The Lost Wife (19 page)
Authors: Alyson Richman
This was a hasty introduction against a backdrop of chaos and death. Women were screaming from down below as the crew frantically rushed around the deck. They were boys who were not navy men but simply “extra” sons who needed a job and found themselves on a cruise ship bound for Canada.
There were still hundreds of people on deck as we were pushed to an available lifeboat. What happened next haunts me to this day. I have relived it in my head so many times. Second by second.
Papa pushes Isaac and me ahead of him. “The young before the old,” he says. “I’ll take the next boat.”
I say, “No, Papa.” He reaches for my cheek. I feel the warmth of his palm. And in that rushed second, I am that shuddering bird of my childhood, cupped in a single hand. “Papa,” I say, but he has already decided. He pushes me away and forces me and Isaac to climb into the lifeboat alone. We are lowered into the water, a pool of black. As the stern of the enormous ship begins to dip lower and lower, I see bodies jumping from the deck. In the chaos of our lifeboat, Isaac manages to hold on to his violin but drops his bow.
The rescue ship, the
Knute Nelson
, has come to help us. But its propeller accidentally tears into one of the bobbing lifeboats. I hear the screams, witness the carnage of blood spilling into the sea illuminated by the rescue ship’s floodlights. Red silk spreading over the water like a parachute. I see my sister falling into the water like a drowning rose.
Knute Nelson
, has come to help us. But its propeller accidentally tears into one of the bobbing lifeboats. I hear the screams, witness the carnage of blood spilling into the sea illuminated by the rescue ship’s floodlights. Red silk spreading over the water like a parachute. I see my sister falling into the water like a drowning rose.
CHAPTER 23
When Isaac plays the violin at my thirtieth birthday party years later, he is the one person who knows me for the man I really am. He plays the music that I am partial to. The melancholy music of Brahms, or the second movement of Dvořák’s
American
string quartet. The melody played by the first violin makes me cry every time I hear it.
American
string quartet. The melody played by the first violin makes me cry every time I hear it.
He is seven years younger than I. He is now a violinist in the New York Philharmonic. He eats Amalia’s dry cakes and drinks sweet wine.
I like to think we are cut from the same cloth. We each arrived here with no one. I carry the weight of my wife and baby trapped in Europe; he carries his violin as if it could serenade his ghosts.
He tells me he plays for his mother, who loved the folk music of her village outside Brno. He plays for his father, who loved the simplicity of Mendelssohn, for his little brother, who hated the sound of the violin and cried every time he played a single note.
My Amalia sits in her kitchen listening to him. She folds her hands and closes her eyes. Sometimes when he plays, I watch her, her face transported to someplace far away.
The three of us eat around our modest table, the basket of bread passed between us. The flowers that Isaac brought are placed in a glass milk bottle that Amalia had saved.
And our lives quietly continue in peace and safety.
I learn the comfort of a good glass of whiskey. I find solace as I clean the corridors of a sticky primary school, and teach myself English by reading the books that are kept in desks by children fifteen years younger than I am. These are the things I do as I put myself through medical school.
The letters I had written to Lenka to tell her I am safe and working to get her out of Prague are all returned unopened and placed in a box under my bed that also contains my first wedding photograph. Next to the wooden toys and miniature airplane I had bought nearly a decade earlier in London, in the giddy anticipation of the birth of my son.
CHAPTER 24
My world went black after I knew of Josef’s ship’s sinking. I became consumed with grief.
It was my mother who told me I had lost all color in my face. You must go to the doctor, she urged as she wrapped me in not one coat but two. It was the end of September and we were now officially at war. Two long lapels dripped from my chest; my belly made it impossible for either coat to close.
Dr. Silberstein took his stethoscope from his bag and held it over the stretched skin of my abdomen.
“When was the last time you felt movement?” he asked. My eyes were full of tears. I could not answer him; since the minute I read of the sinking of the
Athenia
, I had lost track of everything.
Athenia
, I had lost track of everything.
“I can’t remember,” I told him. “Is it the baby?” I felt the floor sliding out from me.
He had me lie down again and struggled to find the heartbeat. “I can’t find it,” he told me, “but it could just be the position. Go home and we will find out in a few days.”
I woke up to a rush of blood the following evening. Everything was sliding out from me. My husband was dead, and my baby was now a jelly of blood on the sheets.
All I wanted was to join them.
My mother bathed me and cared for me, and the doctor was kind enough to give me some precious morphine so that I could sleep.
I slept and slept as if I were sleeping into my own death. I dreamed of nothing. I dreamed black. No images, no memories, no thoughts of the future. When you dream of darkness, you are all but dead.
In the months that followed, my mother took care of me as if I were a newborn child. She washed me, fed me, and read to me as I lay like my own stillborn baby. Lifeless, with eyes like frosted glass, in my own childhood bed.
As I struggled to come to terms with my loss, things only worsened for my family and our community around us. Freedoms we once never considered freedoms were taken from us. We could no longer drive, own a pet, or even listen to the radio. We were given two days to surrender our radios and I remember foggily as Father bundled up the radio he had bought for Mother years before and turned it over to the authorities.
Lucie seemed like the only person we could count on as our former life crumbled around us. She appeared every Monday, arriving like an angel, with fresh eggs and milk from Petr’s brother’s farm. These visits were mother’s lifeline to the world outside the apartment. The tables had clearly turned; instead of offering Lucie decadently sumptuous Saturday meals and gifts commissioned from the seamstress, Gizela, we were reduced to humbly accepting whatever was in her basket that week.
