The Lost Wife (24 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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He tried to laugh when the three of us stood outside the door to his barracks.
“Eliška, how about a kiss for your handsome husband?” he chided her.
She blushed. I could read her face. She wanted to kiss him, but if the dirt got on her, would she ever get it off?
“Papa,” I said, stepping close to him, “I’ll kiss you right now!”
Both Marta and I kissed him on both cheeks and our lips and faces instantly were smudged with soot.
“Look, now we’ve made him all clean for you, Mother,” we chided.
She managed to smile and then walked closer to him. I can see the image of the two of them so clearly in my mind’s eye now—as if cast in eternal slow motion. Mother walks up to her once-elegant husband, who is now dressed in an old flannel coat that I have never seen. The white of his eyes shining out from coal-dusted skin. His black mustache erased from his face. And his once-full cheeks now sunken to two empty wells.
But it is Father’s hands that I remember most clearly. How they trembled as they took hold of Mother’s narrow shoulders. How he kissed her on the top of her head so not to leave a smudge of dirt on her beautiful face.
“
Milačku
,” he whispers.
“
Lasko Moje
,” she whispers back.
He closes his eyes as he kisses her again, as if he were wishing something that was now impossible. That, instead of being in the cold outside the Dresden barracks, he had transported my mother and him to the street of their first kiss, or to our apartment with its view of the Vltava.
In the cold, I think of the story Father had told us of how when the swans were frozen and trapped in the river, the men and women of Prague cut them out to free them. And yet not a single one, when we were all rounded up for our transport, had come to help us.
CHAPTER 28
 
LENKA
 
Several months after we arrived at Terezín, a warm breeze finally replaced the mounds of snow. Marta told us she saw fields of flowers across from the orchard where she worked, which lifted her spirit a bit, though we could not see anything within the walls of the ghetto. There were few birds, and one never saw the scampering of a squirrel or the wings of a butterfly. We had insects, of course, the mosquitoes, the fleas, and lice. The smarter creatures knew enough to stay away, while those who feasted on filth and squalor were more than happy to join us.
I carried on painting my postcards. Theresa still created her enviable copies of Old Master paintings, and my beloved Rita continued to make me laugh with the faces she made as she churned out her innocuous landscapes one by one.
“It’s too bad we can’t send secret messages through our work,” she whispered to me one day. I watched as she dipped her brush into a glass pot of watery blue paint and then drew a small Star of David in the center of the page where a pond would soon be.
“Think of how da Vinci would paint one thing, and then cover it with an entirely different painting. One image buried under a layer of paint purely for the painter’s benefit, and another one created for his audience.”
I sighed. The postcard I was working on was of a water mill with a mountainscape in the background. No secret messages were encrypted inside, that much was certain.
Rita moved closer to me, her eyes alive with an idea. “What if I told you that I’ve heard rumors that a handful of artists are trying to document what’s really going on here. Some men in the studio next door are doing their own paintings . . . that some are being hidden within the ghetto. Someone even told me they have contacts with sympathetic Gentiles on the outside who want to publish them abroad.”
I looked at her with disbelief. “I don’t believe you. That’s suicidal.”
Only three weeks earlier, an entire barracks had been raided because a letter had been intercepted that contained one forbidden line:
I’m starving
.
“Imagine what they’d do if they found drawings of, say, the wooden beds filled with half-skeletal men and women, the piles of corpses we see each day,” I said skeptically. Just that morning, I had sidestepped a dead woman outside the doorway of our barracks. When someone died during the evening, they were placed outside the door to be carted away.
“You wouldn’t take the risk, Lenka?” Rita raised one of her eyebrows at me. “I know I would. There would be no doubt in my mind.”
I looked around the studio. Theresa was busy working on yet another canvas of
The Man with the Golden Helmet
. In front of me, I had painted over twenty postcards of a Bavarian windmill. And yet outside, I could hear the faint sound of a horse’s hooves as it pulled the funeral cart loaded with the dead.
I stared at my friend.
I had never been one to take risks in my life. I remembered how my schoolmate Dina had placed herself in danger just to be able to see the movie
Snow White
, while I had trembled at the thought of breaking any rule. Yet now I felt there was little more that could be taken from me. I wasn’t even sure, with the rate of starvation and disease that flooded the ghetto, that I would live another year. What did I really have to lose at this point? And didn’t I want to make an impact during what time I had left?
And so I found myself nodding to her. “Yes, Rita,” I said with more enthusiasm than I knew was inside of me. “I would.”
 
