A Master Plan for Rescue (20 page)

The next day, I sought out Purser Mueller and told him I had worked in shipbuilding in Berlin and was curious to see the engine room of the
St. Louis
. It was, of course, a lie, but I imagined that being surrounded by so much machinery might soothe me enough to stop my hands from flying through the air. Purser Mueller suggested that after dinner I go down to D deck and seek out First Officer Closterman.

First Officer Closterman was a short man with rounded shoulders and a small head, as if he had been bred to work in the tunnel-like hallways beneath the passenger decks. He did not seem especially happy to see me in his domain. He took me downstairs and led me through a door that had been painted with the words
NO PASSENGER ENTRY
, and did not once look back to see if I was keeping up with him.

The deck down here belonged to the crew, and smelled of cigarettes and piss and seawater. But beneath those smells was the scent of machine oil and metal, and the familiarity of those eased the restlessness of my hands, which by that time had begun to travel up my forearms. It was the scent of machine oil and metal that kept me moving behind the hunched figure of First Officer Closterman, even as I heard the singing—the kind of drunken singing that is generally accompanied by spilled beer and fist-banging and somebody being beaten.

We turned the corner and came upon the singers. Six crewmen seated at a wooden table, all with beer foam on their lips. I recognized Steward Schiendick, a thick-set man with black eyebrows, whom none of us knew very well, as he nearly never spoke to the passengers. I recognized also Assistant Purser Reich, bland and blond beside him. The other men’s faces were familiar from my days aboard the ship, although I was used to them looking less drunk.

Beer was puddled on the wooden table and fists were being pounded on its scarred surface, and I was certain that soon someone was going to be beaten, and equally certain it would be me. Because I knew the song Steward Schiendick and Assistant Purser Reich, and now First Officer Closterman—for he had left me in the doorway and joined the others at the table—were singing. I had heard it many times—this favorite anthem of the Nazi Party—could recognize it despite the fact that the men singing it were so drunk, their words were running together on a river of beer.

It was the
“Horst Wessel.”
Named for a man who had been elevated to the status of a martyr by Joseph Goebbels himself. A man who had done nothing more heroic than write a Nazi poem, and then get himself shot in the mouth by a Communist for refusing to pay his half of the rent.

And now this song—this Nazi anthem—was being sung two decks below nine hundred Jews who had been seduced by the spell of this sparkling ship. Nine hundred Jews who had been lulled into believing they were passengers and not refugees, who had been called
sir
and
madam
and fed cold drinks and warm tea until they had ceased being wary.

I stood before the table of drunken crewmen, my hands twitching, and raised my voice above their drunken singing.

“I am only here for the engine room,” I said, meaning,
I have not come here as a Jew
.

But how could they see me as anything else—no matter how many times they were forced to call me
sir
, to carry fresh towels and cold drinks to my stateroom?

“Purser Mueller has given his permission,” I added.

They ignored me—Steward Schiendick, Assistant Purser Reich, First Officer Closterman, and the others, whose names I did not know, whose names I hoped I would never know. They pounded their fists on the table and continued to sing. Louder now. Because you sing louder when you have the object of your hatred before you. You sing as if you have only just thought of the words of the song yourself, as if you have only just come to understand their meaning.

I considered going into the engine room without their permission. Walking past the table of drunken Germans and through the door not more than a dozen feet away. But I had lived too long under the Nazis and had forgotten how to act with such independence. I considered also turning around, retracing my steps back down the long hallway smelling of cigarettes and piss and beer. But I needed to get inside that engine room, needed it so badly that even if one or more of those men rose from the table and beat me, it would be less than my own body was doing to me now.

I remained in the doorway and absorbed their hatred, stood silent while the crewmen sang every verse of the
“Horst Wesse,”
verses that boasted of streets filled with brown battalions, of millions gazing upon Hitler’s swastika. When they were finished and sat around the scarred table with beer-bleared eyes, too exhausted by the energy they had put into their singing to rise to their feet and beat me, I said again, “The engine room?”

