The Lost Wife (31 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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His comment rendered me speechless. Wasn’t it a wonderful thought, to imagine every soul alight in the darkened sky? I reached for his hand and held it close to mine. As the projection of planets and stars filled the black dome, I saw the look of awe spread over his face, and I just wanted to watch him forever. I wanted to witness how he experienced the world, how he learned to navigate his way through it. And as I watched him grow, I mourned what I had missed with my own son. Jakob kept me at a distance, or perhaps I was the one who had created the distance. I would never truly know.
But what I did know was that I wanted to glue my grandson and me to those seats in the planetarium and count every star alongside him. And how I wanted his thought to be true! That, in death, I’d become a star. Suspended from above, burning brightly over him. Protecting him with a pure white light.
 
His wife-to-be is beautiful, elegant, and refined. Her red hair reminds me of Lenka’s mother’s and sister’s.
I had met a handful of his girlfriends over the years. The brunette he met at Brown his freshman year, the one who did not shave her legs and supported animal rights so fervently it seemed as though it were her religion. The curvy Italian girl in his sophomore year, whose breasts were so full I kept thinking she’d begin lactating at the table, and the twin who had one brown eye and one blue, her face all angles and her body all curves.
Then there was the British girl he met during his junior year abroad, who had the most lovely laugh I had ever heard and who charmed me even though I was now nearly eighty-five and a widower for almost ten years.
His visits to me began to decrease around the time he entered law school. He was busier, so I understood. There were his studies, the pressure of getting good grades, plus the pull of alcohol and music in the New Haven bars.
He had not dated Eleanor more than a year when they announced their engagement, and at that time I had only met her once, at Rebekkah’s apartment on the evening of Rosh Hashanah. She was quiet and polite. I could tell she was intelligent by her careful choice of words and her interest in the books that lined my daughter’s shelves.
I had brought my son with me that evening, and it was Eleanor’s gentle kindness to him that fully won me over. She sat next to him and tried to coax him out of his shell. My son was now fifty, with a gray beard and a receding hairline that accentuated the shine of his taut, red skin.
She asked him what he was reading and he rambled off a list so long I was sure her head was spinning. Yet minutes later, I heard them talking about one title at length, and I saw a faint glimmer of light in his eyes. I wanted to go over and kiss her, so happy was I that Jakob had finally connected with someone.
I saw how Jason beamed in her company. How when she was standing, he couldn’t help but gravitate toward her. I was an insatiable observer that evening, also watching my own daughter, with the first sprouts of gray running through her wiry curls, cutting bagels and making sure there was enough cream cheese and lox for everyone. I watched how Benjamin, now deep in the throes of middle age, still seemed to be in love with her. And that gaze warmed me, because they would soon be celebrating thirty-three years of marriage, and it was no small feat to keep the embers of love aflame for so long.
That night, my son and I stayed up late together and watched television. The gentle hum reminded me of the quiet times between his mother and me. I couldn’t help but be sad that Amalia would not see Jason’s wedding, and share the joy of meeting his beautiful new bride. But then I thought of my grandson’s comment nearly twenty years earlier, at the planetarium, and hoped that he was right. That she would be there, watching in her own quiet way, one of many stars beaming down.
CHAPTER 38
 
