A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  “Somewhere they will not embarrass the Führer,” she replied.

  This was August of 1936, a week before the world would arrive in Berlin for the Olympic Games, and of course the Führer would not wish to be embarrassed.

  As the train approached the station at Unter den Linden, Rebecca stood. “This stop is mine.”

  I got to my feet. “Mine as well,” I said.

  Rebecca smiled, and I am certain she knew that Unter den Linden was not my stop. For a reason I cannot tell you, I am certain she knew I rode the Friedrichstrasse underground all the way to Hallesches Tor.

  We came out of the station into torrential rain. Rebecca is the first and only woman I ever knew who walked straight into rain. Let it fall on her like something natural. The two of us stood together looking across the wide avenue of Unter den Linden at a row of stunted lime trees, the rain soaking Rebecca’s hair like it was trying to turn it blacker, which would have been impossible.

  “I loved those trees.” She said this more to herself than to me. “The old limes.”

  The trees, which had been planted by Friedrich Wilhelm in the sixteenth century, had been chopped under Hitler’s orders, because they blocked his view of the Nazi soldiers marching toward the Brandenburg Gate.

  Rebecca turned her face up into the pouring rain. “Hitler is a swine,” she said.

  I, too, had loved those big old trees. And I also thought that what Hitler had done to them was a terrible thing. But I would never have had the courage to do what Rebecca had just done, stand on one of Berlin’s most well-traveled avenues with that very black hair, and those very dark eyes, and those very Semitic—yet very beautiful—features and call him a swine.

  I tell you that this instant—with the rain falling on us with a force like God Himself was trying to wash us from the face of the earth—was when I fell in love with Rebecca.

  We crossed the street with the water dropping on us to the railing where Rebecca had locked up an ancient bicycle. She bent to unlock it, and as she began to push it over the cobbles, I heard that the chain was not moving over the crank in the right way.

  “Stop,” I said.

  I kneeled at her feet and examined the crank. With the rain pouring over my head, it was like working in a shower. I was so wet I could not tell my clothes from my skin. Still I took my time resetting the chain of her bicycle, stretching it evenly over each individual sprocket until it matched a picture I had inside my head.

  When I finished, I stood and pushed the bicycle back and forth so she could hear how it sounded.

  “I always wondered what was wrong with that chain.”

  “Unevenness.”

  “How did you know?”

  “I can see how things are supposed to work inside my head. And also how to fix them.”

  I did not know which was more unbelievable, that I would stand in the pelting rain and talk to a girl about fixing bicycles, or that she would stand and listen.

  “Can I take you for a coffee?” I asked her.

  “Is that how you make your living, you fix something for somebody and then take them for a coffee?”

  “I have a shop in Hallesches.”

  This made Rebecca laugh.

  It is possible the two of us would have stood in the rain until we drowned before I thought of something further to say.

  “Yes,” Rebecca said when she had stopped laughing, “you can take me for a coffee.”

  We went to a cafe near the Universität where the windows were steamed over from the rain and the marble tables so narrow, our knees touched beneath them.

  “I have a bad heart,” she told me.

  She gave me this information before she gave me her name. “You do not want to fall in love with me.”

  “‘Bad’ as in you will treat me badly?” I said this lightly, thinking she was being careless talking about love with a man she’d just met on the underground.

  “‘Bad’ as in it’s broken, which when you are not talking about love, means that it is not fixable.”

  Rebecca, I would learn, was never careless.

  “The doctors tell me I will die early.”

  “If things in Germany continue as they are,” I said, “I expect most of us will die early.”

  I meant for it to be a dark joke, the only kind of joke we Jews were making then. Although for the short time of the Olympic Games, our jokes—and our lives—seemed maybe less dark. For the Romani were not the only things that had vanished from Berlin’s streets. Hitler had also ordered all the No Jews Allowed signs removed from the shop windows, and we Jews had decided to make ourselves as willing to be deceived as the rest of the world.

  • • •

  The following week, on the day the Games began, I invited Rebecca to meet me.

  “You have remembered what I told you about my heart,” she warned, not realizing it was too late for warnings.

  I told her I did, and said I only wanted to check on how her bicycle was holding up.

  We met in the plaza outside the Dietrich-Eckart-Bühne amphitheater, where the opening ceremonies were being held. Rebecca was taking photographs when I arrived. Shooting the old Berliners who came to the plaza to feed the pigeons that even Hitler couldn’t banish.

  “You do not want to wait by the entrance?” I asked her. “Try for a picture of the athletes as they pass?”

  “I am not interested in Hitler’s idea of perfection.”

  She pointed the lens of her Leica at an old woman standing in front of the massive statues outside the amphitheater. These statues—naked giants sculpted by Josef Wackerle—were a favorite of the Führer.

  “See that woman with the shriveled leg leaning against the concrete thigh of the statue?” Rebecca said. “That they can both exist, and that they are both in this moment next to each other, that is my idea of perfection.”

  She raised the Leica to her eye. “And if for once I can make this camera focus, I will capture it in light and shadow. An image of perfection shot by a Jewish girl with a bad heart.”

