A Master Plan for Rescue (15 page)

•   •   •

I went to see Dr. Lieberman
and asked to borrow a few of his medical texts. It would have been easier to get these from a library, but by this time Jews had been banned from libraries.

“Are you interested in taking up medicine?” His question, implying that any of us had a future in which to take up anything, almost made me laugh.

“I want to see how a heart works when it is healthy.”

The doctor put his hand on my shoulder, as if he believed what he was going to tell me would be better communicated through touch. “You know Rebecca’s heart is not fixable.”

I nodded. But there are sometimes things we cannot be made to understand.

I brought Dr. Lieberman’s books to my shop and opened them across the table where I fixed the things my customers brought me—the clocks and toasters and motorbike engines I could repair by seeing how they worked inside my head. I had learned little about the human body at the gymnasium in Oranienburg, and as I examined the diagrams in Dr. Lieberman’s books, I was surprised to discover that the heart was nothing more than a pump, a machine made of muscle and tissue.

I pored over the doctor’s medical books, learning the mechanism of how a heart worked, the way I had learned the mechanisms of radios and gramophones. I memorized each part—the chambers, the ventricles and valves, the aortas and arteries—all of which seemed familiar, like so many tubes and clamps. It was so familiar, I began to believe that if only I could get to it, if only I could crack open Rebecca’s chest, remove her heart and take it apart as carefully as I had the shortwave radio, I would be able to make it work perfectly.

This idea of fixing Rebecca’s heart became my version of going to Paris, and it began to feed off me. I stayed in the shop until long past the Jewish curfew, until I risked arrest or worse on my way home, studying the books I had long ago promised to return to Dr. Lieberman, picturing inside my head every step it would take to fix Rebecca’s bad heart. When I did at last return to the flat, past the time Rebecca was able to keep herself awake for me, I would slip into our bed and rest my head on her chest—lightly, fearing that the weight of my head would be enough to stop her heart—and listen to the beating, trying to make it confirm what I had pictured back in the shop.

•   •   •

By spring,
newer, deeper shadows had appeared beneath Rebecca’s eyes, and I found myself always taking her by the shoulders and pulling her into the sunlight, as if that would make them disappear. Now when I returned to the flat at night, I lifted the sweaters Rebecca slept in—though the weather had warmed, she had not—and traced the line I would need to cut to uncover her heart.
Just here
, I would think, or perhaps I’d say it aloud, because this no longer felt like something that would stay inside my head.
You will not have to go very deep, there is so little between the skin and the bone. And even the bone is so thin it could all be done while she sleeps
.

I traced this line every night that spring. Allowed my finger to move over that place on her chest so often I began to know how her heart would feel cupped in my hand, how it would beat—I had listened to it enough—the weight and the warmth of it. Then one night, when the window was open and the air, even in Berlin, smelled of things that were blooming and coming to life, Rebecca’s hand fell over mine.

“Go into the kitchen and get a knife.”

I froze, my finger poised on her chest.

“Do you think I am always asleep?”

When I made no move, she slid out from under my hand and went to the kitchen. She returned with the big butcher’s knife we used to cut apart the breastbones of chickens.

She put the knife into my hand and pulled off her sweaters. For a moment, she stood naked in the moonlight, her skin white as paper. Then she got back into bed, arranging herself under my hands.

“I have heard a deep cut is less painful than a shallow one,” she told me.

It was the middle of the night, but I knew I was not dreaming. I put the point of the knife at the top of Rebecca’s chest and felt the skin give beneath its sharpness. My fingers were electric with the desire to slide the knife along the line I had traced so often I was certain I could see it. I had never pictured anything I could not fix, and I had been picturing Rebecca’s heart for months, spent so many nights listening to its beating, I could predict each irregularity.

I knew everything there was to know about Rebecca’s heart.

Including this—what it wanted most was for me to leave Germany. Wanted it enough to let me murder her in our bed if that was what it would take to accomplish it.

I moved the knife from her chest and dropped it to the floor. Then I pulled the blankets over Rebecca.

“It was a very good effort,” I told her.

She turned and pressed the length of her body against me. Her skin was very cold. “Maybe if I had waited longer?”

