A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  “Yet.”

  “All the more reason to go now.”

  It was true that the Christmas Market had always been more about drinking cups of hot spiced glüwein and eating handfuls of roasted almonds and baked cinnamon stars than celebrating the birth of the Christian Messiah. In Oranienburg, everyone except the most orthodox of Jews went to Christmas Market. I remembered as a child, seeing the men who prayed loudest in temple devouring slabs of pork knuckle at Christmas Market, rivulets of grease sliding into their beards like the River Nile. And tucked always away in the sellers’ booths, among the hand-carved shepherds and baby Jesuses in their mangers, would be a few painted dreidels.

  Still, if we Jews were not allowed on the underground during certain hours, or permitted to sit on a bench in the Tiergarten that was not painted yellow, how could we think we would be welcome at a market to celebrate the birth of the Christian Savior? On the other hand, I could not imagine that either the Nazis or I could keep Rebecca away from Christmas Market if she wished to go.

  The day we went was cold, cold enough for me to blame it for the blue of Rebecca’s lips. But still Rebecca made us leave the tram early, so that we could walk the last part over the Spree and watch the walls of the market rise up like a medieval castle.

  “I see that the Nazis have gone and annexed Christmas,” she said. And it was true, for pasted onto the turrets of the crenellated walls of the market, alternating with the smiling faces of St. Nicolas, were black swastikas.

  The Nazis had annexed the inside of the market as well. Every stand selling hot wine and cinnamon stars, painted toys and roasted meats, had a No Jews Allowed sign fixed to the front of it.

  “There is no point to us being here,” I said.

  “Because they say so?”

  I turned to Rebecca, standing in the cold with the beret that was too big for her head, the only other Jew besides myself in the Christmas Market. If I left, I knew I would never see her again.

  “What then?” I asked her.

  Rebecca walked toward a stand where a stout woman with white-blond hair was waiting, half-hidden behind her No Jews Allowed sign. A sign that someone—perhaps she, herself—had written in letters that were thick and dark and pressed deep into the cardboard. As Rebecca and I came closer, the woman puffed herself up, preparing, I was sure, to shout us away. But Rebecca smiled at her, the kind of smile you reserve for someone you expect to do your bidding.

  Rebecca pointed to the pot of glüwein steaming on an amateurishly embroidered cloth and asked in perfect French, “Qu’est-ce que c’est?”

  The woman sputtered, unsure of how to answer.

  Rebecca let her smile falter the smallest amount. “Non parlez-vous pas francais?” In her tone was amazement that any civilized person would be incapable of speaking French.

  The stout woman shook her head. Rebecca sighed in a manner that even to me sounded very French. Then she said in careful German—as if the woman might not have a complete grasp of her own language—“We would like two glasses of this drink, please.”

  The stout woman filled two glasses with steaming glüwein. Rebecca counted out her money as if it was unfamiliar to her.

  “Merci,” said the stout woman, beaming.

  “Je vous en prie,” Rebecca replied, nodding her head only the slightest amount.

  We disappeared into the crowded Christmas Market with our glüwein.

  “The pleasure of deceiving her is tainted a bit by letting her have any of my money,” Rebecca said. “And by reinforcing her notion that Jews couldn’t possibly speak French.”

  “Do you think you could overlook your scruples with that man selling cinnamon stars?”

  “Only because I am about to become your concubine and will have to get used to doing your bidding.”

  “As pleasant as that sounds, why?”

  “I have to give up my job at the end of the year.”

  “Is that what Dr. Lieberman says?”

  “It is what Hitler says.” She said this as if Hitler was one of her least promising students, as if no matter how long she worked with him, he would never master the future tense. “As of January, Jews will no longer be allowed to teach Germans.”

  “What will you do?”

  Rebecca put her hand in my pocket. She never remembered to wear gloves and her hands were always so cold I would believe she had slipped something else in there—a stone, a turnip, a lump of ice.