  “Let me fix that for you.”

  “I’ve already told you, it’s unfixable.”

  “The focus.”

  She pulled the camera away from her face. “You know about Leicas as well as bicycles?”

  “I know about anything mechanical.”

  Rebecca shoved the camera into my hand, which maybe does prove she had no patience. Or maybe that she knew even with a shriveled leg, the old woman was not going to stand in front of Josef Wackerle’s concrete thigh forever.

  I twisted off the range finder at the front of Rebecca’s camera and looked inside, and closed my eyes to see better the way it worked without anything distracting me, like Rebecca’s very black hair. When I had a clear picture of how all the mechanisms fit together, I opened them again.

  “Do you have a safety pin?” I asked Rebecca.

  She turned over the hem of her skirt. Most of it was held up with safety pins.

  “I hate sewing,” she said.

  She gave me a pin, and I felt around the inside of the camera with it until I found the small spring that had come loose. I reset it, spun the range finder back on, and handed the Leica back to her.

  “Tomorrow I will bring you a new spring.”

  But I was speaking to her narrow back, Rebecca being already gone, shooting the picture of the woman with the shriveled leg. I think Rebecca fell in love with me the instant I fixed the focus on her camera. I think this because she said nothing about her bad heart when I spoke about meeting again the next day.

  And because in the time we were together, she printed that photograph a hundred times, in a hundred ways. More grainy, then more blurred. With more shadows, then with more light. Small, so its world became condensed. Large, so that it became abstracted. After she moved in with me, I found versions of that pho
tograph all over the flat, tucked into the corners of mirrors and windows, taped onto the backs of cabinet doors, sliding around in the bottom of drawers.

  “Why so many?” I asked her.

  “It is my definition of perfection.”

  “But all over the apartment?”

  “Maybe I need reminding.”

  When she left me, it would be the only thing of hers I would find. One version, perfectly sharp, exactly the size to fit between the pages of a passport.

  • • •

  It was Rebecca’s tooth that pushed her into my flat. A molar that developed an abscess because she could not find a dentist to treat her. Every Jewish dentist had left Berlin—had left Germany—once the rumors started that the Nazis would forbid Jews from practicing dentistry, even on other Jews.

  “Cannot you find a German dentist who will see Jews?” I said to Rebecca when she turned up at the cafe near the Universität with the left side of her face swollen like a child with mumps.

  It was autumn by then, the Olympic Games had ended and both the visitors and the No Jews Allowed signs had returned to their usual places. Oddly, the Romani remained vanished, and no one knew where they had gone.

  “Just thinking about asking the question makes my tooth ache more.”

  What Rebecca did not tell me was that a tooth infection can travel to the heart. If she had, I would have forced her out of that small cafe and taken her to every dentist in Berlin—every dentist in Germany—until one agreed to treat her. Instead, she told me she was bathing the tooth in salt water and peroxide, and so it was a full week before I wound up banging on the door of the room she rented in the Alexanderplatz, rousing the prostitutes and drug addicts who liked to sleep late, but not waking Rebecca.

  Unlike her neighbors, Rebecca was not a prostitute or a drug addict, but a teacher of French in a gymnasium. When I pointed out that she could afford to live in a better section of Berlin, she explained that then she would be spending her money on rent instead of film.

  “Also here,” she said, “almost nobody complains that I am a Jew.”

  If it had been someone other than Rebecca I had been waiting for in the Tiergarten that afternoon, I might have believed she’d forgotten we had arranged to meet so she could photograph the October light on the dead leaves and then explain to me why this golden sunlight shining on a dry and brittle leaf is the most perfect thing in the world. But it was Rebecca, so I broke down her door. Because Rebecca never kept a spare key hidden anywhere, and though I had known her for three months by then, she would not give me a key, “because then you will begin to think of me as someone you should get used to.”

  I found her feverish in bed. Twisted up in sweaty sheets, surrounded by rolls of exposed film, like she had been trying to develop them with the heat of her body. She was wearing a damp slip and a beret made out of wool felt that I never had the heart to tell her was too big for her head. Although she did not seem to know who I was, she also did not seem at all surprised to see me standing there with splinters from her shattered door on the shoulders of my coat.

  She could, however, recall the name and address of the doctor who treated her for her bad heart. I wrapped her in a blanket and took her there in a taxi.

  It was Dr. Lieberman who explained to me how easily an infection can travel from an abscessed tooth to a heart.

  “That tooth must be pulled,” he said.

  “Can you do it?”

  “I am a heart specialist.”

  “Have you tried to find a dentist who will treat Jews in Berlin?”

  After Dr. Lieberman pulled Rebecca’s tooth, I asked him to tell me what was wrong with her heart.

  He ran a hand over his hairless head. “The simple explanation, which I suppose is as good as the complicated one since they amount to the same thing, is that no part of it is strong enough to last very long. Over time it will begin to work less efficiently. Then it will give out.”

  “How long?”

