The Lost Wife (14 page)
Authors: Alyson Richman
“How can I tell my parents for the first time I am dating you, and in the next sentence, tell them I am to be wed?”
“These are strange days . . . things are not as they once were. Listen,” he said, shaking me a little by the arms. “My parents are in the middle of negotiating exit visas for us. I need to marry you so they can secure one for you, too.”
“What?” I asked incredulously.
“Father is buying them on the black market. We have a cousin in New York who is sponsoring us.” He was now looking at me with such a ferocious intensity, I was frightened. “Lenka, you need to understand . . . we need to get out of here. The Czechs will sell every Jew out if it means maintaining their sovereignty.”
I shook my head. “I can’t marry you unless you also secure visas for my parents . . . and for Marta.”
“That’s impossible, Lenka, you know that.” His voice was now full of force and it surprised me. “You will go first with my family, and then when we are settled you can send for them.”
“No,” I said. “Promise me you will also get my whole family passports, or otherwise, the answer is no.”
CHAPTER 16
We told my parents the next evening. I brought Josef home and my parents, though shocked by the sudden announcement, did not protest. Perhaps delirious and worn down from their own desperation, they would have married me off to even a lesser man if he had promised us safety outside of Czechoslovakia.
Josef appeared remarkably calm as he told Papa of his plans to take care of me, and to take us all out of Prague.
“And your parents? They support this decision?” Papa asked.
“They love Lenka, as do I. My sister adores her. We will all take care of her.”
“But you will come with us. You, Mama, and Marta,” I interjected. “Dr. Kohn is arranging papers for all of us.”
Josef looked at my father and nodded.
“We’ve either sent away or sold off her dowry,” Papa told him sadly.
“I am marrying her for love not for money. Not for crystal.”
Papa smiled and let out a deep sigh.
“This is not how I imagined your betrothal, Lenka,” he said, turning to me. His eyes lifted toward my mother, who was standing at the threshold of the parlor, Marta’s thin arms around her. My sister was thirteen now, but still seemed childlike to me.
“Eliška, do you think you can make a wedding in three days?”
She nodded.
“So be it,” Papa said as he stood up to embrace Josef. “Mazel tov.”
My father’s arms lifted to wrap around Josef. I saw Papa’s head rest on Josef’s shoulder, his eyes squinting shut, and the faint trickle of a father’s tears.
We registered in the city hall and arranged with the rabbi to be wed in the Old Town Synagogue.
For the three days leading up to the ceremony, my mother was a woman possessed. She first unwrapped her own wedding dress, an elaborate white silk gown with long lace sleeves and a high-collared bodice.
I was at least three inches shorter than Mama, but for the alterations, she did not call the seamstress Gizela. Instead, she took out a large wooden box and did the job herself.
The silver shears sounded like blades over ice as Mother cut through the skirt. I was standing on a small stool, the same one that Lucie had stood on the weeks before her marriage. The irony of it had not escaped me as I looked into the gilded mirror in our living room. I looked at my reflection, with my mother now on her knees, the pins in her mouth, her scissors slicing through her own dress. I wanted to cry.
“Mama,” I told her. “I love you.”
She looked up, but she didn’t answer. Still, I saw the strain in her throat, her watering eyes telling me she loved me, too.
I was married at sundown in an ancient brick synagogue with four stained-glass windows, fingers of moonlight illuminating the old stone floor. My chuppah was snow-white silk wrapped around four wooden poles. Candles flickered in iron-roped chandeliers; the rabbi was pale and wizened beneath a tall black hat.
We had only invited our families to the ceremony, along with Lucie and her daughter and husband, Petr. I had not thought she could come, but she arrived with baby Eliška, now old enough to walk beside her and hold her hand. She wore the blue capelet Mother had given her years before, and her hair was braided behind her head. I smiled at her when I walked down the aisle with my parents on either side of me.
At the steps to the bimah Josef stood alone waiting for me. We touched fingers. My parents kissed my cheeks and walked up the steps to the chuppah
.
At the rabbi’s instructions, Josef lifted my veil in accordance with tradition, confirming that I was indeed his bride.
.
At the rabbi’s instructions, Josef lifted my veil in accordance with tradition, confirming that I was indeed his bride.
