A Master Plan for Rescue (32 page)

My brother’s long-fingered musician’s hands were hidden beneath the blanket, out of sight of the policeman. He moved nothing else, only those skillful hands, signing the word for
good-bye
. The moment he was finished, the policeman shoved him in the back and the two of them walked away into the harsh midsummer light.

•   •   •

I walked out of Paris
wearing Madeleine Blancherie’s blue sweater and her gold cross, and for nearly four months, I kept walking. I walked all summer and well into the fall, staying on the smaller roads, keeping to the villages. I ducked into hedges and behind barns whenever my faulty ears sensed the rumbling of trucks, though most of the time it was only a farmer taking wine or cheese or butchered meat from one place to another. And always I walked with my head swiveling because anyone could sneak up on me.

You would think that the worst part of running from the Nazis would be the fear that the Germans, who rode through the parched countryside in open-air vehicles kicking up dust and waving their arms as if they already owned it, would grab me, deliver me to a train station where the local inhabitants would turn away as if I had become one of those animated corpses. But it wasn’t the fear that was the worst part, it was the isolation.

I had been at the Institute long enough to learn to sign, but had only begun to learn to read and write in French. At the first village convent I arrived at, showing the elderly Mother Superior Madeleine Blancherie’s gold cross hanging around my neck, demonstrating to her that I could perform the sign of the cross—a trick Madeleine had taught me one afternoon because we’d nothing better to do—I could not answer the questions that must have been
What happened to your family? Are you traveling alone?
And when the elderly nun put paper and pen before me, I didn’t have the vocabulary to write any kind of satisfactory answer. The sisters there treated me as if I was slow, making their explanations with wide gestures, trusting me with only one direction at a time. Showing me over and over on the map where the next convent was, and looking uncertain as to whether they should allow me to leave at all.

This happened at every convent and chapel where I sheltered. And even when a nun or a priest understood that I was deaf, still it did no good, for none of them knew how to sign.

To have no one you can talk with for such a long time is like being a ghost.

But at least they sheltered me, whether they believed in my Catholicism or not. It was the people in the villages who often looked at me hard when I walked through their streets, stared too long at my black hair, searched my blue sweater for a yellow star they were certain should be there. In a village near Malsherbes, a boy shouted a word into my face I am sure was the French for
Jew
, and when I could offer no more denial than shaking my head, he gave me a beating that left me spitting blood and a molar into the rectory sink.

Even when I reached Marseilles and an aid worker in the camp realized I was deaf, there was still no one there who could sign. No one who could adequately explain why I was woken in the night and slipped into the back of a supply truck, hidden under burlap sacks along with twenty-two others. I didn’t know if this was escape or some trick of the Nazis. And when they marched me into that submarine and dropped me into the ocean, it didn’t feel like rescue, it felt like being buried alive in a metal coffin.

Then like a small miracle, I was on the surface again. Floating across the water toward a single, bright light. When I stepped out of that inflatable boat into the surf, onto the beach, it was like being reborn. And then, after four months of isolation, four months of silence, a girl in a moonlit coat lifted her hands and spoke to me.

W
hen I open the door to Rose the next day, the woman beside her smiles, and the bulb in the hallway glints on a gold tooth in the left side of her mouth.

“I’m supposed to tell my story to the deaf refugee?” I say.

But the woman laughs, throaty and deep, then catches her dark hair with both hands and pulls it back, showing me the hearing aids—flesh-colored disks that are like Rose’s—tucked inside each ear.

“If you do not mumble, I will hear everything.”

She has Rose’s voice—no hard edges—complicated with the formality of something foreign.

“From what my friend has told me, I do not think you will mumble.”

Today it is warm, real spring, and Rose and the deaf refugee are wearing dresses printed all over with flowers. They carry the scent of flowers as well. When they walk in, it’s like spring arriving in my apartment.

I think of the twelve names Albie gave me, how I’ve repeated them over to myself for ten years. And now, here before me is the one refugee whose name was never spoken aloud into the night. The one refugee it would have been the most impossible to find.

I ask Rose how they met, and she tells about the day—four or five years ago now—this dark-haired woman followed her out of the school for the deaf in the Bronx, stood before her signing,
I know you
, over and over.

“I always remembered Rose from the beach,” the deaf refugee says. “Because after four months of silence, four months of isolation, she was the first person to communicate with me.”

