The Lost Wife (13 page)
Authors: Alyson Richman
Věruška, Elsa, and I now kept our heads down when we were in class. Though it appeared a posture of shame, for us, it was born from fear.
One afternoon over lunch outside, Elsa collapsed in tears. “I can’t take this anymore,” she said. She had grown thinner over the past two weeks. Her white skin was translucent and as thin as tulip petals, her blond hair wispy as straw. “I can’t draw. I can’t even see what I’m supposed to be studying.”
Her hands were shaking as I took them in my own. “Elsa, everything is going to be fine.”
“No, it’s not,” she said. As she turned to look at me, there was a wild look in her eyes. And her lips were bright red, but not from lipstick. They were raw and chewed.
I now saw Josef whenever I could. We met in a small, secluded café on Klimentska Street nearly every other day. We had yet to tell our parents. I wish I could tell you that we kept our romance a secret because we didn’t want them to have yet another burden, the pressure of making something too soon out of our courtship, but that would be untrue. We kept it to ourselves because we were young, in love, and selfish. It was our own perfect little secret and we wanted to keep it all to ourselves.
I felt as though I were existing on air. I barely ate and I was incapable of resting at night, my head was so filled with thoughts of Josef and our next plans to meet. And although I had no appetite and could not sleep, I felt more energized than ever before. Even my paintings changed. My brushstrokes were freer. I was more generous with my use of color and texture. Even my sense of line changed in my drawings. My hand loosened, as if it had finally gained a sense of confidence, and my subjects became more alive than ever.
That November, as we both tried to navigate between our studies and our courtship, the threat of war rattled like a storm outside our window. We heard it, but we tried to keep the window shut a bit longer. Each moment was more intense than the one before it. In between learning that his favorite color was green, his favorite author was Dostoevsky, and his favorite composer was Dvořák, we learned how to stretch out our kisses or how the other liked to be touched. There was heat even when there were pauses of silence between us. As I look back on it now, it was during those periods of calm, when we walked down the street and there were no eyes upon us, that I felt the happiest. We didn’t need to talk, so synchronized were our thoughts. He would slip his hand in mine and nothing else seemed to matter. For a few moments I allowed myself to feel secure.
This was a fantasy I wanted to suspend for however long I could. But it was far from realistic. As tensions increased in Prague, we soon found ourselves behaving like every other Jew around us. We kept our heads down now when we walked home, and we avoided all eye contact with others. It was as if all the Jews in Prague wished they could vanish. We heard of Jews in Germany near the Sudetenland being forced from their homes and made to crawl to the Czech border and kiss the ground. The Czech guards forced them back, so they were pushed into a no-man’s-land between two countries, neither of which wanted to accept them. Every time it rained and the temperature dropped near freezing, I thought of these men, women, and children. To live like hunted animals with wolves at your heels.
By January 1939, we felt all was lost. Our government, now headed by Hachá, ordered the police to coordinate with the Germans in suppressing the supposed threat of communism within Czechoslovakia. It was difficult for me to fully comprehend what this meant for us, but my father’s reaction to the news made it all too clear. That night, he raised his hands to the ceiling and said this was a death sentence to all Czech Jews.
My mother said to be quiet, not to speak like that in front of Marta and me.
I smiled at Marta, who was holding back tears.
“We need to get visas,” Mama told him.
“Who in America will sign an affidavit for us?”
“We can buy false papers!” she cried.
“With what? With what, Eliška?” And his high-pitched cry reminded me of shattered glass. “It’s too late now. We should have left when the Gottliebs and the Rosenthals did. There is no money left to buy the papers and passage,” he said helplessly, his palms turned up toward the sky.
One day, in the first week in November, Elsa did not come to class. Věruška and I exchanged a worried glance. “Maybe they’ve been able to get out, somehow,” Věruška said flatly. I immediately wondered if the apothecary now stood empty, its shelves bare, and the smell of gardenia and rose replaced by stale air. Perhaps Elsa and her family had gotten on a boat with no time to say good-bye.
But what if it had been something terrible. I was worried.
I decided to pass Elsa’s father’s apothecary on the way to meeting Josef. Through the broken glass, I could see her sitting by the counter, her face in shadow.
I stood there staring at her. If I were to go in, I’d be late for Josef and cause him to worry. If I didn’t, I would be distracted when I saw him by this haunting image of my friend, her face as shattered as the store’s glass.
I walked in; my footsteps on the tile were the only sound. Elsa looked up at me, her blue eyes lifting like a porcelain doll. Her mouth trying to twitch into a smile.
“We missed you in class today,” I said softly as I approached her.
“I’m not coming back,” she said. “I can’t concentrate there anymore, and anyway, Papa needs me here to run the sales counter. He had to let Fredrich go, so Papa’s now working the pharmacy in the back.”
“I thought perhaps your family had left,” I said.
She looked at me as though she were trying to read my face. “We’re trying to, Lenka. But everything requires money now, and we hardly have any left.”
I nodded. I knew this feeling all too well.
“Is there anything I can do?”
She shook her head. Elsa did not look helpless; she looked resigned.
“I’ll bring Věruška the next time I visit,” I said, trying to sound upbeat.
We parted with a kiss, and I hurried off to meet Josef, my heart far heavier than it had been that morning.
He was waiting for me, his throat wrapped in a thick black scarf, his hands wrapped around a cup of steaming tea.
“I was worried about you,” he said, standing up to greet me with a kiss. His lips were still warm from the tea.
“I’m sorry,” I told him. “I went to check on Elsa. She wasn’t in class today.”
He raised his eyebrow and shook his head.
“I don’t think any of us are going to be in class much longer.”
“Don’t say that,” I said, reaching over the table to kiss him one more time.
He placed his hands on my cheeks and held them there. His fingers were so long they nearly touched my ears.
“Kiss me again,” I told him.
His mouth on mine was like new air being pumped into my lungs.
“We should get married, Lenka,” he said as he slowly pulled away from me.
I laughed. “Get married? Neither of our parents even know that we are courting.”
“Exactly.” He smirked. “Exactly.”
At night, I dream of myself in a white veil. My family’s black coats and scarves are replaced by ripe colors of red and gold. Their faces are no longer frightened and worried, but radiant and full of joy. I see Papa being lifted on a chair, and Mama and Marta clapping as he bounces about on sturdy shoulders.
We drink wine in tall rosy goblets, and eat dumplings with the tenderest meat. The chuppah is threaded with flowers. Daisies, asters, and irises the color of jam.
On my honeymoon night, I lie beside him. He lays his hands above my head on the pillow. He kisses my temples, my heart, my belly, and then below.
I close my eyes and pass through a world where there is only love.
CHAPTER 15
In January of 1939, it seemed as though it would only be a matter of time before the Germans finally invaded Czech soil.
“We must get married,” Josef implored me. “I’ve told my parents that I’m in love with you.”
I blew puffs of steam in his face as I stood next to him in the cold. “How can we get married now? The whole world’s turned upside down.”
He pulled me closer. “If we don’t get married, there will be nothing good left in this life for me.”
He kissed me again, his arms enveloping me in their warm woolen sleeves. I felt like my heart was flooding with emotion whenever I was near him. But our situation was becoming more and more desperate.
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