Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle

by Warsh, Sylvia Maultash

  “I got some mousies for you!” he called out. “Lookit.” He headed toward the entrance in the hedge.

  Rebecca had never seen a man so ugly. His nose was so flat and disfigured, it appeared smashed into his weathered face. His lips caved in where his front teeth were probably missing. Not too much of a stretch to believe he was delivering mice.

  At least the woman wasn’t friendless after all, thought Rebecca.

  Walking to the car, she pulled apart the handles of the plastic bag and peered inside. It looked like blue flannel. A dusty little flannel blanket wrapped around something. She pawed at the bundle until one end came away to reveal a vinyl arm. It was a doll. Okay. Everyone was entitled to their own “precious.” She placed the bag in the trunk of her car, unwilling to throw it out just yet. It didn’t smell. Let it sit there a while.

  Somewhere in the distance, the phone rang. Rebecca startled awake. Where was she? The green bedspread. Her bedroom; the light on. Was it morning or evening? She was sitting up in bed, the newspaper across her lap. She reached for the receiver automatically and mumbled into it.

  “Hi,” said Nesha.

  “Umm.” Her mouth felt gummy.

  “Did I wake you up?”

  “I’m not sure I’m awake. What time is it?”

  “Must be around ten your time. Did you have a long day?”

  It all came back to her. “My long day started last night.”

  Silence on the other end. She better explain. “My sister, Susan, drove in from Montreal.”

  “Isn’t she pregnant?”

  “She was. She went into premature labour and I had to deliver her baby in the house.”

  “Good God! Did her husband help?”

  “She came alone. She was running away from her family. Didn’t want another child. Anyway, the baby’s in an incubator in Mount Sinai. Too early to tell how she’ll do. She’s over three and a half pounds so she’s a good-sized preemie, but all kinds of things can go wrong at this stage.”

  “Since I don’t know what can go wrong, I can be doggedly optimistic. In that spirit of ignorance, I congratulate you.”

  How could he be optimistic after everything he’d been through?

  “How’s your sister?”

  “Very depressed. I feel helpless. It’s so heartbreaking seeing her reject her baby.”

  “You must be exhausted. I’ll let you get back to sleep.”

  “Nesha? I’ve been thinking. Do you like children?” Silence. “I must. I have one of my own.”

  “And Josh is a nice boy.”

  “Man. He’s twenty-two.”

  “It’s just that ... I don’t want to get too old before — before I start thinking about having a child.”

  “You’re young yet. Lots of time.”

  “I’m thirty-three.”

  “Rebecca, I’m forty-eight. I’ve been through all that.” Her heart fell. Without realizing it, this was something she’d been worried about.

  “I am tired,” she said. “Good night.”

  “Rebecca?”

  “Yes?”

  “I’ll see you in a couple of weeks.”

  chapter eight

  April 1934

  Though Frieda must attend lectures every day, forcing herself to go to class becomes more and more difficult. Only two other Jewish students are still attending, young men whose fathers were decorated in the war. The three of them sit in the back row though there are empty seats in front of them. Even so, none of them wants the taint of the other, each sitting separately, with as many seats between them as possible.

  She times her entrance to the last minute, so that most of the students are already seated in the lecture hall. Nevertheless, often one or two Aryan students walk in late before she has seated herself, and as they pass, they entertain themselves by jostling her and sending her flying into the back of a chair.

  She has noticed a decline in the standards of lectures since the qualifications for teachers changed from possessing scientific knowledge to professing Nazi ideology. The basis for their medical studies is no longer rational science, but race and blood. Not blood in the objective sense, not the blood she recognizes under a microscope, but a mystical, magical blood that defies definition.

  During a Racial Science lecture, the professor pulls down a chart of head shapes and expounds on the difference between Aryan and non-Aryan types. While he goes on with his pointer, the students in nearby seats, mostly young men, turn their heads to the back where Frieda and the two other Jews sit. They whisper to each other, staring at her breasts, snickering under their breaths in a way that sickens her. Contempt isn’t enough. They’ve added lasciviousness, a coarse appraisal more appropriate for a streetwalker.