At night, the thought now became all-consuming. I could think of little else but this secret resistance movement within Terezín. I imagined myself receiving an assignment to memorialize the conditions. The filth. The squalor. The ravaged bodies. The sunken eyes.
I confided to Rita that I couldn’t get the thought out of my head. “This resistance movement would give my life here purpose . . .” I told her. “I have no husband or child to consider. I know if only given the chance to help them, I would.”
“Tell me about it,” Rita said. “I think about it every day, too.”
She let out a deep sigh and I watched as she dipped her brush into a jar of water, swirling it until it rinsed clean.
“I haven’t been able to find out any information about it, as much as I’ve tried. There is an artist who works in the technical department, by the name of Petr Kien. My friend Leah said she saw him drawing one of the old men who are hidden away upstairs in one of the attic rooms.” Rita turned her head away from me, her gaze now focused on one of the studio’s windows that had been boarded up with wood.
“Did you know that they keep the old in these attic rooms with no air, no windows. There are too many people and too little space, so the Council of Elders assigns these rooms to the people who they know won’t survive very long.”
I was, in fact, all too aware of this. On the top of our barracks, there was a room that housed six women who all looked like grandmothers. Not only did they have no windows or light, they were allotted half the amount of food rations as those of us who were young enough to work. Mother sometimes went up there and gave them a piece of fruit that Marta had smuggled from the orchard.
“This boy, Petr, is certainly part of the resistance . . . Leah tried to get more information from him, but he clammed up immediately. He told her he was drawing it for himself to keep up his artistic skills.” Rita was now shaking her head. “But even she knew better.”
 
Nearly a month later, much to Rita’s and my excitement, one of the men from the Jewish Organizing Committee came and asked for a volunteer to go work in the technical department.
“They need someone who has a good hand for drafting,” the man said.
Both Rita and I raised a hand. We were like two schoolgirls, desperate to be chosen. In both our minds we were imagining that once we got through the doorway and stepped into the drafting department, we’d be part of an underground movement that wielded brushes instead of swords.
“Please pick both of us,” I whispered under my breath. I did not want to lose my friendship with Rita over this, as badly as I wanted it.
“You with the pale eyes,” the man said, pointing to me. “What’s your name?”
“Lenka Kohn.”
“Go report now. Tell them I sent you.”
I looked quickly over at Rita, hoping she’d give me a sign that she wasn’t mad at me. I had made up my mind that if she looked upset, I would forfeit my new assignment. But Rita was not one to hold a grudge. She immediately smiled at me and mouthed the words “good luck” as I stood to follow the man out the door.
 
I met Bedřich Fritta that afternoon. I walked into the studio, which was also housed in the Magdeburg barracks, and was immediately greeted by a tall thin man who appeared to be in his midthirties.
“Are you the new recruit?” he asked. There was a trace of warmth in his voice, but mostly I heard a curiosity for more information.
“Yes, sir. I was told to come here immediately.”
“What’s your background?”
“Two and a half years at the Prague Academy.”
“Just like our young Petr Kien over there . . .” Now he smiled. I watched as he lifted his hand to point to a man in his twenties with thick black curly hair. I recognized the name as that of the man Rita had mentioned. I also now realized I had seen him before, walking through the camp prior to curfew. We all had. He was the only one who risked walking around with a sketchpad in one hand and a bottle of ink in the other. Mother had shaken her head, thinking he would end up imprisoned in the small fortress for his brazen disregard for the rules, but I had been envious of his courage.
“I’ll need to see you draw something freehand,” Fritta said, sliding a piece of paper and handing me a cartouche pen. “Here, sit down. I want to see the line of your hand . . . It will be important to know where to place you.”
I surveyed the room to decide what to draw, and chose to do a quick profile of Petr. Something about him resonated with me. Was it the thick, tempestuous hair? The fleshy mouth—lips so full they seemed to belong more on a woman than on a man—that reminded me of Josef? Or was it something else? I could feel my eyes running over the contour of his face. I noticed the thin blue vein pulsing from his temple. The curled fist resting against his cheek. His other hand with its fingers wrapped tightly around his pen. He was so completely absorbed in his work, he had neither heard Fritta mention his name to me nor realized that I had already taken my paper and pen and begun to sketch him.

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