  “Are you asking me how much time you will have together?”

  I nodded.

  “You are Jews in Hitler’s Germany. The answer to that has nothing to do with anybody’s heart.”

  Because her door was broken, I brought Rebecca to my flat and put her into my bed. When her fever came down some days later, I suggested she stay.

  “So you do not have to break down any more doors?”

  “That would be one reason.”

  • • •

  Rebecca and I were all the other had. Except for the prostitutes and drug addicts in her building, Rebecca avoided other people. “If you have friends, you have to be willing to accept their sympathy,” she told me. “That is a tiring proposition.”

  Her parents were alive. Still living, as far as she knew, in Frankfurt. She told me they were wealthy Jews with Communist leanings. “You know the type.”

  “No,” I told her. “I have no idea.”

  “My father’s department store makes considerable money, which he donates to Jewish charities. My mother is a surgeon who has a way of not performing the abortions the Nazis want, and then performing the ones they don’t.”

  “I do not know what you mean by that either.”

  Rebecca explained that her mother refused to force abortions on women the Nazis determined had a chance of passing on a hereditary illness. And that she was willing to perform them on the healthy Aryan women who wanted them.

  I told her they sounded like good people.

  “It would be better if they were less good.”

  Rebecca had turned herself into an orphan. “It is best if the last memory they have of me is of a nineteen-year-old girl who is not much paler than she should be getting onto a train they believe is bound for Stuttgart.”

  I was a true orphan. My mother died the day after my sixth birthday, as if she had been holding out, waiting for me to reach an age where I would not miss her too much. We lived in Oranienburg then, a not-so-scenic town north of Berlin. It was winter and influenza swept through the town, taking someone from nearly every house. The person it took from our house was my mother.

  This was the same winter my father taught me the trick of fixing things. That happened two months after my mother died. I was playing with an electric train set, making the cars go around on the tracks beneath our Christmas tree, which had been dropping needles for weeks. My father had tried taking the tree out—it was so dry, he could no longer risk turning on the lights, no matter how much I begged him—but the moment he put his hands on its trunk, I’d throw myself against it and push my face into the brittle needles, sending the glass balls my mother had hung with her own hands smashing to the floor.

  “You must let me take the tree,” my father said. “It is long dead.”

  But I would hold onto the rough trunk, unable to explain that as long as the tree stood dropping needles in the parlor, I could believe my mother was only out on an errand.

  On the day two months after my mother died, the coal car that belonged to the electric train set stopped moving, and I went to the bedroom looking for my father. It was afternoon and the sun had already set in that northern city, but my father hadn’t gotten up to turn on the light. He was sitting in the wooden chair placed beside the bed where my mother had died two months earlier, looking into the empty air as if he could still see her.

  “Fix this, Papa.” I dropped the coal car into his lap.

  My father looked into his lap for a moment, then he picked up the coal car and handed it to me. “See if you can fix it, Jakob.”

  My father had not gone into his repair shop since my mother died, and I decided then that my mother’s dying had taken away his ability to fix things, and that this had happened because they had fallen in love over a broken bicycle.

  “It was a terrible bicycle, and not worth fixing,” my father would always say when he told the story
.

  “Still I loved the thing,” my mother would tell him. “Because it belonged to my aunt Ida, who was an anarchist.”

  “Which explains the condition of the bicycle.”

  I could never figure out the connection between anarchists and terrible bicycles, but even at six, I believed I could understand the connection between my father losing my mother and losing his desire to fix things.

  “Picture what makes the coal car move around the tracks,” my father said to me. “See it inside your head. Then look for what might be stopping it.”

  This was the method I used to find the dried pine needles caught in the wheels of the coal car. And the following day, in the wheels of the engine.

  Two days later, I allowed my father to take the dead Christmas tree out into the yard and burn it.

  My father died thirteen years after my mother. The day I buried him, I turned my back on the shop he left me in Oranienburg and took the train for Berlin, where I had a friend.

  But he’s gone now, too.

  Rebecca and I were happy with only the two of us in Berlin. More than happy. Maybe this is not something I should say to you, it is something you are still too young to understand, but when we came together beneath the blankets of my small bed, I believed Rebecca made us into her version of perfection, that she turned us into the rarest combination of opposites. When we came together there was strength and heat and an overwhelming energy that made me want to cry out, Let every single jack-booted officer of Hitler’s Gestapo come bursting through the door and I will kill each one without rising from this bed, without lifting a finger. I will kill them all merely with the act of love. And also because there was a feeling so vulnerable, I felt I had become Rebecca’s fragile heart, that I’d been taken out of the protection of her chest and left in the open, where all it would have taken was the slightest breath for me to cease beating.

  • • •

  The December after Rebecca moved into my flat, she said she wanted to go to the Christmas Market in the square outside the Berliner Dom, the cathedral near the Spree River.

  “Do you think that is a good idea for Jews?”

  “I have been going to the Christmas Market since I was a child, and as far as I know, the Nazis have not made believing in Jesus Christ a prerequisite for drinking a glass of glüwein.”