  “First I will get you your cinnamon star. Then I will advertise for private students who do not mind learning French from a Jew.”

  Rebecca pulled me by my pocket toward the man selling cinnamon stars.

  “What does it matter? All this teaching of French has only been to keep me in practice for when I go to Paris.”

  Going to Paris was the only lie Rebecca ever told herself. Though I do not think it began as a lie, I think it began as a dream. A dream that had made her go to university and study French. This, when she lived in Frankfurt and had parents and knew nothing about her heart. Now she lived in Berlin and had turned herself into an orphan, and knew enough about her heart to have killed off every dream except this one. The best she could with this one was turn it into a lie. A lie that needed to be fed from time to time.

  She would begin, “When I go to Paris,” and then she would tell me what she would do there, who she would see—most often the Jewish photographer Gisèle Freund, who had escaped from Berlin three years ago with her negatives strapped to her body. Always I would listen, even if she talked for an hour. Because the lie of going to Paris was the one thing Rebecca allowed herself that wasn’t a brutal truth. It seemed so little to help her feed the lie.

  • • •

  That winter, Rebecca advertised for private students. But no private students were willing to learn French from a Jew, and Rebecca had no one with whom to speak French except herself.

  And that turned the lie ravenous.

  On a frigid night near the end of January, I came home from the shop and found Rebecca wrapped in blankets on the sofa. The heat in the building was unpredictable and she’d forgotten to light the fire in the tiled stove, which we used for a backup. It was nearly as cold inside as out, yet her face was flushed and feverish-looking.

  “When I go to Paris,” she said as I stepped through the door. Not, Hello. Not, Why are you late? Because I was late. Because five minutes before closing time, an officer of the Gestapo had come into the shop with a broken gramophone, and you do not tell an officer of the Gestapo that it is five minutes before closing time and would you mind very much coming back tomorrow. Not if the name on the door of your shop has a Semitic ring to it. No, you bow your head as if you are grateful for the business, and you accept the gramophone, and you stay as long as it takes to fix it, and then you arrive home late.

  “The first place I go will be the Sorbonne,” Rebecca was saying as I built the fire. “And I will sit there until Gisèle Freund agrees to see me.”

  “Is there food?” I asked her. “Have you thought about supper?”

  “I will explain that I, too, have escaped Hitler, and that even though she does not know me, she does. Then I will show her my photographs.”

  “Stay here. I will go and see if the butcher on Fraenkelufer is still open.”

  The butcher’s shop was shuttered, and I had to resort to making a watery soup from what I could find at the bottom of our vegetable box. I do not believe Rebecca noticed. She barely stopped talking long enough to put the spoon in her mouth, hardly ceased speaking long enough to swallow.

  She told me about the photographs Gisèle Freund had taken for Life magazine, pictures she had heard of in rumor, because the Nazis would never have allowed Life magazine into Germany. “She has put photographs of the poorest of England’s working class in the middle of a story on the British aristocracy,” she told me, soup spilling down her chin.
“She will understand my woman with the shriveled leg leaning against Josef Wackerle’s concrete thigh.”

  While I tried to get her to eat the sorry soup, she explained how Gisèle Freund would take her to meet all of her bohemian friends—Jean-Paul Sartre, who Rebecca claimed was never cheerful, and Colette, who she believed always was. She told me this in such detail that I saw it all inside my head, the way I saw how mechanical objects worked, and I began to believe in it myself. Only when her voice became hoarse and started to crack did I remember that this was her lie.

  I took the empty spoon out of her hand. “It’s late,” I said. “You can tell me the rest tomorrow.”

  Rebecca did. She told me about Paris the next day, and the day following. Until I realized that she never went out, never left the flat, only moved from the bed to the sofa, where she waited for me to come home from the shop so she could begin talking.

  “When I go to Paris, I will live in the Latin Quarter on the Rue Saint-Jacques, and I will have an apartment where all the windows face west and south, and none of them face east, so I will never have to look toward Germany.”

