A Master Plan for Rescue: A Novel

by Janis Cooke Newman

  I took it from him, wondering if I was feeling Jakob’s magnetism, humming beneath Uncle Glenn’s like an undertone.

  “They didn’t try to decode it?”

  “The men from the FBI?” Uncle Glenn shook his head. “I’m pretty sure they don’t think you’re a spy.”

  I sat on the roof with my back against a leg of the coop and deciphered Jakob’s message. Because I needed to know what it said, and because I, too, had memorized the code.

  Jakob had written

  ONE DOOMED JEW FOR 23 WHO HAVE THEIR LIVES AHEAD OF THEM. IT IS THE SAME AS THE PHOTOGRAPH OF THE WOMAN WITH THE SHRIVELED LEG STANDING BEFORE JOSEF WACKERLES CONCRETE THIGH. THINK HOW MUCH REBECCA WOULD HAVE LIKED THAT.

  Uncle Glenn’s shoes shifted on the tar, and I knew he was waiting for me to show him the message, knew he wanted more than anything to see it.

  I wanted to slide that piece of paper inside my shirt, let it rub against the skin of my chest until it wore away to nothing. But as long as that message existed in the world, the twenty-three who had climbed out of those boats onto that moonlit beach, the twenty-three Jakob had sacrificed himself for, would never be safe.

  I pressed my palm to Jakob’s message one last time. Then I tore it into pieces, opening my hands and letting the March wind blow them across the roof like so much spring snow.

  Uncle Glenn watched the bits of paper fly into the sky.

  “Will you tell me now?” he asked.

  “Tell you what?” I said. “That it was men who got out of those boats?”

  I got up and went back into the building, then out onto the street. Stood in the wind and scanned every face for something I might recognize, Jakob’s story still caught in my throat.

  Seventeen

  The day I saw Rose LoPinto again, she was standing on the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, and at first I believed I was imagining her.

  Ten years had passed since she’d walked away from me, her pale coat shining in the darkness, and yet I recognized her in an instant. Felt the familiarity of her hands moving against the unobstructed sky on this tallest building in Manhattan.

  She was surrounded by a group of men in dark suits, speaking to them in that secret language. Her dress was filmy and apricot-colored, and much too light for the weather—it was the kind of spring day that begins fine, but by noon is threatening rain—and her black hair was as wild as it had ever been. But the metal headband that had held the RadioEar receiver was gone, and there was no microphone box pinned to the neck of her filmy dress. When I moved closer, I saw beneath a curl of dark hair, a flesh-colored disk tucked inside her ear and a thin wire hugging the side of her smooth neck.

  Of course, I thought, it is the Atomic Age, filled with the wonders of science. There is no longer the need for speaking into girls’ throats.

  I followed Rose across the Observation Deck as she led her dark-suited men on a silent tour of the city’s skyline, naming for them the silver spires outlined against the darkening sky. If I had known that secret language, I could have given the men the tour myself. For I had spent nearly every lunch hour for the past four years on this windswept deck. Though I had spent little of that time gazing at the view. Instead, I’d been scanning the faces of the people who came here to point out landmarks, the people who stood holding their hats on their heads against the breeze.

  When Rose took her dark-suited men to wait for the elevator, I went to stand before her.

  “Rose,” I said.

  She looked at me with the same depthless dark eyes.

  “Jack.”

  We were both twenty-two years old, and for a second, I wondered at the fact that she’d recognized me. But then, how unrecognizable can a person become who wears the kind of glasses I do?

  Rose escorted her men down to the street and put them into a taxi, then she came back, and while we stood at the top of the tallest building in Manhattan, she told me the story of why she’d disappeared.

  She said that at the same moment we were standing on that beach at Coney Island, the same moment the first boat of refugees scraped ashore, halfway around the world, her father was walking into a U.S. Army base in Agadir, Morocco, with an expertly amputated left hand and no memory of how it had gotten that way or where he’d been the past two months.

  Neither Rose nor her mother had had any idea her father had been missing. The army had sent a telegram, but her mother, who had never learned to read English, had stuffed it in the kitchen drawer where she was keeping all the correspondence until her husband’s return.

  The telegram saying Rose’s father had been found arrived the morning after the refugees landed. She answered the door and learned that her father was missing and found in the same instant.

  Once she’d figured out what had happened, after she’d gone through the piles of letters and unpaid bills in her mother’s kitchen drawer, she knew that what she’d done on that beach was responsible for her father’s miraculous return from the dead.

  “It was an even exchange. One deaf refugee for my father.”

  And the sign of this was the missing hand. A symbol of the secret language of the deaf.

  I believe everything that happened between Rose and me that afternoon can be put down to one fact: I was the one who placed her on that beach.

  The next telegram was from her father. The army was sending him home. He instructed Rose and her mother to close up his butcher shop in Yonkers, pack his knives, and meet him at the family farm in Newburgh, where they’d stay until he could teach himself to cut meat one-handed.

  “The army would have paid for a prosthetic hand,” she said, “but my father wanted a hook, said it would be better for holding onto meat.”

  As Rose told me this story, her slippery consonants slid into my ears, stirring up the cold stream that ran beneath the surface of my skin. The stream that hadn’t run in ten years.

