ago with Frau Nowak’s younger sister.

As Frau Nowak would not let me past her doorstep, I offered her my bargain while standing in the street. I would come once a week and fix whatever was broken in her flat if she would send her daughter upstairs to Rebecca for French lessons.

Frau Nowak looked suspicious, but free labor and free French lessons proved more potent than her sense of morality.

“Under no circumstances can the Fräulein upstairs know of our exchange,” I told her.

“I understand.” Frau Nowak nodded. Although I cannot imagine what she believed she understood.

I must have been correct about Frau Nowak’s twelve-year-old daughter, because Rebecca complained about her much less than she had about her gymnasium students, the bulk of whom she believed would be fortunate if they could convince anyone in France to bring them so much as a croissant. Although she did wonder where Frau Nowak had found the money to pay for French lessons.

“Perhaps Herr Nowak has had an attack of conscience.”

“I very much doubt it.”

“Then perhaps there is something to the rumor about Frau Nowak taking up with an officer of the Gestapo.”

On the two days a week Frau Nowak’s daughter came for her lessons, Rebecca did not talk to me of Paris. And on those days, she generally remembered about the fire and about eating.

During that time, I also scoured Berlin’s pawnshops in the Kreuzberg until I found one that would sell me a shortwave radio.

“You can have that one cheap,” the man behind the counter told me. “It does not work.”

“I should have it free then.”

“I have to make something.”

I took the radio back to my shop and worked on it all afternoon. When it was fixed, I brought it home to Rebecca.

She was waiting for me on the sofa, wrapped up in blankets. “When I go to Paris,” she began.

I ignored her, placing the radio on the table where there was nothing set out for our supper and turned it on. Static poured out, drowning Rebecca’s voice. Then, because I’d tried it out in the shop and knew where to look for it, I turned the dial and the sound of French—no, the sound of France—filled our flat.

Rebecca stopped talking. She rose from the sofa and with the blankets still wrapped around her, walked to the radio. She was staring at it like it wasn’t a box filled with tubes and transmitters and amplifiers. She was looking at it as if it was something magical, something that could take the lie and not turn it back into a dream—nothing could do that—but turn it less deadly maybe.

“What are they talking about?” I asked her.

“Soap powder.”

I looked at her—pale and too thin—standing before the shortwave with the blankets wrapped around her fragile shoulders.

“It is an advertisement. And I can see it perfectly—a French woman hanging her husband’s shirts on the line with the curved dome of Sacré-Coeur at the edge of her window. The husband’s shirts, they’re very white.” She laughed. The sound of it was so rare and lovely, I had to turn away.

Two weeks later when a chest cold kept Frau Nowak’s daughter from her lesson and bad weather prevented the radio from pulling France into our flat, Rebecca greeted me once more with, “When I go to Paris.”

“But what about me?” I interrupted.

She looked up at me from her pile of blankets on the sofa.

“I cannot spend all my time fixing typewriters and cameras. What if I want to ask Jean-Paul Sartre for directions to the
bibliotheque
? Suppose I would like to talk to Colette about the train service to Marseilles? I cannot stand around Paris like a mute.”

And so Rebecca began to teach me French. At first I was not as quick as her twelve-year-old student. But after a month, I was good enough for the two of us to occasionally go out and flaunt the
No Jews Allowed
sign in a cafe or butcher shop. While we were often chased away—even in French—it did not bother me as much as it should have. I had only to notice how the shadows beneath Rebecca’s eyes had lightened to lavender, and think how long it had been since she had last begun a sentence with, “When I go to Paris.”

•   •   •

In November
of that year the Eternal Jew exhibit opened in Munich. This was the type of news I would have gone to lengths to avoid, but Rebecca would not let me. She dragged me to a kiosk on Unter den Linden to buy a copy of
Jüdische Rundschau
, the Jewish newspaper.
Jüdische Rundschau
, Rebecca claimed, was the only newspaper in Berlin that could be trusted, because the Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda did not interfere with it.

“How can that be?” I asked her.

“Because the only public opinion Herr Goebbels cares about is
German
public opinion.”

We took our newspaper to the small cafe near the Universität to read over coffee. But since we had last been there, they had put up a
No Jews Allowed
sign.

“It is not too cold,” I said. “We can go sit in the Tiergarten.”

Rebecca looked up into the blue sky, as if checking the weather. It was a clear autumn day, the kind where one can see for miles.

“Hitler is probably happy for the weather. Clear enough for everybody in Germany to look toward Munich and see exactly what he thinks of the Jews.”

I took her arm and led her toward the Tiergarten. At times I wondered if Rebecca was testing which would kill her first, her heart or the Gestapo.

We sat on one of the yellow benches reserved for Jews, and Rebecca—who insisted on reading all injustices in newspapers out loud to me—read from
Jüdische Rundschau
.