Lucie’s daughter, Eliška, was now speaking her first sentences, and her chubby legs and doll-like face made Mama and Marta temporarily forget their unhappiness. I, however, could not bear to look at the child. I would see Lucie smiling as Eliška twirled around in her pinafore or nibbled on a crust of bread and I would be filled with an envy that made me loathe myself even more. It was terrible to be jealous of another person’s child, especially someone you loved so much. But I felt so empty that all I could think of was craving a replacement for what I had lost.
Still, it was Lucie who saved me from my grief. She arrived one afternoon with her basket of food but also with a little package just for me. She brought the present, wrapped in brown paper and twine, to my bed.
“Lenka,” she ordered. “I want you to open it now . . . not later.”
My hands were weak from lack of use. They trembled slightly as they went to undo the string and remove the paper. Inside was a little tin of pastels and a small sketchpad.
“Remember how we used to draw together?”
I nodded.
“Start again.” She moved the curtains beside my bed. “What other family still has such a view of the Vltava?”
I had wanted nothing more than to forget the emptiness in my belly, the ache for something that was no longer there. But it had remained like a wound that had no salve, a stifled wail that had no release.
Lucie had given me a gift—a reminder that I still had my sight and my hands. That afternoon I began sketching again.
At first, I struggled to get my hand back. My fingers gripped the pencil, the tip pointed to the page, but I could not connect my hand with my head. But slowly, things returned to me, and I began to regain my focus. I started by sketching small objects in my room. Just looking at things that I had not noticed for so many months was nourishing to me. The glass birds on my desk, the wooden whistle from my childhood, and the porcelain doll that had been a birthday gift.
Every week, Lucie would return with more supplies, and I found that a tin of charcoal and a stiff pad of paper went a long way toward soothing my wounds. I was like a painting that had been rendered in black and white. But after several days I was able to add the first strokes of color.
My grief still had its own ebb and flow. When I looked out the window and saw the Gentile women taking strolls with their shiny black prams, the sunshine hitting their babies’ caps, I still wanted to curl up into a ball and cry.
Other times, when I lay at night in my bed, I would feel such an ache in my womb that I wasn’t even sure if it was the miscarriage—for I had never even seen this child’s eyes, felt the grasp of its finger—or the loss of the possibility that I would ever have a child with Josef. He was gone now and so was any connection I was ever to have with him. I had barely grieved for him when I received news of his death because the miscarriage had arrived so swiftly—but now the finality of his death swept over me.
As the weeks passed, however, my bouts of crying lessened and I was able to distract myself more and more with my drawings. I remembered how I used to lock myself in the same room that first year and study my legs or the flexed tendons in my hand, and I was comforted by knowing that there were some things that could not be taken from me.
I began to curl myself on the window seat of my bedroom with my pad atop my knees and sketch the roofline of the castle, the bridge outside our apartment, and the young girl who skipped along the edge of the Vltava as I myself had done so many times as a child. I sketched until my fingers were numb, the apron of my dress dusty with pastel.
My mother would often knock on my door and ask me to come and join her in our parlor for a cup of tea and a few biscuits if Lucie had managed to bring some butter that week. The parlor was now a shadow of what it once was. Weeks before, we were forced to bring what little remained of our valuables and turn them over to the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Marta and I took our heirloom silver candlesticks, the few remaining china figurines and ornaments to the storage center at the Spanish synagogue, where they were registered and then sent on to the Reich.
I believe one of the reasons I was so content to just stay in my childhood room sketching was that I could sequester myself from the loneliness and emptiness of the rest of our apartment. Sitting in an empty room that had once been filled with so much color and life was now unbearable. It wasn’t that I longed for the full shelves of glass and decorations themselves. It was the sense of emptiness that permeated the walls, a sense that was intensified by the scene of Mother sitting against a now-worn sofa, with her two girls trying so hard to act as if a single cookie was an extravagance neither of them deserved.
For most of that year, I passed each day by drawing. I even set up a small easel by my window. The scarcity of oil pigments made me more focused than I had been at the Academy. I would find myself first applying each brushstroke in my head, imagining it on the canvas even before I put it there to make sure it was just right. For I knew how precious each inch of color was.
That autumn of 1941, all Jews were ordered to wear yellow Stars of David.
I remember the afternoon in September we registered at the Gestapo office and were given our stars. The four of us returned home to find Lucie and Eliška already there. Lucie had her own key and had let herself in, and had begun making pancakes from the flour and eggs she had brought.
We had stuffed the yellow felt stars into our pockets and sat down at the table to eat with Lucie and Eliška. Our faces were strained. I could see the tears filling Mother’s eyes as she looked at her namesake’s rosy, sweet face. Papa sat straight in his chair looking at the grandfather clock, and Marta and I tried to forget the burning stars in our pocket and simply enjoy Lucie’s delicious pancakes that we had grown fat on in our own childhood.
It was Mother’s star that slipped to the ground as Lucie hugged her good-bye. I stood behind the two of them and saw the star fall to the carpet, its silent descent more powerful than the loudest cry. Mama carefully picked it up and put it back in her pocket, placing a palm over it as if to shield it from Lucie’s little girl. But Eliška had noticed. “Look, Mama, Aunt Liška has stars in her pocket. She’s so lucky, Mama!”
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