A Master Plan for Rescue (31 page)

T
he day I saw Rose LoPinto again, she was standing on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, and at first I believed I was imagining her.

Ten years had passed since she’d walked away from me, her pale coat shining in the darkness, and yet I recognized her in an instant. Felt the familiarity of her hands moving against the unobstructed sky on this tallest building in Manhattan.

She was surrounded by a group of men in dark suits, speaking to them in that secret language. Her dress was filmy and apricot-colored, and much too light for the weather—it was the kind of spring day that begins fine, but by noon is threatening rain—and her black hair was as wild as it had ever been. But the metal headband that had held the RadioEar receiver was gone, and there was no microphone box pinned to the neck of her filmy dress. When I moved closer, I saw beneath a curl of dark hair, a flesh-colored disk tucked inside her ear and a thin wire hugging the side of her smooth neck.

Of course
, I thought,
it is the Atomic Age, filled with the wonders of science. There is no longer the need for speaking into girls’ throats.

I followed Rose across the Observation Deck as she led her dark-suited men on a silent tour of the city’s skyline, naming for them the silver spires outlined against the darkening sky. If I had known that secret language, I could have given the men the tour myself. For I had spent nearly every lunch hour for the past four years on this windswept deck. Though I had spent little of that time gazing at the view. Instead, I’d been scanning the faces of the people who came here to point out landmarks, the people who stood holding their hats on their heads against the breeze.

When Rose took her dark-suited men to wait for the elevator, I went to stand before her.

“Rose,” I said.

She looked at me with the same depthless dark eyes.

“Jack.”

We were both twenty-two years old, and for a second, I wondered at the fact that she’d recognized me. But then, how unrecognizable can a person become who wears the kind of glasses I do?

Rose escorted her men down to the street and put them into a taxi, then she came back, and while we stood at the top of the tallest building in Manhattan, she told me the story of why she’d disappeared.

She said that at the same moment we were standing on that beach at Coney Island, the same moment the first boat of refugees scraped ashore, halfway around the world, her father was walking into a U.S. Army base in Agadir, Morocco, with an expertly amputated left hand and no memory of how it had gotten that way or where he’d been the past two months.

Neither Rose nor her mother had had any idea her father had been missing. The army had sent a telegram, but her mother, who had never learned to read English, had stuffed it in the kitchen drawer where she was keeping all the correspondence until her husband’s return.

The telegram saying Rose’s father had been found arrived the morning after the refugees landed. She answered the door and learned that her father was missing and found in the same instant.

Once she’d figured out what had happened, after she’d gone through the piles of letters and unpaid bills in her mother’s kitchen drawer, she knew that what she’d done on that beach was responsible for her father’s miraculous return from the dead.

“It was an even exchange. One deaf refugee for my father.”

And the sign of this was the missing hand. A symbol of the secret language of the deaf.

I believe everything that happened between Rose and me that afternoon can be put down to one fact: I was the one who placed her on that beach.

The next telegram was from her father. The army was sending him home. He instructed Rose and her mother to close up his butcher shop in Yonkers, pack his knives, and meet him at the family farm in Newburgh, where they’d stay until he could teach himself to cut meat one-handed.

“The army would have paid for a prosthetic hand,” she said, “but my father wanted a hook, said it would be better for holding onto meat.”

As Rose told me this story, her slippery consonants slid into my ears, stirring up the cold stream that ran beneath the surface of my skin. The stream that hadn’t run in ten years.

When she finished, I told her I had something to show her. We took the elevator down and got into a taxi. I suppose we just walked away from our jobs. Rose was the City Hall interpreter for the deaf, the city’s official speaker of that secret language. I worked as a sound engineer for a radio station that broadcast from that tallest building. We didn’t think about our jobs for one second.

The taxi driver took us through Central Park, where the air was filled with unsettling blooming. Once going around a curve, our hands touched and I felt an electric shock that was like lightning from the storm that kept threatening but never came.

When we arrived at Dyckman Street, I took Rose to the roof. Together, we stood in front of the coop and watched the pigeons fluttering behind the chicken wire, filling the newly warm air with feathers.

“They were Jakob’s,” I told her. Though I supposed they weren’t Jakob’s anymore, and also I’d replaced a few.

The pigeons flapped their wings in time with the wind moving the skirt of Rose’s light dress.

“I wish I’d met him,” she said.

Rose picked up the Garcia y Vega cigar box on the shelf beside the pigeons’ coop and shook it. There was the sound of the metal capsules rolling back and forth.

I took the box out of her hands. “Just some old things in there.”

