The Lost Wife (26 page)
Authors: Alyson Richman
My fifteen minutes every day with Otto are my lifeline to information.
One day I dare to be bold.
“I’ve heard Fritta and Haas are working to get their drawings to the outside,” I whisper.
Otto doesn’t answer me. He chews more slowly. He closes his eyes as if he is pretending he didn’t hear what I just said.
“Otto?” I repeat my question. Still, he doesn’t answer me.
“Otto?” My voice is now a bit firmer.
“I heard you the first time, Lenka,” he says. He wipes his mouth with a handkerchief that is the color of dirty dishwater.
“Did you know I have a wife and five-year-old daughter?” he says changing the subject. “Her name is Zuzanna.”
I am shocked. It is the first time he has mentioned their existence.
“I don’t see them as much as I want to. At night, I miss them so much I close my eyes and try to imagine that I am digging a tunnel between my barracks and theirs.”
“I’m so sorry, Otto,” I say. “I had no idea.”
“It’s a terrible thing to go to sleep dreaming that you are clawing at the earth.”
I say nothing. I nod my head.
“It’s as though you’re buried all the time. Suffocating.”
Again I nod.
“No,” he tells me, “I know nothing of any resistance.”
He looks at me and his eyes are full of warning. The irises look like stop signs instructing me to halt.
“Lenka,” he says, reaching for my hand. “It’s time for us to go inside.”
I watched in amazement as Otto started on a watercolor of the Terezín ramparts. He worked quickly, first doing the dark lines of the brick walls, then filling them in with bleeding colors of soft browns and yellow. With a nimble hand he painted the soft, cloudy haze of the mountains beyond and patches of watery green. The next day, after he must have secretly stored the painting so that it could dry, he took a brush with pen and ink and painted the roping barbed wire like a knife blade cutting through the page.
I knew the Nazis had forbidden any kind of illustrations that depicted them unfavorably. We had been told that anyone caught doing so would be either imprisoned in the small fortress or put on the next transport east. Thus, it was no surprise to me that I had not yet seen any depictions of the atrocities that were ongoing within the camp. If these paintings existed, they could only be made in secret, either at night in the barracks or in crowded places where no one would be watching. Still, I would be lying if I did not say that I sensed a secret language flowing between Fritta and Haas while we all worked.
“Write this down!” they’d occasionally bark to each other over their desks. It was as though they were telling each other what they were recording.
Fritta and Haas left us alone as long as we met our deadlines. I’m sure they knew many of us were pilfering the supplies for our own work in our rooms. Otto was even bold enough to work on some of his own paintings during the day. He taught me how to keep my sketchpad filled with my illustrations for the Germans, and my own personal work hidden between the pages. If an SS officer surprised us at the studio, we could just pull down one of the pages in the sketchpad to cover what we were really painting.
I had yet to become friends with Petr Kien. There were times when I saw him secretly sketching program covers announcing an opera or a play that was going to be performed before curfew. We would later see these posters nailed to a post by one of the barracks, and we would all congregate to watch that evening’s entertainment.
As I look back on it now, it’s hard to believe how much artistic activity we managed to make time for in Terezín. Although the Germans turned a blind eye to the performances as long as they were not critical of the Reich, there was always some inevitable cruelty. How many times would we see German soldiers watching one of our performances, clapping at the tenor’s wonderful range, or the soprano’s mesmerizing aria, and the very next day ordering those same singers on the next transport east.
I would often see Rita at one of these performances. She loved the singing, she told me, and she had started seeing a man named Oskar, who had a good voice and was often chosen as one of the leads.
They were a handsome couple, with her high cheekbones and cropped blond hair, and his broad shoulders and almond-shaped brown eyes. When he sang for the others, he would always take his hand and place it over his heart, as if he were coaxing out each note in the name of his beloved. Of course, that was Rita, who stood in the corner with her radiant smile and shining eyes. In the few moments before curfew sounded, I often saw them sneaking behind doors and other hidden places within the camp to steal a kiss, and I would smile, happy that they had both discovered a bit of romance under such misery.
As crowded and disease-ridden as Terezín was, romances like Rita and Oskar’s somehow did bloom. I heard lots of the girls in the barracks talking of boyfriends and secret meetings. I saw how they tried to groom themselves with nothing but their bare, dirty fingers and a spot of saliva on their palm. I saw how they pinched their cheeks and bit their lips so the tiny droplets of blood would bring a semblance of color to them.
