A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  As for Max Loesser, the death of Leonid Berg was wearing on the fragile machinery inside him. When the news came to me of Berg’s leap into the sea, I had run to the Loessers’ stateroom and found Max cowering behind the bed.

  “Last night, when the ship turned,” Frau Loesser said, “he declared it was because the Gestapo had discovered he was on board. He was certain Captain Schroeder had turned it to take him back to Germany.”

  Ruth Loesser was standing at the room’s porthole, looking as if she wished she might jump out of it.

  I knelt beside Max and told him about the kitchen hand in a gentle voice.

  “He was a Jew and they threw him into the sea,” Max said.

  “That is the speculation.”

  “And who will be next?”

  I shrugged. “There are nine hundred of us, and we are scheduled to arrive in Havana in three days. Your odds of staying dry are good.”

  • • •

  After Weitz, after Berg, every one of us was desperate to get off the St. Louis. No member of the crew could appear without being asked when he thought we would arrive in Havana Harbor and did he believe there was the chance we would get there early. Barring the hottest hours of the day, there was always a line of us standing at the railings, scanning the horizon, as if we could make Cuba appear only by wishing for it.

  The day the purser announced he would be handing out our landing cards, I joined the crowd that filled the narrow hallway outside his office, pushing and shoving each other no matter how many times he reminded us there were enough landing cards for all nine hundred. Because I was not the only one who had convinced himself that having a landing card might somehow protect him from the evil that lived beneath the St. Louis’s polished wooden decks.

  • • •

  On the last full night before the St. Louis was to dock in Havana—Thursday, May 25—a fancy-dress costume ball was held for the entire ship in the enormous Social Hall of the St. Louis. This, Doktor Spiegel explained to me, was the custom aboard pleasure boats.

  “Have you not brought a costume?” he said to me.

  I shook my head, marveling at the notion of a Jew who would think to pack a fancy-dress costume while he was fleeing the Nazis.

  “Then you shall have to improvise something.”

  After dinner, when everyone was getting ready for the ball, I returned to my stateroom and opened the suitcase I had not touched since accepting the loan of Max Loesser’s suit. Raising its cardboard lid released the scent of the flat in the Kruezberg into my gleaming stateroom—the bitter smoke from the tiled stove, the air of mothballs and lanolin from the blanket Rebecca wrapped around her shoulders, her cinnamon-flavored tea. Rebecca always smelled of that blanket and that tea, and under them both, of the chemicals she used to develop her film. I grew to hate the smell of those chemicals, because she made me use up favors on them, turning the small water closet in our flat into a darkroom.

  Rebecca does not smell like these things anymore, I told myself, even as I put my face deep into the case. She smells of French cigarettes and strong coffee, and whatever scent the wind carries when it blows across the Seine. It is possible I believed this as surely as Max Loesser believed the St. Louis was filled with agents of the Gestapo sent to hunt him down.

  I put on the oldest of my woolen trousers and the most frayed of my white shirts. As I entered the Social Hall, Herr Bergmann, who was dressed as a pirate with a patch over his eye, asked me what I was supposed to be.

  “A Communist,” I told him.

  Silver streamers cascaded from the ceiling and hundreds—maybe thousands—of balloons floated above our heads. The black and white squares of the marble floor were so highly polished, the floor itself appeared like a great expanse of ice. All the many tables and chairs had been pushed against the walls to make room for dancing, and the ship’s orchestra was perched high above us on a platform. As I entered, they were playing American swing music.

  It seemed all nine hundred of us were here—everyone in fancy-dress costume. Pirates and Roman gladiators and Japanese geishas circled beneath the silvery streamers. Some, who had been forced to improvise, had turned their bed linens into Arabic-style clothing from British Palestine, or converted the fronds from the palm trees on A deck into Hawaiian hula skirts. Babette Spiegel was wearing a sea green evening gown with a pair of black riding boots. None of us could say who or what she was supposed to be, but it did not matter. Babette Spiegel only needed to be Babette Spiegel.

  The mood should have been festive, but there was a desperate quality to the party, a foreboding that floated amidst the balloons and streamers. Everyone appeared in a frenzy to spend his shipboard money, as if we believed the sooner it was out of our pockets, the sooner we would be free of the St. Louis. And the only thing to spend it on now was drink—champagne and rum and schnapps and whiskey.

  As the evening wore on, the pirates and Roman gladiators, the Japanese geishas and Palestinian Arabs became more and more intoxicated. No one could walk without stumbling, without having to hang onto someone else for support. The ship’s orchestra switched from American swing to Cuban rumbas and tangos, and the dancing on the treacherous marble floor grew more abandoned.

  I attempted to get just as drunk as everyone else. But the more whiskey I drank, the more sober I felt. Finally I gave up, sat on one of the chairs pushed against the wall, and watched my fellow passengers fling themselves around the dance floor as if they didn’t care whether they broke every bone in their bodies.