Then my veil was again placed over my face. We stood before the rabbi and heard the seven marital blessings. I walked around Josef, promising he would be the center of my life. We wrapped our fingers around the wedding chalice and drank the ceremonial wine as the rabbi asked us to repeat:
“I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.”
We slipped bands over our fingers—a sign of unbroken, seamless love—and Josef broke a single glass underneath his foot.
“I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.”
We slipped bands over our fingers—a sign of unbroken, seamless love—and Josef broke a single glass underneath his foot.
We kissed as the rabbi pronounced us man and wife, the taste of salty tears as my lips parted over his.
That evening, Josef takes me to an apartment on Sokolská Street. He says he needs to tell me something, but I silence him with one finger over his soft, ripe mouth.
He tells me again that we need to speak. “Urgent matters,” he says. And I tell him, what could be more urgent than this?
He leans into me and I can taste the powdered sugar on his lips from Mother’s palačinka.
“Lenka,” he whispers, and I kiss him again. His hands touch my throat, his fingers reaching to the nape of my neck. “Lenka.” My name said again, but this time like a psalm, a prayer, a wish.
I can feel his heart beating through his shirtwaist, the white cotton dampening from our heat. I pull his hands from my face and turn my back to him so that he will undress me.
His fingers are nimble over the scale of buttons. He pulls back the cloth, places a single kiss between my shoulder blades, and presses his cheek to my back. I hear him inhale the scent of my skin; I feel him drop lower, offer another kiss to the small of my back, as he kneels even lower to the ground, his hands gliding over my thighs as the material falls to the ground.
I step out of a puddle of white silk, naked except for a corset of lace and whalebone. Josef’s vest is unbuttoned, his dark throat exposed from his open collar. His hair a black lion’s mane.
I am no longer a shy student but a wife. I unbutton him as he has done to me. I wrap my hands over the curve of his shoulders, and trace my finger down the line of his chest.
I feel the weight of his belt buckle in my hands and unlatch it. My hands now feel the back of his thighs, his sex swelling between us.
Does he whisper my name one more time before he lifts me and brings me to the bed? I can’t remember. I only recall the sensation of my body inching under him, my legs wrapping tightly around his waist, my thighs sealing around his ribs. There is the sensation of him threading through me. Like a needle inching through the cloth. “Josef,” I whisper into his ear. “Josef.” I say his name again.
His name is an anchor in that bed of naked limbs and twisted sheets. I say it and he, too, whispers mine. And I bite his shoulder as we both climb to a peak and fall.
If the sound of clinking glass reminds me of my parents, then it is the sound of rattling porcelain that will forever remind me of my marriage to Josef. Over breakfast the next morning, white coffee cups and saucers, jiggling in his nervous hands, he tells me there will be no passage for my parents.
The table is set like a scene from the theater. The basket of warm rolls, the pots of jam. A china coffeepot. Two folded napkins. A vase with one, tired rose.
I tell him I don’t understand what he is saying to me. I tell him I thought he promised me their safe passage.
“There are laws . . . restrictions, Lenka. Our cousin writes he can sponsor only my family and no one else’s.”
“I am not your family,” I whisper. My voice trembles.
“You are my wife.”
And I think, though I don’t have the strength to say:
And my mother is my mother. My father my father and my sister, my sister.
And my mother is my mother. My father my father and my sister, my sister.
“I have already told your father and he wants you to come with me.”
As he speaks, I can feel the blood running through my veins and my heart stopping as if it were tied off by a tourniquet. I know my eyes are too much for him and that he feels my anger, my disappointment, cauterizing his skin and slicing him to the bone. For months now, I know I have been selfish. I have heard my parents’ desperation at night, and have seen it on their faces. I have felt it as I saw the riches of our once-lavish lifestyle vanish. But only now, with the threat of being separated from my family, do I feel myself forced into a reality I’m ill-prepared to accept.
“Josef,” I say. “How can I accept this?”
“We don’t have a choice, Lenka. This is the only way.”
“I can’t. I can’t.” I say it over and over again. Because I know it’s the truth. I know that if I go with him and something happens to my parents, to Marta, I will never recover from the guilt.
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