I wrapped my arms around her. “That much time neither of us has.”

The next day I returned Dr. Lieberman’s medical books.

•   •   •

In that summer
the Nazis passed a law that required all Jewish-owned businesses to register with the government.

“Do not do it,” Rebecca warned. “It is the first step of them taking the shop away from you.”

“What else can I do?”

“Close the shop.”

“And what will I do all day?”

“Sit in the shop and wait. Even the Nazis own things that break.”

“But if I take their money, they can arrest me.”

“That is why you will fix their things for favors, which are much more valuable than money.”

I shook my head. “I opened the shop because I wanted to stay away from politics.”

Rebecca laughed, the kind of laugh where nothing is funny. “You are a Jew. You are not allowed to stay away from politics.”

It was politics that had brought me to Berlin, arriving on the same day that I buried my father in Oranienburg. The year was 1930, and I was nineteen years old and restless for revolution. Too restless to spend my days repairing the radios and motorbikes of the local bourgeois when each day the battle for the future of Germany was being acted out on the streets of Berlin between the Nazi brownshirts and the Communist red tide. That morning, I had walked away from my father’s fresh gravesite, packed a small suitcase with a few clothes and a copy of
Das Kapital
, and turned my back on the repair shop that was my inheritance, leaving the door unlocked and all my father’s precious tools unguarded, because I did not believe in private property.

I knew only one person in Berlin, Pietr Abend, who had been two years ahead of me at the gymnasium. Pietr had been the first of us to leave Oranienburg. The first of us to do anything—ride a motorbike, get drunk on the sour beer made at the Oranienburg brewery, become a Communist.

The day Pietr graduated from the gymnasium he invited all of us to the crumbling tavern at the edge of town that would serve anyone with enough pfennigs in his pocket, and stood us to a pitcher of beer. When we were all drunk but he still seemed sober, he brought us back to the leaning, windswept house he shared with his mother and we watched him pack a single suitcase. I do not know where Pietr’s mother was while he was packing, most probably still at the tavern.

“The day that you graduate, you must come to Berlin and join the revolution,” he told us. “I will send each one of you a postcard with my address, so you will know where to find me.”

Over the next five years, while I finished my studies at the gymnasium and fixed sewing machines and gramophones with my father, I received fourteen postcards from Pietr Abend, each with a new address. At the bottom of every one was this sentence,
The revolution is waiting
.

The morning my father died, I sent a telegram to the most recent address,
Arriving Mitte station 3 pm tomorrow
. I did not know if Pietr Abend would turn up to meet me, or if I would recognize him if he did.

Five years in Berlin had not altered Pietr much. His blond hair had darkened a bit, as if it had absorbed some of the griminess of the city, and while he had always been slight, he was now more gaunt than I remembered.

“You have arrived on an auspicious day.” Pietr waved his arms at the blue May sky, making me believe he was talking about the weather. “Twelve Nazi Storm Troopers have trampled a Communist to death at Innsbrucker Platz.”

“What will happen to them?”

“The Minister of the Interior has already issued a swift and just punishment.” Pietr was smiling. “He has banned the wearing of brown shirts.”

I recalled then that Pietr’s smile had always been like this—ironic—as if he never expected to find anything genuinely amusing.

“I understand some members of the SA have already begun wearing white shirts,” he continued. “So much better for showing blood.”

Pietr walked me down Friedrichstrasse toward Hallesches Tor, to give me a better sense of “this gorgeously terrible city.” We passed packs of blond-haired SA members—“You will never see one walking alone”—who forced us off the sidewalk and into the street. And more promisingly, small groups of city girls dressed in airy skirts that swirled about their legs, that made me think it would only take the lightest breeze to raise them.

“Tell me all the news of Oranienburg,” Pietr said. “Even there, something interesting must have happened in the past five years.”

“Your mother has not sent you a letter?”

“I only know she is alive because no one has written me for the money to bury her.”

The address on Pietr’s fourteenth postcard was in the Wassertorstrasse, on a street of ruined buildings built so close together the street was in perpetual dusk. We were near to the Spree here, and the damp from the river made it feel as if the spring weather in the rest of the city intended to pass this neighborhood by.