  Somehow she must carry on. She must walk with her head high despite the daily degradation. She only has this year left, then she can write her exams. If they let her. Is she fooling herself into this preposterous hope?

  She must also steel herself to work in the hospital every day. At rounds and in clinic groups, the attending physicians ask her no questions and she offers no answers. She struggles daily against the urge to miss rounds so that Ilse Remke and people like her cannot use her absence as ammunition: See, Jewish doctors are lazy, unreliable. Herr Doktor Hans Brenner still stares at her when they pass in the hall. She cannot interpret his gaze, blank as a curtain.

  When she is in Emergency one day, Herr Doktor Nolling, the attending, assigns her to clean up a patient’s vomit. She has become adept at positioning bedpans and cleaning incontinent patients with diarrhea. Next, she must examine a man complaining of hemorrhoids. She enters the curtain to find a stocky, grey-haired man waiting on a cot. She checks his chart.

  One look at her and the man’s face goes rigid. He yells at the top of his lungs, “I want a man doctor!”

  “Now, now, Herr Braun, I’m Fräulein Eisenbaum and I’m going to examine you ...”

  “And I don’t want a Jew touching me!”

  An impatient nurse yanks open the curtain, scowls at Frieda, and, with a brusque jerk of the head, dismisses her from the cubicle. Frieda’s face goes hot as she creeps away and down the hall under the stares of the other nurses and students.

  Late that afternoon on the way home, Frieda takes a detour. She crosses a small park she has often passed through, only this time she stops and stares at a bench. It was green the other day, but now it has been painted yellow. On the back, printed in large black letters: “Only for Jews.” Her heart begins to race and she wonders if she’s dreaming. Could such a bizarre thing happen in real life? Will she ever wake up? Her legs ache with exhaustion and she wants to sit down, but she is embarrassed to sit on such a bench. She continues on her way in a fog.

  She touches the blue plaque attached to the door that signifies a Krankenbehandler, a caretaker of the sick. The plaque has replaced the sign of the doctor. She has been coming here since she was a little girl, a simpler time when doctors were called doctors and shown respect, no matter their religion.

  She tries the door that used to be kept unlocked. No longer. She isn’t surprised. There’s no telling who might jump into your apartment these days.

  Herr Doktor Kochmann answers the door himself. His head and face are still round, despite the weight loss. “How nice to see you, liebling. How are you? Any better?” He bends over to kiss her cheek, the grizzled hair of his trim beard grazing her skin.

  She shakes her head, surprised when a tear begins to dance in her eye.

  “Come. Sit.”

  He lumbers to one of the leather chairs in his office, and she can see he’s not holding up so well himself. He was always a portly man, yet now, despite losing some of his paunch, he moves more slowly. The national health insurance will no longer pay for treatment by Jewish doctors, which means most of their patients have left them. She supposes all the portly doctors will be losing their bellies. They have less money for food, more time to reflect on their plight.

  “I need some more,” she says, ey
es downcast. “I can’t sleep.” She looks up at his drawn face with apology.

  He sighs, smiles sadly at her. “I understand.” Suddenly she sees herself sixteen years old again, the day he came to the store to persuade Vati to let her stay in school. What was it all for?

  She pulls some bills from the pocket of her skirt and hands them to him.

  “How are things at the hospital?” he asks, avoiding her eyes.

  “All right,” she lies. “Everything’s fine. I just can’t sleep.”

  “Why don’t you leave Germany?” he says, reading between the lines. “You’re young. Leave while you can.”

  She blinks at him. Everyone with their advice. How can she go against Vati?

  “I’m surprised your father isn’t trying to get your sister out. Isn’t he afraid for her? She’s fortunate the family takes care of her at home. If it ever comes to her going into an asylum ... you must’ve heard of the sterilization program for people like her?”