I did not tell her about the afternoon when I was fifteen or so, when I nearly exhausted a pigeon to death trying to make it carry a message to Germany. A message that said

YD ATNNI

IM SORRY.

The clouds above our heads stacked up on each other, and the storm seemed closer. I brought Rose down to my apartment.

•   •   •

I had little experience
bringing women home, and did not know what I would do with Rose once she had stepped through my door. But before we’d moved out of the hallway, she turned, swirling the skirt of her apricot-colored dress around my legs, and pressed her lips against mine in a dizzying kiss.

Even I knew better than to take Rose into my childhood bedroom, into the room where I still slept—mostly out of habit, partly because I believed it might be a kind of luck, a talisman for finding those twenty-three.

I took her instead into my mother’s old room.

My mother had been gone four years. She left a week after I graduated from high school, the day after I took the job at the radio station. Came out of her bedroom dressed in one of her brown-colored outfits, carrying a small suitcase I didn’t know she owned.

“I’m moving to the convent in Poughkeepsie,” she said, then stood behind me and rested one arm across my chest. An arm that was so weightless, it rose with no effort on my breath. “You, though,” she told me. “You have your whole life.”

Rose and I fell into my mother’s bed like it was ours.

I had been with other women. Though not, I would guess, as many as Jakob, who had learned which Wassertorstrasse windows were worth whistling up at. And not, I suppose, as many as most twenty-two-year-old men living in New York City in 1952—something I blamed on my glasses, rather than my habit of staring so nakedly at the faces of strangers.

Rose was twenty-two as well. And not long after her too-light dress floated to the floor of my bedroom, I knew I wasn’t her first. Anything beyond that was a mystery. Most things about Rose were a mystery to me—perhaps because of that secret language she could speak with her hands.

Still, as a hard rain from the storm that had been threatening all day battered the windows, Rose deciphered the code of her body—and mine—touching me everywhere at once with those hands that could speak a hundred secret languages worth learning.

Only when it was over, only when I was lying next to the full length of her skin, which smelled to me impossibly of chocolate and coconut, only then did I turn my head and put my mouth close to the flesh-colored disk tucked inside her ear and ask for the names she’d heard called out in the dark.

Rose pushed herself to her elbows, her black hair its own spring storm around her head.

“You have been looking for them?”

I pulled her from the bed and wrapped her in a blanket, led her down the hallway into the kitchen. Showed her the table, covered in newspapers.

Rose smoothed the pages of one of the open papers, running her fingers over the names I’d circled.

“‘Betrothals and Marriages’?”

“We are of that age,” I said.

She looked hard into my face, wound the blanket tighter around herself.

“What will you do if you find one?”

I tried to explain. About Jakob. And Uncle Glenn. And about the story that never grew any lighter, despite so many years of telling it to myself. As I spoke, the storm outside flung hail against the window, as if trying to shatter it, yet Rose never took her eyes from me.

“For ten years, I have been looking,” I told her. “Calling strangers on the telephone. Searching the faces of people on the street. But I have never found any of them. Not even one.”

Rose put her hand on my face. Her fingers were warm.

“I have,” she told me.

RIVKA

Not long after he realized I was deaf, my father invented a secret language for the two of us, a series of gestures that my mother and older brother, Jan, did not share. This was when we still lived in Warsaw, before we moved to Paris so that I could enroll in the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets—the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes. Later, when I asked my father why he invented an entire language for only two people, he’d tell me he believed I was like him and that he wanted to know what I was thinking. And it was true that even after we both learned to sign, it seemed we could tell each other more in the language he’d invented.

To help me get along in the world, my father also taught me to read gestures. Every day from the time I was small, he took me out into the city and showed me how to interpret the raising of an eyebrow, the shrug of a shoulder. He taught me what it meant when someone shifted back and forth on his feet, when he dipped his head when telling you something. My father made me understand how much is revealed by the body.

The day the Nazis took him, my father used the secret language he’d invented for the two of us to give me the same instructions he gave to my mother. He knew I was more likely to follow them.

The Nazis did not come themselves—my father was not important enough, only another Jew—but sent two French policemen instead. They arrived on a soft spring morning, pounding on our door so hard, even I heard it. I was eleven years old and not entirely deaf. A year earlier when the Germans arrived in Paris, I’d heard the rumbling of their tanks as they rolled into the Place de la Concorde. I could hear any sound that came with a strong vibration. They say that is why, years later, the surgeons were able to repair my hearing.