A man dressed in a suit was standing outside one of the ruined buildings, whistling up at its cracked facade, as if he was calling for a dog. But rather than a shepherd or a dachshund bounding out of the open doorway, a window on the second floor opened wide enough for a feminine hand to toss out an old-fashioned skeleton key.

Pietr gave me his ironic smile. “The means of production are terrifically straightforward on this street. Remind me to show you which windows are worth whistling at.”

The flat Pietr led me into was dark and close and smelled of something poisonous.

“Lung soup,” said a voice in the dimness.

When my eyes adjusted, I saw a man wearing only a pair of boxer shorts standing before a stove. He stirred a pot filled with something thick and viscous.

Pietr slapped the man on one of his hairy shoulders. “I am sorry to say that Otto here is the best cook among us.”

“Each according to his abilities,” Otto declared.

In addition to the tiny kitchen where Otto was cooking the lung soup—a staple of the household, it would turn out—the flat on Wassertorstrasse possessed two other rooms which the inhabitants used for sitting, eating, and sleeping, as needed. There was also a WC at the end of the hallway that was for the use of the entire floor, although most of the time we either pissed in the sink—or if it was dark and not too cold, out the back window. If we needed a proper wash and did not have a girlfriend at the time, we went to one of the communal baths.

For the three years I lived in the flat in the Wassertorstrasse, I never once spied the floor in either of those two rooms. There was always a pile of dirty clothes, or someone’s latest manifesto, or a snoring Communist—or more often all three—covering it. I could also never say with any certainty how many comrades I would find stretched out on the floor, or ravenously spooning up whatever foul-smelling concoction Otto had cooked in that tiny kitchen, as the number depended on who was hiding out from the SA, or his landlady, or his girlfriend, or some combination of these.

To help me earn my share of the rent money, Pietr got me a job at
Rote Fahne
, the newspaper where he worked. I told him I had given up fixing things until after the revolution, but Pietr convinced me I should make an exception for the ancient printing presses of a Communist newspaper.

Pietr worked at
Rote Fahne
as a photographer. He called it “documenting the Communist Revolution,” although he was documenting it with a capitalist camera—a Speed Graphic he had talked a rich American girl into giving him. Pietr was good at talking girls into giving him things, and not only cameras. Pietr was also—for a Communist—very fond of all things American. American girls. American jazz. American movies. American movie stars. Especially Gloria Swanson, who we had seen in the movie
Male and Female
in a scene with a caged lion—a scene he claimed was now burned into his memory alongside the quotes of Karl Marx.

Pietr never told any of the other comrades in the flat in the Wassertorstrasse about his fondness for American things. I think that he trusted me with this knowledge because we were from the same town, and maybe also because I knew about his mother—and perhaps because I agreed with him about Gloria Swanson. How he justified the Speed Graphic to our colleagues at
Rote Fahne
was that he was utilizing a product of capitalism in the service of the Communist cause.

In those years the struggle that was going on in the Reichstag—the German government—between the Communists and the Nazis was also taking place in the streets. But in the streets, instead of words, it was being fought with rubber truncheons and lead pipes, and also with bullets. It was this fight that Pietr went out to photograph, and I never knew how he did not come back with more cuts and bruises than he did. Could not figure how he did not come back with his precious American newspaperman’s camera smashed into many pieces.

I had watched Pietr walk straight into a band of SA men who were throwing bricks through the windows of Jewish-owned department stores in the Leipzigerstrasse—because in their minds Jews and Communists were the same thing. Seen him photograph these same SA men as they smashed more bricks into the faces of any passersby whose features they thought too Semitic. When a riot erupted between a group of Nazis and Communists in Hallesches Tor, right around the corner from our flat, rather than stay inside the way any sane person would, Pietr grabbed his American camera and ran out, capturing the streams of blood that ran between the cobbles. He roamed the streets of Berlin late at night, photographing the bodies of comrades shot in the face and the back of the head, preserving their images before the SA men could drag them away, go back and tell their families they’d been sent to a work camp, or pressed into service in the army.