  She is startled by the allegation against Vati. Vati wouldn’t put them at risk.

  “What about you?” she says.

  He shakes his grey head. “We’re too old, Helga and I. Not enough money to start over somewhere else. Too tired.”

  He gets up and plods to a cabinet in the corner. She stands up when he returns with the little tube of pink liquid. “Tell your Vati that it’s time to go.”

  “Oh no,” she says, smiling faintly. “Everything’s all right. It’s just that I can’t sleep.”

  She slips the tube of phenobarbital into her pocket and kisses him goodbye. Maybe she can make it last for two weeks. She’s having trouble getting up in the morning. Not just because she can’t sleep. She used to get by on little sleep. But she has lost her way, her sense of purpose. What’s the point of going to the hospital when every moment she’s there she expects someone to come up to her and spit the cursed word in her face. “Jew! Get out! It’s your turn now.”

  October 1934

  Working where she is not wanted has taken its toll on Frieda. The hospital has become an alien place where she must try to learn what she can, despite the hostility and scorn of the staff. She is there on sufferance, the only Jewish student left who has the stomach to face day after day of derision. The other two Jews have stopped coming. She has heard that one immigrated to Brazil and the other is teaching biology in a Jewish school. The daily strain has given her constant headaches and melted pounds from her body.

  Early one morning a patient is admitted to her floor after an emergency appendectomy. Summoned by a surly nurse, Frieda heads toward the room, noting the back of a Nazi officer at the nursing station down the hall.

  An elderly woman in the bed is stirring awake, her mouth open, her yellow-white hair tangled against the pillow. Her chart says, “Maria Brenner.” She is babbling sounds that don’t quite form words.

  “You’re all right, Frau Brenner,” Frieda says, coming to the side of the bed and patting the woman’s arm. “We took your appendix out. You’ll be fine now, dear.”

  “Don’t bother,” says a voice behind her.

  Frieda turns to find the Nazi officer standing in the doorway. Hans Brenner. Herr Doktor Hans Brenner.

  “She doesn’t understand. She hasn’t for a long time.” He steps toward the woman, at the same time removing his uniform cap. His brown hair has been cut short, military style, revealing a well-shaped head. He takes the patient’s hand with no discernible emotion on his face. “My mother suffers from dementia, Fräulein Eisenbaum.” He looks into Frieda’s face pointedly. “But she is not to be reported. You understand?”

  Her eyes are level with a scar around his mouth. She nods. The elderly feeble-minded, the demented who have had the bad fortune to land in an institution, are given “mercy” injections. Who knows how many have been dispatched that way already. Yes, she understands. He’s a Nazi, but when it comes to his mother, he makes an exception.

  “No, little Mutti, the student doctor will not report you.” He pats the unresponsive hand. Turning his brown eyes on Frieda, he says, “It’s the least you can do.”

  She doesn’t dare ask why. He’s a Nazi doctor and she’s a lowly Jew. There doesn’t need to be a why.

  He turns back to the old woman in the bed, smoothing down the white hair. “Did you notice you’re the only Jewish student left in the hospital?”

  Frieda is uncomfortable with this discussion. It’s the only time Hans Brenner has spoken to her.

  “Why do you think that is?”

  So there is a why. She feels strangely absent. Separate from her body, as if she is looking down on herself from the ceiling. “My father’s war record.”

  “Your father’s war record,” he says with quiet irritation. “No. It’s because I asked for you.”

  Frieda’s mouth falls opens. She is astonished. “I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t understand it myself. But my dear mother always said when you want something, you must go after it.”

  She takes a sudden breath. The empty creature she has become cannot speak, only tries to hang on to her real self floating by a filament near the ceiling. Her real self looks down and sees that he is a handsome man, tall and wide-shouldered, with a strong nose and sculpted mouth.

  “One could say you were in my debt.” He turns away from his mother to observe Frieda more closely, his eyes travelling over her hair, her mouth, her breasts. “You’re a shining light, Fräulein. Too bad you’re Jewish.”