  When she finished, I told her I had something to show her. We took the elevator down and got into a taxi. I suppose we just walked away from our jobs. Rose was the City Hall interpreter for the deaf, the city’s official speaker of that secret language. I worked as a sound engineer for a radio station that broadcast from that tallest building. We didn’t think about our jobs for one second.

  The taxi driver took us through Central Park, where the air was filled with unsettling blooming. Once going around a curve, our hands touched and I felt an electric shock that was like lightning from the storm that kept threatening but never came.

  When we arrived at Dyckman Street, I took Rose to the roof. Together, we stood in front of the coop and watched the pigeons fluttering behind the chicken wire, filling the newly warm air with feathers.

  “They were Jakob’s,” I told her. Though I supposed they weren’t Jakob’s anymore, and also I’d replaced a few.

  The pigeons flapped their wings in time with the wind moving the skirt of Rose’s light dress.

  “I wish I’d met him,” she said.

  Rose picked up the Garcia y Vega cigar box on the shelf beside the pigeons’ coop and shook it. There was the sound of the metal capsules rolling back and forth.

  I took the box out of her hands. “Just some old things in there.”

  I did not tell her about the afternoon when I was fifteen or so, when I nearly exhausted a pigeon to death trying to make it carry a message to Germany. A message that said

  YD ATNNI

  IM SORRY.

  The clouds above our heads stacked up on each other, and the storm seemed closer. I brought Rose down to my apartment.

  • • •

  I had little experience bringing women home, and did not know what I would do with Rose once she had stepped through my door. But before we’d moved out of the hallway, she turned, swirling the skirt of her apricot-colored dress around my legs, and pressed her lips against mine in a dizzying kiss.r />
  Even I knew better than to take Rose into my childhood bedroom, into the room where I still slept—mostly out of habit, partly because I believed it might be a kind of luck, a talisman for finding those twenty-three.

  I took her instead into my mother’s old room.

  My mother had been gone four years. She left a week after I graduated from high school, the day after I took the job at the radio station. Came out of her bedroom dressed in one of her brown-colored outfits, carrying a small suitcase I didn’t know she owned.

  “I’m moving to the convent in Poughkeepsie,” she said, then stood behind me and rested one arm across my chest. An arm that was so weightless, it rose with no effort on my breath. “You, though,” she told me. “You have your whole life.”

  Rose and I fell into my mother’s bed like it was ours.

  I had been with other women. Though not, I would guess, as many as Jakob, who had learned which Wassertorstrasse windows were worth whistling up at. And not, I suppose, as many as most twenty-two-year-old men living in New York City in 1952—something I blamed on my glasses, rather than my habit of staring so nakedly at the faces of strangers.

  Rose was twenty-two as well. And not long after her too-light dress floated to the floor of my bedroom, I knew I wasn’t her first. Anything beyond that was a mystery. Most things about Rose were a mystery to me—perhaps because of that secret language she could speak with her hands.

  Still, as a hard rain from the storm that had been threatening all day battered the windows, Rose deciphered the code of her body—and mine—touching me everywhere at once with those hands that could speak a hundred secret languages worth learning.

  Only when it was over, only when I was lying next to the full length of her skin, which smelled to me impossibly of chocolate and coconut, only then did I turn my head and put my mouth close to the flesh-colored disk tucked inside her ear and ask for the names she’d heard called out in the dark.

  Rose pushed herself to her elbows, her black hair its own spring storm around her head.

  “You have been looking for them?”

  I pulled her from the bed and wrapped her in a blanket, led her down the hallway into the kitchen. Showed her the table, covered in newspapers.

  Rose smoothed the pages of one of the open papers, running her fingers over the names I’d circled.

  “‘Betrothals and Marriages’?”

  “We are of that age,” I said.

  She looked hard into my face, wound the blanket tighter around herself.

  “What will you do if you find one?”

  I tried to explain. About Jakob. And Uncle Glenn. And about the story that never grew any lighter, despite so many years of telling it to myself. As I spoke, the storm outside flung hail against the window, as if trying to shatter it, yet Rose never took her eyes from me.

  “For ten years, I have been looking,” I told her. “Calling strangers on the telephone. Searching the faces of people on the street. But I have never found any of them. Not even one.”

  Rose put her hand on my face. Her fingers were warm.

  “I have,” she told me.

  Eighteen

  RIVKA

  Not long after he realized I was deaf, my father invented a secret language for the two of us, a series of gestures that my mother and older brother, Jan, did not share. This was when we still lived in Warsaw, before we moved to Paris so that I could enroll in the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets—the National Institution for Deaf-Mutes. Later, when I asked my father why he invented an entire language for only two people, he’d tell me he believed I was like him and that he wanted to know what I was thinking. And it was true that even after we both learned to sign, it seemed we could tell each other more in the language he’d invented.

  To help me get along in the world, my father also taught me to read gestures. Every day from the time I was small, he took me out into the city and showed me how to interpret the raising of an eyebrow, the shrug of a shoulder. He taught me what it meant when someone shifted back and forth on his feet, when he dipped his head when telling you something. My father made me understand how much is revealed by the body.