  I began to think the St. Louis had put us all under a new spell. That it had convinced us to dress like someone we were not—like something we were not—and then forced us to drink until we were drunk. So drunk we could no longer think, no longer remember who we were. And soon, very soon, we would look down at ourselves in our pirate and gladiator and Palestinian Arab costumes and run to the upper deck, to the spot where the crewmen had dropped Morris Weitz’s body into the sea, and we would hurl ourselves into the ocean, just as Leonid Berg had done.

  Then, as if he had been the one putting these thoughts into my head, I spotted Max Loesser on the platform with the orchestra. He was not wearing a fancy-dress costume. He had come as himself, as Max Loesser in his overcoat and fedora, and he was waving his arms at the musicians to silence them.

  As the music ceased, the drunken revelers on the dance floor gazed up. We were all suddenly sobered, I think, by the fear of what Max Loesser—dressed as himself—might say or do from that platform high above the marble floor.

  Max came close to the edge of the platform.

  I left the chair at the edge of the dance floor, calculating how difficult it would be to catch a falling man.

  “I have just seen the Bahamas,” Max Loesser shouted down to us.

  The crowd below gasped as loudly as if he had jumped.

  “A small light,” he continued, “from a lighthouse, probably. You can see it from the upper deck.”

  We went—all of us in our fancy-dress costumes—to the upper deck and stood at the railing, looking into the darkness at a small light shining from a country where there weren’t any Nazis. And for the first time since Leonid Berg jumped into the ocean, the first time since we had stepped foot on the St. Louis, the first time in years, we believed we were saved.

  • • •

  Two days later—at 4 AM on Saturday, May 27—the St. Louis arrived in the waters outside Havana Harbor. The clanging of the ship’s klaxon woke me, and I threw Max Loesser’s suit on over my pajamas and went to the upper deck to stand peering out in the darkness with the others. We were still some way out from the harbor, but close enough to see the headlights of the cars moving along the shoreline and the silhouettes of the domed buildings behind them.

  After breakfast a small launch sputtered out to the ship carrying a man with a well-waxed mustache. Not long afterward, Steward Schiendick’s voice
came through the ship’s loudspeakers, directing us to assemble in the Social Hall for an examination meant to ensure the Cuban government that none of us were “idiot, insane, or suffering from some loathsome or contagious disease.”

  I brought Max to the Social Hall myself, arriving late, so we would be at the back of the line. My hope was that the Cuban doctor with the well-waxed mustache would be so eager to get off the St. Louis by the time he got to us, he would not notice the existence of anything breaking down inside Max Loesser. But from what I could tell, the Cuban doctor did not seem interested in whether any of us were idiots or insane or suffering from any type of disease. When it was our turn to be examined, he barely raised his heavy-lidded eyes from our paperwork to look at us.

  An hour or so later, another launch came, this one filled with Cuban policemen and men wearing elaborate uniforms we were told were immigration officials. These men relieved us of our landing cards, though none of us wanted to give them up.

  “They must be stamped,” Purser Mueller explained to everyone.

  “Stamped for Buchenwald? Stamped for Dachau?” Max Loesser murmured.

  “Stamped for Havana,” I whispered, pulling the landing card from his grasp.

  Hours later, the launch returned and we were given back our landing cards. I opened mine and saw that it had indeed been stamped with the word Habana. But when the launch left, the immigration officials in the elaborate uniforms went with it, and the Cuban policemen remained on board.

  The sun moved overhead and it grew hot. We were dressed in our traveling clothes, standing on the open deck with our packed suitcases. Everything had been prepared for landing, the swimming pool drained, the wooden chaises folded and stored. And yet the St. Louis remained anchored outside the harbor.

  To raise our spirits, Captain Schroeder assembled the ship’s orchestra and asked them to play a song. The orchestra chose “Freut euch des Lebens”—“Be Happy You’re Alive.” I do not think it lifted anyone’s spirits.

  After some time, smaller boats motored out to us, mostly fishing skiffs. These were loaded with bananas and grapefruits, and people willing to sell them to us if we threw down a few pesos. A bit later, other boats came carrying the relations of some of the nine hundred stranded on the St. Louis—Jews who had emigrated to Cuba in the earlier years. When they shouted up the question of why we had not docked, none of us could answer it.

  At dinner, Max Loesser insisted the reason was because Captain Schroeder was hiding him.

  “It has nothing to do with you,” I told him, “and everything to do with the corruptibility of the Cuban government.” For these were the rumors being whispered within earshot of the Cuban police standing guard on the ship. “Governor Brú only wants a bigger bribe for accepting nine hundred Jews the Germans didn’t want.”

  “That is what they are telling you. But the moment the Gestapo comes on board and offers Captain Schroeder more money than I have given him, I will hear Steward Schiendick counting.”

  I placed my hand on Max Loesser’s shoulder to comfort him, and felt his insanity vibrating like a combustible engine beneath my fingers. I willed it quiet, for it seemed the engine that was driving Rebecca’s doom.

  “We will be off this ship tomorrow,” I assured him.

  But Sunday came and we stood again in the hot sun with our suitcases. Now the Cuban policemen stood with us, making certain, I think, that none of us jumped into the sea and swam for a shoreline that had begun to look not so far away.