  “Rebecca, have you eaten today?”

  “I will invite over all the people I have met there, all the people Gisèle Freund has introduced me to. James Joyce and Jean Cocteau. Marcel Duchamp and Virginia Woolf.”

  “Let’s go around to the cafe that serves the sheep stew you like.”

  “In Paris, I will eat coq au vin, and cassoulet, and steak frites, and I will eat them in any cafe I wish. Because no one on the Boulevard Saint-Germain or Rue de Rivoli or the Champs-Élysée will care that I am a Jew or an existentialist or a Hindu or a lesbian.”

  “Are you planning on becoming a lesbian in Paris?” I smiled.

  “I might. In Paris, I might become something different every day. A lesbian on Monday, a Negress on Tuesday, a devout Catholic on Wednesday. In Paris, I shall become whatever I want and there won’t be a single Nazi to tell me that I can’t because a quota for it has already been filled.”

  “And what about me?”

  “You?” She wrapped a thin arm around my neck. “You, my darling, will come and fix the typewriters and cameras and bicycles of all my famous bohemian friends. Because, of course, they are artists and incapable of fixing anything for themselves. And they will adore you and call you indispensable, which, of course, you will be.”

  Listening to Rebecca talk was like falling into an opium dream. It was much easier to stay with her inside the lie of Paris than to go outside into the reality of Berlin. But I saw how the lie was feeding off her. How purpled the skin beneath her eyes had turned—a color I could not blame on the early sunsets of February. And at night, after the nervous energy of feeding the lie had finally exhausted her, I would reach under the sweaters she wore to bed and count her ribs with my fingers, a task that got easier each time I tried it.

  • • •

  During the first week of March, I knocked on the door of our downstairs neighbor, Frau Nowak. Frau Nowak was a brown-haired, buxom woman with a tired face who disapproved of Rebecca and me. Not because we were Jewish, but because we were not married. However, Frau Nowak had a twelve-year-old daughter who had impressed me as quick-witted and also, I suspected, many things in her flat that needed fixing, as Herr Nowak had taken off two years ago with Frau Nowak’s younger sister.

  As Frau Nowak would not let me past her doorstep, I offered her my bargain while standing in the street. I would come once a week and fix whatever was broken in her flat if she would send her daughter upstairs to Rebecca for French lessons.

  Frau Nowak looked suspicious, but free labor and free French lessons proved more potent than her sense of morality.

  “Under no circumstances can the Fräulein upstairs know of our exchange,” I told her.

  “I understand.” Frau Nowak nodded. Although I cannot imagine what she believed she understood.

  I must have been correct about Frau Nowak’s twelve-year-old daughter, because Rebecca complained about her much less than she had about her gymnasium students, the bulk of whom she believed would be fortunate if they could convince anyone in France to bring them so much as a croissant. Although she did wonder where Frau Nowak had found the money to pay for French lessons.

  “Perhaps Herr Nowak has had an attack of conscience.”

  “I very much doubt it.”

  “Then perhaps there is something to the rumor about Frau Nowak taking up with an officer of the Gestapo.”

  On the two days a week Frau Nowak’s daughter came for her lessons, Rebecca did not talk to me of Paris. And on those days, she generally remembered about the fire and about eating.

  During that time, I also scoured Berlin’s pawnshops in the Kreuzberg until I found one that would sell me a shortwave radio.

  “You can have that one cheap,” the man behind the counter told me. “It does not work.”

  “I should have it free then.”

  “I have to make something.”

  I took the radio back to my shop and worked on it all afternoon. When it was fixed, I brought it home to Rebecca.

  She was waiting for me on the sofa, wrapped up in blankets. “When I go to Paris,” she began.

  I ignored her, placing the radio on the table where there was nothing set out for our supper and turned it on. Static poured out, drowning Rebecca’s voice. Then, because I’d tried it out in the shop and knew where to look for it, I turned the dial and the sound of French—no, the sound of France—filled our flat.