  January 1935

  The government has decreed that only Jewish doctors may set exams for Jewish medical students. Thus, in January, Frieda must find twelve Jewish physicians, one for each of her subjects. Former professors who used to teach at the medical school are easily persuaded away from their depressing clinics, where the level of anxiety among Jewish patients is unprecedented. Each of the professors makes up an exam for her in their area of expertise, some eagerly, some with bittersweet nostalgia for the days when setting exams was routine.

  By March she has passed all her written and oral exams. The professors send her test results and their endorsements of her achievements to the administration office of the medical school. Then she waits.

  But when the list of graduates comes out in April, her name is not on it. She must gather her courage to go to the registrar’s office. She has not been to the university since the previous fall.

  She stands before the secretary, a middle-aged woman, her thin, mousy hair pulled back behind each ear with pins.

  “Yes?”

  “I’ve come to get my certificate,” Frieda says. She has resigned herself to her name being left off the graduating list, but she needs the certificate if she is to practise medicine.

  “Name?”

  “Frederika Eisenbaum.”

  The woman’s neutral business face goes blank. She has stood up in preparation to go to some file and look, but now stops. “There is no certificate for you.”

  Frieda realizes the woman has recognized the name as Jewish. Her anger rises almost beyond control, but she must control it. “All the documents have been sent in. I passed all the exams.”

  “We received no documents.”

  “You haven’t even looked.”

  “I know all the names. Yours isn’t there.” The woman’s chest puffs out as if she is defending her home.

  “I want to speak to the registrar.”

  The woman glares at her, then turns and disappears down a hallway. Frieda’s heart thumps. All those years, all the training in the hospital, the dreams.

  After a few minutes, the woman returns with a man in tow. To Frieda’s shock, he is wearing a Nazi uniform. What else did she expect?

  “I understand there’s a problem,” he says.

  Behind him the woman holds her head high, one side of her mouth curled up in a smirk.

  Frieda lifts her chin. She will not be intimidated. “I’ve come for my certificate. All the proper documents have been sent in. I passed all the required exams.�
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  “Fräulein Hebmann cannot find your papers.”

  “All the documents were sent in. They have to be there.”

  “And yet they are not.”

  His eyes are a blank wall. They reflect nothing, not even her own wavering image.

  She stumbles out of the building and squints into the April sun. Are these the same ancient stone-faced buildings she used to pass, day in, day out? Their facades wobble in the morning air as if the heat from the sun is colliding with her dream of what they used to be. She once loved the university more than any place on earth. The students still cross the square carrying rucksacks filled with books and discussing the latest theories with their classmates. But she has lost her place among them. She is a ghost they cannot see, don’t want to see, refuse to see. She is disappearing, even to herself. She must stop herself from dissolving into the ground like snow in April.

  She wanders across the square, only vaguely aware of the people she bumps into.

  “Watch out!” someone says, from somewhere outside of her dream.

  “What’s the matter with her?” Another disembodied voice.

  The sun reflects off the stone and fills her eyes with splinters of light. But when she closes them, she sees a man in a Nazi uniform with no hat. His brown hair is shorn, military style. She knows what she must do.

  She enters the first building she comes to and finds a public phone. She dials the operator, asks for an address and phone number. Then she inserts a coin and dials.

  “Surgery.”

  “Could you tell me what time Herr Doktor Brenner is finished seeing patients today?”

  “Two o’clock. Would you like an appointment?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  She wanders the streets for two hours, down Unter den Linden, past the Reichstag and the Brandenburg Gate, that symbol of childish joy when Vati carried her on his shoulders. Gone forever. Her eyes water from the bracing wind, and without a thought she walks into a café, ignoring the sign in the window, “No Jews Allowed.” She sits there sipping coffee for another hour. In the washroom she combs her hair and applies lipstick, dabbing a bit on her cheeks for colour. Then she heads for his office, not far from the university.