She turns toward me. Her eyes are dark, like Rose’s.

“But I remembered you more. I remembered the way you touched us. The flat of your hand on the front of our coats, as if you were feeling for our heartbeats.”

When she says it, my fingers remember it, too—the damp, sandy wool, the resistance of breastbone.

I bring them into my kitchen, where the newspapers have been cleared away. And though I have waited ten years to tell my story, I surprise myself by asking to hear the deaf refugee’s first.

Perhaps it is because I suspect—know, even—that she is the only one of them I will ever meet. The only one of the twenty-three with their lives ahead of them.

When she finishes, the three of us sit and let the room return to silence.

Then I begin. I start with the moment before my eyes went bad. The moment I would return to. The moment I have always been trying to return to. It is further back than I usually begin. But somehow sitting at this table, which was once too red for a kitchen table but has now faded into something more ordinary, I know that this is where the story starts.

My words travel into the flesh-colored disks tucked into the ears of the two dark-haired women across from me, a broadcast designed specifically for them. And for once—for the first time—as I talk, as I say the words, the weight of them rises up and away from me.

When I come to the end, when I have finished describing how the small pieces of Jakob’s final message blew across the roof like so much snow, I ask the deaf refugee if she will do something for me. I ask her if she will let me place my hand on her chest.

She nods, and we both rise from our chairs.

I reach across the table—which I see now has never been very big—and rest the flat of my hand on her breastbone. Beneath my palm I feel the beating of her heart, evidence of what Jakob and I have accomplished.

•   •   •

After Rose leaves to walk
the deaf refugee to the subway—saying she will be back, taking the key I press into her hand to make sure of it—I go to the roof.

It has taken a while to tell my story and the sun is setting, streaking the sky over the East River. The soft cooing of the pigeons—a sound like a roomful of babies, like water over stones—carries to me on the April breeze. It’s the hour I usually feed the birds, and as I walk toward the coop, they fly back and forth behind the chicken wire, the fluttering of their wings stirring something inside my chest.

I can see the spot where my father placed me the day he shot the picture for the code-o-graph, wanting nothing but the wide, blue sky behind me. Wanting me to look as if I could be anywhere.

The Texas plains.

The Canadian wilderness.

The far horizon of Death Valley.

Places I have never gone.

The pigeons dart about inside their coop in anticipation of being fed, send small feathers floating through the chicken wire. But I do not bend to the shelf where I keep their bag of feed. Instead, I put my hand on the hook that holds their door closed and unlatch it. And then I swing it wide.

It takes the birds some seconds to fly out, but when they do, they come soaring through the door in silvery streaks, spiraling upward like a feathered cyclone.

I stand back and watch them. My birds—though I think they are not mine anymore—spinning up into the orange-ing sky.

“Auf wiedersehen,”
I say, as if they are German pigeons. As if I am twelve years old, setting them free on a tenement roof on the Lower East Side.

The birds fly into the sunset, out over the trees in Fort Tryon Park, out over the Palisades. Heading west.

All but one. A lone bird who arcs toward the east, in a bright flashing of silver.

The book you are holding in your hands is a much better one thanks to the tireless efforts of my very smart editor, Sarah McGrath. Huge thanks are also due to my agent, the wonderful and generous Ellen Levine, who makes every writer feel like her most important writer.

I owe a bigger debt than the fancy dinner I bought them to the members of my writing group: Lee Kravetz, Cameron Tuttle, and especially, Kirsten Menger-Anderson, Susanne Pari, and Ethel Rohan. An equally large debt is owed to Nona Caspers, who understood what this story was about well before I did.

Thanks go to Peter Orner and Tom Barbash for helping this book see the light of day. And to Chris Hardy for advice on all things photographic.

I am enormously grateful to the Writers’ Grotto of San Francisco for giving me a home to write this book. Thanks also to the Jackson family for the use of their retreat at Big Sur for the final push.

I owe thanks to each and every one of my students. Their energy and enthusiasm never fails to inspire me.

As always to Ken, for his unwavering support and encouragement. And to my son, Alex, for giving me access to the world of boys, and for being himself.

Most of all, to my father, George Cooke, for taking me to a roof on Dyckman Street and telling me his stories with nothing but the wide blue sky behind us.

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