  Rebecca stopped talking. She rose from the sofa and with the blankets still wrapped around her, walked to the radio. She was staring at it like it wasn’t a box filled with tubes and transmitters and amplifiers. She was looking at it as if it was something magical, something that could take the lie and not turn it back into a dream—nothing could do that—but turn it less deadly maybe.

  “What are they talking about?” I asked her.

  “Soap powder.”

  I looked at her—pale and too thin—standing before the shortwave with the blankets wrapped around her fragile shoulders.

  “It is an advertisement. And I can see it perfectly—a French woman hanging her husband’s shirts on the line with the curved dome of Sacré-Coeur at the edge of her window. The husband’s shirts, they’re very white.” She laughed. The sound of it was so rare and lovely, I had to turn away.

  Two weeks later when a chest cold kept Frau Nowak’s daughter from her lesson and bad weather prevented the radio from pulling France into our flat, Rebecca greeted me once more with, “When I go to Paris.”

  “But what about me?” I interrupted.

  She looked up at me from her pile of blankets on the sofa.

  “I cannot spend all my time fixing typewriters and cameras. What if I want to ask Jean-Paul Sartre for directions to the bibliotheque? Suppose I would like to talk to Colette about the train service to Marseilles? I cannot stand around Paris like a mute.”

  And so Rebecca began to teach me French. At first I was not as quick as her twelve-year-old student. But after a month, I was good enough for the two of us to occasionally go out and flaunt the No Jews Allowed sign in a cafe or butcher shop. While we were often chased away—even in French—it did not bother me as much as it should have. I had only to notice how the shadows beneath Rebecca’s eyes had lightened to lavender, and think how long it had been since she had last begun a sentence with, “When I go to Paris.”

  • • •

  In November of that year the Eternal Jew exhibit opened in Munich. This was the type of news I would have gone to lengths to avoid, but Rebecca would not let me. She dragged me to a kiosk on Unter den Linden to buy a copy of Jüdische Rundschau, the Jewish newspaper. Jüdische Rundschau, Rebecca claimed, was the only newspaper in Berlin that could be trusted, because the Ministry for Enlightenment and Propaganda did not interfere with it.
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br />   “How can that be?” I asked her.

  “Because the only public opinion Herr Goebbels cares about is German public opinion.”

  We took our newspaper to the small cafe near the Universität to read over coffee. But since we had last been there, they had put up a No Jews Allowed sign.

  “It is not too cold,” I said. “We can go sit in the Tiergarten.”

  Rebecca looked up into the blue sky, as if checking the weather. It was a clear autumn day, the kind where one can see for miles.

  “Hitler is probably happy for the weather. Clear enough for everybody in Germany to look toward Munich and see exactly what he thinks of the Jews.”

  I took her arm and led her toward the Tiergarten. At times I wondered if Rebecca was testing which would kill her first, her heart or the Gestapo.

  We sat on one of the yellow benches reserved for Jews, and Rebecca—who insisted on reading all injustices in newspapers out loud to me—read from Jüdische Rundschau.

  “Julius Streicher,” she said, “a member of the Nazi Party, opened the exposition by declaring that Jews are children of the Devil.”

  According to the paper, three thousand German people had attended the opening day of the exhibit. They had wandered through its twenty rooms, reading posters with titles like How Bolshevism Is the Jewish Desire to Rule the World and Usury and the Fencing of Goods Were Always Their Privilege, then marveling at the displays of Jewish Facial Features—the hooked noses, thick lips, and enormous ears made of rubber.

  “Herr Streicher told the story of the Eternal or Wandering Jew,” Rebecca read into the clear autumn air, “the Jew who mocked Jesus on his way to the cross and was condemned to wander the earth until Judgment Day. A poor Jew, Streicher said, who would have considered it a favor to be put out of his misery.”

  She dropped the paper into her lap; her face was paler than usual.

  “This is how they will begin to exterminate us.”