First Officer Closterman raised his head and regarded me. Then he waved a weary hand at the door behind the table.

I hurried through it.

The familiar sound of machinery—that low and constant rumbling like something alive—surrounded me. I dropped to the floor, getting grease on the trousers of Herr Loesser’s suit, and breathed deep, wanting to coat the inside of my lungs, the inside of my whole body with the comforting smell of motor oil and metal—a smell that could make you believe there was nothing in the world except things that could be fixed if only you could see them inside your head.

But all I could see inside my head was Herr Loesser, trembling behind the wall near the swimming pool. Herr Loesser, who had not succumbed to the dream of the sparkling ship, who had understood that there was something broken inside the
St. Louis
. I think because he had something broken inside himself, something that had been broken by the same people.

I pushed myself upright and sat back against one wall. My hands were twitching in my lap, the creases of the fingers stained black from the grease of machinery—the result of so many years of fixing things—a black that never washed out, that made me look, I sometimes thought, guilty of something.

I needed something to fix, and I wondered if it might not be Herr Loesser. If not fix him, maybe keep him from breaking down, the way I had kept the ancient printing presses of the Communist newspaper from breaking down. For I was worried what would happen to his daughter—who was so like what I’d imagined Rebecca had been before the knowledge about her heart broke some part of her—if the thing inside her father, the thing that had set him to davening behind the pool wall, continued to misfunction.

I thought, too, that if I could keep Herr Loesser from breaking down, even if it was only for the single week we had left aboard the ship, it would mean that the story I had invented for Rebecca—the story of the French journalists, of Rebecca going to Paris—would be real. That is how strong the dream world of the
St. Louis
was for me. A world in which Germans called me
sir
and brought me drinks. A world in which we used different money and spent our days playing shuffleboard and dancing waltzes. A world in which I could believe that keeping one man from breaking down would keep Rebecca alive.

•   •   •

The next morning,
I went to the Loessers’ stateroom and asked Herr Loesser to walk with me on A deck.

Herr Loesser cowered behind his half-open door.

“No, no, no. There are Gestapo on this ship.”

I did not want to tell him something I was not certain of myself, so I said, “I have dealt with them before. I promise you will be safe in my company.”

Herr Loesser looked me up and down, then asked me to wait. He closed the door. When he opened it, he was wearing a heavy overcoat and had a fedora pulled low on his forehead.

“The morning is warm,” I told him.

Herr Loesser merely shook his head and pushed past me.

We walked the polished wood of the deck, Herr Loesser flinching each time a seagull came cawing too close to his head. When I asked how he had come to be on a Gestapo arrest list, he told me he had been a lawyer in Berlin until the Nazis made it illegal for Jews to practice law.

“After that, I prepared briefs for German lawyers.”

“For money?”

He nodded.

“You should have done it for favors.”

“My family couldn’t eat favors.”

I was about to tell him otherwise, then realized the explanation would not matter now.

It was one of Herr Loesser’s German clients who had told him the Gestapo had learned what he was doing and were on their way to arrest him.

“I had already bought our tickets for the
St. Louis
,” he said, “so I only had to stay out of their hands for a month.”

“A month is a long time.”

“You cannot know. I left my family and slept in the streets, sometimes in worse places. I knew the smell Aaron Rosner brought with him into Shed 76.”

Herr Loesser told me about the Germans willing to hide Jews for a price, and equally willing to give them up when the Gestapo came offering more. “One night I woke to the voice of the woman hiding me counting marks. When she got to a number higher than the amount I had paid her, I went for the window. Do you know these Germans nail their windows shut so that the Jews they’re hiding can’t escape? Fortunately some of them are not smart enough to hide the hammer.”

I coaxed Herr Loesser into telling me every detail of the month he had spent in hiding. And the next day, I did the same. It was, in my mind, like grinding down the rough edges of a gear to make it turn more smoothly, and I believed that if Herr Loesser—Max, as I came to call him—repeated these stories enough times, they, too, would lose the rough edges that were catching inside him.