“Julius Streicher,” she said, “a member of the Nazi Party, opened the exposition by declaring that Jews are children of the Devil.”

According to the paper, three thousand German people had attended the opening day of the exhibit. They had wandered through its twenty rooms, reading posters with titles like
How Bolshevism Is the Jewish Desire to Rule the World
and
Usury and the Fencing of Goods Were Always Their Privilege
, then marveling at the displays of
Jewish Facial Features
—the hooked noses, thick lips, and enormous ears made of rubber.

“Herr Streicher told the story of the Eternal or Wandering Jew,” Rebecca read into the clear autumn air, “the Jew who mocked Jesus on his way to the cross and was condemned to wander the earth until Judgment Day. A poor Jew, Streicher said, who would have considered it a favor to be put out of his misery.”

She dropped the paper into her lap; her face was paler than usual.

“This is how they will begin to exterminate us.”

An elderly German couple walking by turned their heads to stare at her.

“En francais,”
I said.

“They will turn us into something other than human,” she continued in French. “And they will call it a favor.”

She grabbed hold of my wrist with more strength than I would have imagined she possessed. “You have to leave.”

“We both have to leave.”

“There are only so many visas for Jews in countries outside of Germany. There is no point wasting one on me.”

“I will not go without you.”

“Do not make me responsible for you dying here.”

I pointed to the newspaper. “This is only one exhibit in one city.”

She picked it up, showed me the listings.

“After Munich it will go to Vienna, then it will come here to Berlin. The Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda is already preparing a documentary of it to show all over Germany.”

“Still, from a documentary to extermination?”

Rebecca shook her head. She knew it would not be such a long journey.

I knew it as well, although I tried very hard not to know it.

But Rebecca would not let me. All that winter, she filled the flat with newspapers. Three years earlier, when Berlin had published more than fifty daily newspapers, this would have been easier. But Herr Goebbels had declared it illegal for Jews to work at non-Jewish newspapers, and since that time, Berlin’s newspapers had shrunk to less than a dozen. Still, Rebecca bought every one of them and left them scattered around our flat. On the sofa—where she no longer sat wrapped up in blankets—spread out on the kitchen table, covering our bed. I even found them pressed against the window glass, as if it would be more difficult for me to disregard the news if there was more light shining through it.

Each day when I returned home from the shop, I gathered these newspapers and stacked them neatly beside the tiled stove to use for kindling. It is not easy to hold so many words in your hands and prevent your brain from turning them into meaning. To do so, I paid more attention to Rebecca, noting that her lips looked bluish even in the warmth of our apartment, that her skin had a permanent pallor.

When Rebecca understood that I could be surrounded by newspapers covered with words that if added together equaled an ominous outcome for anyone who was Jewish and still ignore them, she tried a different tactic.

“You have to leave” became the new phrase she greeted me with each evening. And each evening, I tried to find a way to convince her that she should leave as well.

“What about France?” I said. “Your French is good enough that maybe we can buy you a French passport.”

“And you?”

“Maybe I can get a visa. Or maybe I can be smuggled in.”

“What makes you think we will be safe in France?” she asked me. “You do not believe the Führer has plans for France?”

“Palestine, then. They actually want Jews.”

“Jews who will live.”

For each night of the length of that winter, Rebecca and I had some version of this argument, some version of her telling me to leave, reminding me she would die, until I wanted to run out of the flat and search the entire Kreuzberg, the whole of Berlin, until I found this hypothetical Jew she believed deserved to leave Germany instead of her. And when I did, I swore I would put my hands around his deserving neck and strangle him until he was the one who was dead and Rebecca could leave with me.

•   •   •

In March,
there was news even I could not ignore. Hitler had invaded Austria, a country with two hundred thousand Jews.

I came home early and found Rebecca on the floor of the flat, surrounded by open newspapers, a country of newsprint she had decided to occupy.

“It says here that Hitler has established an Office for Jewish Emigration in Vienna.”

“Do you think they will be allowed to leave?”

“With Eichmann in charge? Only if their destination is Herr Himmler’s new concentration camp near Linz.”

I sat on the floor beside her. “You are going to tell me to leave again.”

“And you are going to tell me some new idea you have about me going with you.”

I took her hand, telling myself the blueness at the end of her fingers was only ink from the newsprint.

“Here is what I think,” I told her. “I think that shortly before you believe it is too late, you will find some way to make me leave.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes were very dark. “That is probably true.”

“So let us not use up any more of the time between now and then talking about it.”

Rebecca nodded, and I no longer came home to newspapers.

But I was not agreeing to leave Rebecca in Germany, only to stop trying to persuade her to go. For if she would not go because her heart was bad, I would find a way to fix it.