  “They are not letting us land because it is their Sabbath,” somebody said. “They do nothing on their Sabbath.” But all of us could see other ships sailing past us to the dock.

  Max Loesser remained below in his stateroom, waiting for Captain Schroeder to hand him over to the Gestapo. I went to see him in the afternoon, sitting with him on his sour sheets—the crew had been given leave to go ashore and there were no more services being performed. I repeated for him the theory about the Christian Sabbath, but he believed it as readily as if he had watched the other ships sailing by with his own eyes.

  On Monday the complaints began. Why are we being held here? Why have we not docked yet? This complaining prompted First Officer Closterman, the round-shouldered man who had taken me down to the engine room, to insist that Captain Schroeder order Steward Schiendick—and five crewmen of Schiendick’s choosing—to search our staterooms for weapons and explosives. As First Officer Closterman explained it, we were making the crew nervous for their safety, because “you never know how many of these Jews are Communists and anarchists.”

  The crewmen of Steward Schiendick’s choosing were the men I had seen singing the “Horst Wessel” with beer foam on their lips outside the engine room. They burst into random staterooms, opening trunks and suitcases without permission. They ransacked Aaron Rosner’s room, all the while threatening to send him back to Dachau. “I cannot understand how they even knew that about me,” he told me later. Before they left, they smashed a framed photograph of his family. “Why would they do something like that? Did they think I had hidden explosives behind a picture of my wife and children?”

  Steward Schiendick and his friends went into the stateroom of Morris Weitz’s widow, whom we had not seen for days. When she appeared later on the scorching deck, looking pale and disheveled, we believed we were seeing a ghost.

  “They blew out Morris’s candles,” she said in a shaking voice. “Called them a fire hazard.” Tears were running down her wrinkled cheeks. “How could they be a fire hazard when I never left the stateroom? When I always watched them and never slept?”

  While the searching continued, I sat in the Loessers’ stateroom with Max—I had sent his family, including Ruth, to the deck, so they would not have to watch him cowering. We sat on the bed and waited for Steward Schiendick and the other men to burst through the door, but they never came. Maybe they understood that the anticipation of their coming would be harder on Max.

  When I returned to my own stateroom, my suitcase had been unpacked and my clothes tossed about the room. I suspected that Steward Schiendick had understood, too, that draping my worn trousers and frayed shirts on these gleaming surfaces would shame me more than any beatings would. As I put my clothes back into the suitcase that smelled of the flat in the Kruezberg, I was grateful that since the night I’d come upon the men singing the “Horst Wessel,” I’d returned Rebecca’s photograph to my sock.

  At sunset, several Cuban police boats sailed out to us and spent the night circling the St. Louis, shining their searchlights into our portholes while we tried to sleep, finally banishing any illusion that we were passengers on a pleasure ship.

  Tuesday came and brought no change, except that it was hotter. By midday, it was nearly impossible to stand in the sun at the railings on the upper deck. My shirt was stuck to my skin as if with glue, and my tongue was dry and thick in my mouth. Still I forced myself to remain. If I stand at this railing until two o’clock, I told myself, we will get off this ship tomorrow. If I do not wipe this drop of sweat from my eye, the thing inside Max Loesser will not break down before he sets foot in Cuba. If I do not drink water, Rebecca is safe in Paris.

  I had decided the Germans had brought us to Hell. That all the fine linen and the glasses of champagne and the calling us sir and madam had only been to trick us, to keep us from suspecting. Because if we had suspected, we would have escaped the way Morris Weitz had escaped, the way Leonid Berg had escaped. Because that was the only way you could escape this particular Hell.

  It was just after three o’clock and the domed buildings of Havana were shimmering in the heat, or maybe I was only dizzy, when a door slammed hard at the end of the deck. I turned. Coming toward me in the blinding sunlight was Max Loesser. He was running, and his arms were covered in bloody sleeves.

  “They cannot get me now!” Max shouted.

  As he ran, the sleeves turned to liquid, as if melting in t
he heat, leaving a trail on the hot deck behind him. But as quickly as they sloughed off, new sleeves appeared, thick and red and running to his elbows.

  I shook my head, trying to clear it of this delusion caused by heat and despair. But as I did, Max Loesser rushed past me, moving the air in a way a delusion never could, spattering blood across the bottom of my trousers.

  “Murderers!” he shouted. “Try to get me now!”

  Max threw himself onto the railings, staining them red. He paused there a moment, waving his red-coated arms as if he was signaling to someone, then in one motion he tumbled into the sea.

  The water foamed where he landed. And then the blood came up—thick and red—floating on the surface of the water. Max’s head floated up next, a dull black island in the center of all that blood.

  My ears filled with the wailing of the ship’s siren, or maybe it was me making the sound. Because as I looked down on Max Loesser’s black head bobbing in an ocean of his own blood, I knew that despite all I had tried to fix him, the thing inside Max Loesser was well and truly broken. I had failed him in the same way I had failed Rebecca. And while the sun beat down on my head, I built a new—and more terrible—story of her future, one filled with pictures of Rebecca drowning in a vat of water before breakfast, hung from a rope before a line of horrified Jews before the evening count.