•   •   •

But it seemed
that the
St. Louis
was against me, for after we had been at sea for ten days, the ship killed one of us.

The dead was Morris Weitz, a man in his seventies. He had died in his bed and his wife claimed that what had truly killed her husband was having to leave their home in Germany. Still, the old professor had walked onto the
St. Louis
in what had seemed good health, and now ten days later, he was dead.

Max Loesser claimed it was the Gestapo. During our morning walk on A deck, he ranted about the Gestapo’s secret tactics, talked of poisoning, predicted he would be next, and it seemed all the wearing down I had hoped to accomplish had only sharpened the rough edges inside him.

Captain Schroeder wished to keep the news of Morris Weitz’s death as quiet as possible. But as we were still four days from Cuba, and with no refrigeration facilities to keep a body that long, he was forced to order a sea burial. He arranged it for eleven o’clock that evening, when few passengers would be wandering the deck.

It was a strange thing, a funeral on the deck of a pleasure boat. Morris Weitz had been stitched into a piece of sailcloth weighted with iron bars, then laid on a plank a few feet from the swimming pool. Those of us who had heard came with the sleeves and collars of our shirts torn in grief, though none of us had shirts to spare.

A rabbi was found from the passenger list. He stood beside the sailcloth-covered body of Morris Weitz and spoke the service in Hebrew. He had shortened the committal service by half, for Captain Schroeder did not want to keep the ship stopped for very long.

“May he come to his place in peace,” the rabbi intoned.

Without a moment’s breath, Purser Mueller tilted the plank and Morris Weitz slid into the sea with an insignificant splash.

“Remember God, that we are of dust.”

At these words, we went in a line to a children’s sandbox—the only dirt on the ship—and scooped up handfuls of sand to throw over the bobbing shroud of Morris Weitz.

Only then we heard the footsteps, running toward us through the darkness of the deck.

Max Loesser, dressed in his overcoat and fedora.

I had tried to keep the timing of Morris Weitz’s funeral from Max, but I think maybe his obsession with death made him more attuned to it. He rushed toward the children’s sandbox, pushing aside those still waiting to fill their hands, and grabbed up big handfuls of sand himself, leaving a trail of it on the polished deck as he staggered to the railing.

“Herr Loesser,” Captain Schroeder said. But even the imposing captain made no impression on Max Loesser.

“Max.” I tried to put my hands on his shoulders.

But no one could stop Max Loesser. He leaned far out over the railing and with a terrible sound that was like choking, hurled his sand into the wind, which blew it all back onto us. And while we were wiping the sand out of our eyes, Max Loesser shouted, “This is for all of us! For soon we will all end up like Morris Weitz, dead and in shrouds.”

I heard in his voice how close to breaking he was. How little I had done to fix him. I wrapped my arms around Max Loesser and dragged him away from the ship’s railing.

“Come, Max,” I said. “Frau Weitz does not need to hear any more.”

•   •   •

It seemed that the death
of Morris Weitz—as well as Max Loesser’s outburst over his sailcloth-covered body—unleashed something in the ship, set it free to prey on us. For that night, one of the
St. Louis
crewmen, a kitchen hand named Leonid Berg, leapt to his death in the exact spot where we had committed Professor Weitz to the sea.

Captain Schroeder tried to keep the news of Leonid Berg’s suicide from us. But this was not the type of news he could keep quiet on a ship of nine hundred Jews. Most of us had been awakened in the early hours when the
St. Louis
turned around to search the black water for the kitchen hand’s body. We had been awakened again when the ship resumed course, after the sea refused to yield it up.

All of us had lived too long under the Nazis not to question the notice Purser Mueller tacked onto the message board on B deck describing crewman Berg’s frequent attacks of depression.

“Someone discovered he was a Jew,” Herr Schiller said. And most of us agreed. What we were divided on was whether Steward Schiendick had thrown him into the water or merely hounded him into doing it himself.