We were living in the Jewish quarter, on the Rue des Rosiers in a two-story house with lace curtains at every window. The French policemen stood inside my parents’ bedroom, the backs of their uniforms pressed up against the expensive striped wallpaper, and watched my father pack a small suitcase with clothing they probably knew he would never wear. I sat on a small stool at the side of the bed, dressed for school in my skirt and blouse, refusing to leave the house, refusing to leave my father, although my sixteen-year-old brother, always more obedient, had already gone.

As my father folded shirts, I signed to him in our secret language. “Where are they taking you? When will you be back?”

My father was talking to my mother, who kept eyeing the policemen leaning against her wallpaper. By the shape of his mouth, I knew he was speaking in Polish. Each time he set down a shirt, his hands shaped the same words for me. “Go,” he was telling her. “Take the children and leave Paris. Leave France if you can.”

But my mother had been born into money and believed that every problem—even Nazis—could be solved by it. She hurried from the bedroom, and when she returned with a thick stack of bills, I knew what she’d been doing. She’d taken her sewing scissors with the handle shaped to look like a crane and snipped open the silk lining of her spring coat, pulled the bills from the stack she’d hidden there the day the Nazis marched into Paris.

My mother stood close to one of the French policemen, the taller of the two, a man with a thick mustache. My mother—still beautiful after two children, her dark wavy hair falling down her back—standing so close to the policeman you could barely slip one of the bills in her hand between them. She showed the policeman the money, then ran her fingers along the curve of her throat. My father kept his gaze down, fixed on the shirts in his suitcase, but it seemed to me that his shoulders were shaking.

The policeman looked at the money and at my mother. Then he looked at me, sitting not as out of his sight as I’d imagined. He shook his head. My mother pressed closer to him, but he shook his head again. My mother backed away, the stack of bills still in her hand.

I don’t know if it was that the French policeman was so very honest as that it was early in the war, when the policemen were still afraid of the Nazis.

After my father had finished packing his useless suitcase, the policemen led him out into the spring morning. I followed, hiding in the doorways of the still-shuttered shops. It was early, the sun streaming between the buildings of the Marais, but the streets of the Jewish quarter were filled with French policemen escorting men with suitcases, all of them heading in the direction of the Gare d’Austerlitz.

When you learn to see the world through gestures, you learn to see things as they are. And all of Paris knew—even if they pretended they didn’t know it—that the trains for Jews at the Gare d’Austerlitz were the trains that went to the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.

I pressed myself into the doorway of a shuttered
patisserie
and watched my father walk away. He was wearing his best suit. My father had put on his best suit to be taken by Nazis. His suitcase, tan calfskin, bumped lightly against the side of his leg, and he was leaning a little to the left. My father always walked that way, leaned to the left. As I stood in the doorway of that shuttered
patisserie
on that soft spring morning, I realized it was because I was usually walking on that side.

It was a long street and I wanted to stay in the doorway and watch until my father turned the corner—my father, the only other person on the earth who knew the language of my thoughts—but my face felt wet and I was afraid I was making sounds, and that alone would have been enough for one of the French policemen to scoop me up and take me to the Gare d’Austerlitz with the others.

I pushed myself out of the doorway and ran home.

Over the next year, I begged my mother to take us south, out of occupied France.

“Your father will be heartbroken,” she’d sign, “if he returns and finds no one.”

“He will be heartbroken,” I’d sign back, “if we die.”

Each week, my mother pulled more money from inside the silk lining of her spring coat—money that could have bought our way out of Paris, out of France—and gave it to yet another German officer who promised to look into my father’s case.

“You have no case once you are in Pithiviers or Beaune-la-Rolande,” I told her. Because I had seen the way people turned away from the Jews who were loaded onto the trains that were headed there, as if they were already dead, only animated corpses.

“You must have faith,” my mother told me.

I could see, too, how my mother’s faith was feeding off her. She was no longer beautiful, but gaunt and hollow-eyed. I suspected she didn’t eat, turning too much of our money over to German officers, saving only what was needed to feed my brother and me. I began to fear that her desire to believe my father was alive would kill her.

I appealed to my brother, but Jan was not interested in leaving Paris unless we could take the Bechstein.

The Bechstein was an upright grand piano that had belonged to our mother’s grandfather. It was a beautiful thing, a polished piece of carved mahogany, and my brother loved it like a woman. No, he loved it more than any man has ever loved a woman. For unless he was sleeping or eating, his long-fingered hands were on that instrument.

I might have been deaf, but I understood music from watching my fair-haired brother practice. Although
practice
is the wrong word for what Jan did. Even
play
is not the right word. What my brother did was purposely drown himself in music.

I never watched his hands. I had enough of watching hands at the Institute. I watched how the music took over his body. My brother was tall and made like an athlete. But he wasn’t athletic, he was only musical, and when he played his muscles stretched and tightened as if he was running a race. And though I lived in a silent world, I knew the rush of music from the sway and surge of my brother’s body on the piano bench.