But I did not have anyone, just the ghost of Josef in my heart. In the nights I was able to dream, I dreamed only of him.
CHAPTER 30
There were countless times over the years when I swore I saw Lenka. I’d be on the subway and see someone who could have been her. I’d be on vacation with Amalia and the children and think I saw Lenka walking away from the pool. At other times I’d be on a bus, and swear I had seen the back of a head that was the same shape as hers, the hair the same color. I would hold my breath until the woman turned her head and I could see it was not her.
This is what Amalia referred to as a “ghost day.” When you saw those you’ve been looking for in the shadow of another. Isaac once called it a “projection of your longing,” but I preferred the simplicity of Amalia’s term. She had coined it early on in our marriage. All she had to do when I came home tired from the office was to say she’d had one of those days, and no further words were needed.
When she had one, I’d simply nod to her, my eyes sincere with understanding. I’d try to smile, and squeeze her hand.
After she died, I sometimes let myself wonder what her ghost days had been like compared with mine. I was looking for a wife, a lover I had left behind. She was searching for a mother, a father, and a sister who was supposed to have joined her on her journey. Mine was lost love, hers was lost family. But loss was loss, wasn’t it? Cold and white. Blue and dark. Cut a vein and it bleeds.
I am in love with a shadow. I look for her in the darkness of the hallway. I search for her in the eyes of the old women crossing the street. My second wife, whom I used to spoon every morning as we lay in bed, was not the saddle for my sleep; it was Lenka, who visited me in my dreams. She still haunts me like a lioness, a cat with piercing eyes. Over sixty years have passed and her shadow still walks beside me. Her shadow stretching long and black—waiting for me to reach for her—waiting for me to extend my hand.
In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to its own current. If you were to corner it in a dam, true love is so bountiful it would flow over. Even in separation, even in death, it moves and changes. It lives within memory, in the haunting of a touch, the transience of a smell, or the nuance of a sigh. It seeks to leave a trace like a fossil in the sand, a leaf burned into baking asphalt. I never stopped loving Lenka, even when my letters were returned and the newspapers revealed the deaths of millions of Jews who had been incinerated into a ceaseless cloud of black smoke.
I told my daughter, the first time she fell in love, not to hold it too close. Think of yourself in a warm, summer pool, I told her, concentric circles rippling all around you. Golden beams of sunlight flooding your hair, striking your face. Inhale it. Breathe it. It will not leave you. If you place sunlight in your palms, it will turn to shadow. If you put fireflies in ajar, they will die. But if you love with wings on, you will always feel the exhilaration of being suspended in flight.
She fell in love with a boy in college who proposed to her the night before graduation. He was tall and dark like I was. He was quiet and loved books. I liked Benjamin. I saw how he sat at the table with Amalia and me, looking at us with a reverent gaze, a trace of confusion in what he saw.
It was the confusion that made me think he was the right man for Rebekkah. He looked at the quiet between Amalia and me, the careful, almost cautious compassion, and I could read his mind:
Let this never be me.
Let this never be me.
And that is what bound me to him. Yes, let this not be you. Kiss my daughter and feel the warm breeze in your face, the warmth of the sun on your eyelids. Embrace the fluttering of butterflies in your stomach. If I give you my blessing, marry her and make love to her as if you were the king and queen of your own kingdom. Feel the beating of her heart on top of yours. Seal yourself to each other.
But betray her and I will burn your eyes out. Love her purely and do not let her go. May the two of you be rewarded with the songs of angels in your ears.
When he finished his dessert and reached for her hand, placing his on top of hers, I saw the confirmation I needed. I saw how his eyelids closed, as if he were slipping into her. As fluid as honey. As strong as a current of waves.
And I, too, closed my eyes.
CHAPTER 31
My grandson was born five years later. I stood in the waiting room with Benjamin and Amalia. The doctor handling the delivery was a protégé of mine. I knew his hands at the sight of them. They were large and strong. He had delivered over three hundred babies and I trusted him implicitly. His cesareans were flawless, and his sutures were seamless and healed without the faintest trace of scarring.
Rebekkah had never been more beautiful than when she was pregnant. Her long hair grew thick and glossy, her pale skin glowed.
Amalia sewed her maternity dresses. Benjamin brought her milk shakes and bouquets of lily of the valley on his way home from the office. He had grown wiry after law school, and the two of them looked like one of the medieval paintings I remembered in the churches back in Prague, my daughter, the Madonna with her swollen belly, and Benjamin one of the wise men bearing her gifts.
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