I might have been deaf, but I understood music from watching my fair-haired brother practice. Although practice is the wrong word for what Jan did. Even play is not the right word. What my brother did was purposely drown himself in music.
I never watched his hands. I had enough of watching hands at the Institute. I watched how the music took over his body. My brother was tall and made like an athlete. But he wasn’t athletic, he was only musical, and when he played his muscles stretched and tightened as if he was running a race. And though I lived in a silent world, I knew the rush of music from the sway and surge of my brother’s body on the piano bench.
With the help of my brother, I found a mover—also Jewish, also moving south.
But my mother said she would not hear of her family heirloom being put on a horse cart and taken into the countryside.
When the Nazis ordered all Jews to wear a yellow Star of David, I tried again to persuade my mother to take us out of occupied France.
“It would break my father’s heart if he saw us wearing such a thing,” I told her. “That is, if his heart is still beating.”
My mother slapped my face, then handed me the crane-handled sewing scissors and a pile of yellow stars.
I sewed one yellow star onto a blue sweater, which I wore over all my other clothes, because I could not bear that terrible thing lying too close to my skin.
A month later, my mother disappeared.
Jan and I had spent the night at the home of Monsieur Blancherie, one of my former teachers at the Institute. Monsieur Blancherie had a son and a daughter who were the same ages as my brother and myself, and a lenient attitude toward Jews. Monsieur Blancherie’s children were hearing, but because of their father’s profession, they both knew how to sign.
When Jan and I returned to the Rue des Rosiers the following morning, we found our house empty.
“Perhaps she has gone to buy something for our lunch,” Jan said.
“There is still the food she bought yesterday.”
“Then perhaps she has gone again to bribe someone.”
“The blanket from her bed is gone. And two pairs of her shoes are missing.”
I ran back to Monsieur Blancherie’s house to see if he had heard anything, if there were rumors of Jews being taken.
My former teacher stood in his doorway and assured me he had heard nothing. Surely my mother was out on an errand, to the baker’s, perhaps. Certainly if I went home now, I would find her there.
Monsieur Blancherie’s blunt-fingered hands moved through the air much more abruptly than usual, letting me know he was lying, that the Nazis had come for my mother. His hands did not tell me why he would lie. They did not have to. There was no reason a teacher of sign language should be any less afraid of Nazis than the French police.
I asked Monsieur Blancherie if I might come inside, if I might go up to his daughter’s room for something I’d left behind.
Madeleine Blancherie owned a sweater the same shade of blue as mine. I exchanged mine for hers and ran home, wearing a starless sweater that told the world nothing about myself.
I could not make my brother believe that the Nazis had taken our mother, that they would be back to take us as well. He sat with his fingers on the keys of the Bechstein, ignoring me as I cut the yellow star off his shirt with the crane-handled sewing scissors.
“They will have seen our bedrooms,” I said, setting down the scissors to sign. “Seen our clothes. Nazis do not like loose ends.”
When he turned his head to shut me out, I moved into his line of sight, trying to make him see the truth of what I was telling him.
“Tomorrow,” he signed, lifting his fingers from the keys.
“Tomorrow they will have us.”
He shut his eyes, which in an argument with me was as good as stopping his ears, and continued to play.
I wanted to stay and watch him one last time, but a pair of French policemen could have been climbing the stairs to our apartment that very moment, and I would not have heard them. I found the rucksack my father and I would take on walks in the Bois de Boulogne and filled it with hard cheese and a sausage and some bread. Dropping the starless shirt on the piano bench next to my brother, I left the house.
It was July, and the day was hot and bright. I forced myself to walk, to look as if I was not running away from anyone. I had only reached the Seine when Madeleine Blancherie came hurrying toward me.
“I saw your sweater and knew you had been to my house,” she signed.
I placed my hands on the front of her sweater, not yet sure if I meant to return it or keep it.
Madeleine placed her fingers over mine, left them there for a moment, before she signed.
“I only wanted to tell you that the Germans rounded up more than a thousand Jews this morning. They have them locked inside the velodrome near the Eiffel Tower.”
“Where they hold the bicycle races?”
She nodded. “They are going to deport them to Auschwitz.”
I turned back toward the Rue des Rosiers, sure this new information would convince my brother.
Madeleine took my hand and dropped a gold cross on a chain into it.
“Do you think it will fool anyone?” I asked her.
She studied my face, my hair, wild and black.
“It’s all I have.” She gave me a quick hug, wrapping her arms around her own sweater.
I ran through the hot, bright streets, my hands practicing the arguments I’d make for my brother. But when I turned onto the Rue des Rosiers, Jan was stepping out the front door of our building in the company of a French policeman, possibly the same tall man with the thick mustache my mother had pressed herself against a year ago. My handsome brother was carrying the blanket from his bed—ridiculous in this heat—and a pair of shoes. He stopped outside our door and looked up, squinting into the harsh July sunshine at the window of the sitting room where the Bechstein sat. When he lowered his head, he saw me, standing across the street.
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 o
nly 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.
Nineteen
When 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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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 an
d 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.
Looking for more?
Visit Penguin.com for more about this author and a complete list of their books.
Discover your next great read!
A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel Page 29