With the help of my brother, I found a mover—also Jewish, also moving south.

But my mother said she would not hear of her family heirloom being put on a horse cart and taken into the countryside.

When the Nazis ordered all Jews to wear a yellow Star of David, I tried again to persuade my mother to take us out of occupied France.

“It would break my father’s heart if he saw us wearing such a thing,” I told her. “That is, if his heart is still beating.”

My mother slapped my face, then handed me the crane-handled sewing scissors and a pile of yellow stars.

I sewed one yellow star onto a blue sweater, which I wore over all my other clothes, because I could not bear that terrible thing lying too close to my skin.

A month later, my mother disappeared.

Jan and I had spent the night at the home of Monsieur Blancherie, one of my former teachers at the Institute. Monsieur Blancherie had a son and a daughter who were the same ages as my brother and myself, and a lenient attitude toward Jews. Monsieur Blancherie’s children were hearing, but because of their father’s profession, they both knew how to sign.

When Jan and I returned to the Rue des Rosiers the following morning, we found our house empty.

“Perhaps she has gone to buy something for our lunch,” Jan said.

“There is still the food she bought yesterday.”

“Then perhaps she has gone again to bribe someone.”

“The blanket from her bed is gone. And two pairs of her shoes are missing.”

I ran back to Monsieur Blancherie’s house to see if he had heard anything, if there were rumors of Jews being taken.

My former teacher stood in his doorway and assured me he had heard nothing. Surely my mother was out on an errand, to the baker’s, perhaps. Certainly if I went home now, I would find her there.

Monsieur Blancherie’s blunt-fingered hands moved through the air much more abruptly than usual, letting me know he was lying, that the Nazis had come for my mother. His hands did not tell me why he would lie. They did not have to. There was no reason a teacher of sign language should be any less afraid of Nazis than the French police.

I asked Monsieur Blancherie if I might come inside, if I might go up to his daughter’s room for something I’d left behind.

Madeleine Blancherie owned a sweater the same shade of blue as mine. I exchanged mine for hers and ran home, wearing a starless sweater that told the world nothing about myself.

I could not make my brother believe that the Nazis had taken our mother, that they would be back to take us as well. He sat with his fingers on the keys of the Bechstein, ignoring me as I cut the yellow star off his shirt with the crane-handled sewing scissors.

“They will have seen our bedrooms,” I said, setting down the scissors to sign. “Seen our clothes. Nazis do not like loose ends.”

When he turned his head to shut me out, I moved into his line of sight, trying to make him see the truth of what I was telling him.

“Tomorrow,” he signed, lifting his fingers from the keys.

“Tomorrow they will have us.”

He shut his eyes, which in an argument with me was as good as stopping his ears, and continued to play.

I wanted to stay and watch him one last time, but a pair of French policemen could have been climbing the stairs to our apartment that very moment, and I would not have heard them. I found the rucksack my father and I would take on walks in the Bois de Boulogne and filled it with hard cheese and a sausage and some bread. Dropping the starless shirt on the piano bench next to my brother, I left the house.

It was July, and the day was hot and bright. I forced myself to walk, to look as if I was not running away from anyone. I had only reached the Seine when Madeleine Blancherie came hurrying toward me.

“I saw your sweater and knew you had been to my house,” she signed.

I placed my hands on the front of her sweater, not yet sure if I meant to return it or keep it.

Madeleine placed her fingers over mine, left them there for a moment, before she signed.

“I only wanted to tell you that the Germans rounded up more than a thousand Jews this morning. They have them locked inside the velodrome near the Eiffel Tower.”

“Where they hold the bicycle races?”

She nodded. “They are going to deport them to Auschwitz.”

I turned back toward the Rue des Rosiers, sure this new information would convince my brother.

Madeleine took my hand and dropped a gold cross on a chain into it.

“Do you think it will fool anyone?” I asked her.

She studied my face, my hair, wild and black.

“It’s all I have.” She gave me a quick hug, wrapping her arms around her own sweater.

I ran through the hot, bright streets, my hands practicing the arguments I’d make for my brother. But when I turned onto the Rue des Rosiers, Jan was stepping out the front door of our building in the company of a French policeman, possibly the same tall man with the thick mustache my mother had pressed herself against a year ago. My handsome brother was carrying the blanket from his bed—ridiculous in this heat—and a pair of shoes. He stopped outside our door and looked up, squinting into the harsh July sunshine at the window of the sitting room where the Bechstein sat. When he lowered his head, he saw me, standing across the street.