  The day the Nazis took him, my father used the secret language he’d invented for the two of us to give me the same instructions he gave to my mother. He knew I was more likely to follow them.

  The Nazis did not come themselves—my father was not important enough, only another Jew—but sent two French policemen instead. They arrived on a soft spring morning, pounding on our door so hard, even I heard it. I was eleven years old and not entirely deaf. A year earlier when the Germans arrived in Paris, I’d heard the rumbling of their tanks as they rolled into the Place de la Concorde. I could hear any sound that came with a strong vibration. They say that is why, years later, the surgeons were able to repair my hearing.

  We were living in the Jewish quarter, on the Rue des Rosiers in a two-story house with lace curtains at every window. The French policemen stood inside my parents’ bedroom, the backs of their uniforms pressed up against the expensive striped wallpaper, and watched my father pack a small suitcase with clothing they probably knew he would never wear. I sat on a small stool at the side of the bed, dressed for school in my skirt and blouse, refusing to leave the house, refusing to leave my father, although my sixteen-year-old brother, always more obedient, had already gone.

  As my father folded shirts, I signed to him in our secret language. “Where are they taking you? When will you be back?”

  My father was talking to my mother, who kept eyeing the policemen leaning against her wallpaper. By the shape of his mouth, I knew he was speaking in Polish. Each time he set down a shirt, his hands shaped the same words for me. “Go,” he was telling her. “Take the children and leave Paris. Leave France if you can.”

  But my mother had been born into money and believed that every problem—even Nazis—could be solved by it. She hurried from the bedroom, and when she returned with a thick stack of bills, I knew what she’d been doing. She’d taken her sewing scissors with the handle shaped to look like a crane and snipped open the silk lining of her spring coat, pulled the bills from the stack she’d hidden there the day the Nazis marched into Paris.

  My mother stood close to one of the French policemen, the taller of the two, a man with a thick mustache. My mother—still beautiful after two children, her dark wavy hair falling down her back—standing so close to the policeman you could barely slip one of the bills in her hand between them. She showed the policeman the money, then ran her fingers along the curve of her throat. My father kept his gaze down, fixed on the shirts in his suitcase, but it seemed to me that his shoulders were shaking.

  The policeman looked at the money and at my mother. Then he looked at me, sitting not as out of his sight as I’d imagined. He shook his head. My mother pressed closer to him, but he shook his head again. My mother backed away, the stack of bills still in her hand.

  I don’t know if it was that the French policeman was so very honest as that it was early in the war, when the policemen were still afraid of the Nazis.

  After my father had finished packing his useless suitcase, the policemen led him out into the spring morning. I followed, hiding in the doorways of the still-shuttered shops. It was early, the sun streaming between the buildings of the Marais, but the streets of the Jewish quarter were filled with French policemen escorting men with suitcases, all of them heading in the direction of the Gare d’Austerlitz.

  When you learn to see the world through gestures, you learn to see things as they are. And all of Paris knew—even if they pretended they didn’t know it—that the trains for Jews at the Gare d’Austerlitz were the trains that went to the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.

  I pressed myself into the doorway of a shuttered patisserie and watched my father walk away. He was wearing his best suit. My father had put on his best suit to be t
aken by Nazis. His suitcase, tan calfskin, bumped lightly against the side of his leg, and he was leaning a little to the left. My father always walked that way, leaned to the left. As I stood in the doorway of that shuttered patisserie on that soft spring morning, I realized it was because I was usually walking on that side.

  It was a long street and I wanted to stay in the doorway and watch until my father turned the corner—my father, the only other person on the earth who knew the language of my thoughts—but my face felt wet and I was afraid I was making sounds, and that alone would have been enough for one of the French policemen to scoop me up and take me to the Gare d’Austerlitz with the others.

  I pushed myself out of the doorway and ran home.

  Over the next year, I begged my mother to take us south, out of occupied France.

  “Your father will be heartbroken,” she’d sign, “if he returns and finds no one.”

  “He will be heartbroken,” I’d sign back, “if we die.”

  Each week, my mother pulled more money from inside the silk lining of her spring coat—money that could have bought our way out of Paris, out of France—and gave it to yet another German officer who promised to look into my father’s case.

  “You have no case once you are in Pithiviers or Beaune-la-Rolande,” I told her. Because I had seen the way people turned away from the Jews who were loaded onto the trains that were headed there, as if they were already dead, only animated corpses.

  “You must have faith,” my mother told me.

  I could see, too, how my mother’s faith was feeding off her. She was no longer beautiful, but gaunt and hollow-eyed. I suspected she didn’t eat, turning too much of our money over to German officers, saving only what was needed to feed my brother and me. I began to fear that her desire to believe my father was alive would kill her.

  I appealed to my brother, but Jan was not interested in leaving Paris unless we could take the Bechstein.

  The Bechstein was an upright grand piano that had belonged to our mother’s grandfather. It was a beautiful thing, a polished piece of carved mahogany, and my brother loved it like a woman. No, he loved it more than any man has ever loved a woman. For unless he was sleeping or eating, his long-fingered hands were on that instrument.