LENKA
 
By her own reckoning, Rita was now six months along. Whenever I stopped by the Lautscher workshop, she was almost always sitting, still painting postcards. The completed, dried ones were stacked in piles to her right. The wet ones were set in front of her.
Her hand was still steady. I noticed the scenes of the horses and the bales of hay, the mother with the child sitting on her lap, the Nativity scene that she had painted in abundance even though it was only September.
Theresa was standing in the corner by the easel, painting a copy of Rembrandt’s
Jewish Bride
. Had the SS commissioned this as a sadistic form of irony, or was it Theresa’s quiet form of defiance? I looked quickly at the canvas and saw the gold and red of the bride’s dress executed in Theresa’s delicate brushstrokes.
“It’s beautiful,” I told her.
“I’m hoping they don’t know the title,” she said. “They just told me to do another Rembrandt.”
I smiled at her and she looked at me directly.
“You know they say Rembrandt’s wife was a Jew.”
I nodded and each of us smiled at the other with satisfaction.
As I turned to face Rita, however, I noticed how pale she was.
“How are you?” I asked, touching her shoulder.
She was quiet for a moment.
“I’m tired, but I’m better than so many others here.”
I knew the truth of what she was saying. There had been an outbreak of typhus and the infirmary was flooded. The dreaded roundups continued. Those inmates who were lagging were sent east to Poland.
We saw the smoke rising from the ghetto’s crematorium, its two chimneys burning with the bodies of those who had died in the infirmary or at work. And while the only executions were rare hangings of those who had tried to escape, two gallows remained in the center of the ghetto as a stark warning to all of us.
And still, new trains arrived weekly with more and more Jews.
On some days, we would hear whispers from someone who had overheard some information coming from within the Council of Elders that a thousand would be arriving from Brno; on another day there might be fifty from Berlin, a week later another thousand from Vienna or a few hundred from Munich or Kladno. We saw the new arrivals walking down the street from the windows of our workplaces: women holding their babies in one arm and a suitcase in the other. There were the young and single always walking in front, the elderly and unaccompanied lagging behind.
It reminded me of a funeral procession, these men, women, and children walking with the look of death and defeat on their faces. I couldn’t imagine how the ghetto, which was already overflowing with people, could accommodate a single person more.
One evening, just before curfew, Rita confided to me that she had seen Fritta in her barracks the night before. He had come to draw the woman who was known as the Fortune-Teller, an ancient woman who always wore a tattered shawl.
Rita lived in one of the attic dormitories, where, because of the pitch of the roofline, there were no three-tiered bunks. There were only mattresses and straw on the floor, and a few low wooden beds.
Fritta found the Fortune-Teller in a corner, sitting next to a window lined with metal pots and pans. “He drew her quickly in pen and ink,” Rita told me. Her white hair tied with a rag, her spectacles, her slackened jaw, and her toothless mouth.
“He said nothing as I watched him draw,” she said. “It was an amazing thing to see.” Within seconds, he had exaggerated the weight of her head on a narrow body, the length of her spindly arms, her two enormous eyes.
She described how he drew the window where she was sitting as if it had been flung open, even though it remained firmly shut. He drew the brick wall that was next door as if it were broken down the middle. He drew the side of a rampart, an old sparse tree in the courtyard, and an iron gate on an ancient wall. Sweeping from one corner of the paper were three squares of laundry on a clothesline, dangling like white flags.
“It took him less than an hour,” Rita whispered. “The Fortune-Teller asked if he wanted her to read his cards.”
“And what did he say?” I was now riveted by the story.
“He said that sadly, he already knew what lay in store for him.”
I shook my head.
Rita closed her eyes as if she, too, knew her fate. “The Fortune-Teller did not disagree.”
 
I continued to hear whispers of the many paintings and drawings that Fritta and his colleague Leo Haas were doing in secret, but I saw only two of them, and that was by accident. One morning I had come to our drafting room early, as I had wanted to collect some materials for Mother before the others arrived.
When I got there, the room was still dark. A single incandescent light was lit at the back. I moved closer, only to see a single figure hunched over the wash sink. It was Fritta.
“Sir?” My voice sounded far louder than I had intended. At the sound of it, Fritta swung back. One of his hands must have jerked to the side, as a glass jar came crashing to the ground.
“Lenka?” he cried as he whirled around. “You scared me!”
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, sir . . .” I must have sounded like a nervous child as I tried to apologize. I immediately rushed to the floor where the glass had shattered and tried to collect the mess with my hands.
“Don’t, Lenka. Don’t.” He put up a hand to stop me. “You’ll injure yourself and what use will you be for me then?” He quickly went to the corner of the room to retrieve a short broom and knelt to clean up the shards of glass.
“You should know better than to sneak up on someone before work hours.” He looked more perplexed than angry with me. “And why are you here so early? What if someone caught you?”
He worked quickly and efficiently as he spoke to me, pushing the glass shards onto a piece of cardboard then dumping them in a waste bin near his desk.
I followed him as he walked.
“I’m sorry, sir. I should have known better.” I avoided his gaze. My words were caught in my throat as I struggled to come up with an explanation for my early arrival. “I . . . I just wanted to get a head start on those illustrations of the pipeline for the SS,” I lied. As I stood next to him, I could not help but see two fresh pen-and-ink drawings on his desk.
The first was a drawing of a transport arriving. The second was of the old people’s dormitory in Kavalier. Three skeletal bodies, again sketched in pen and ink, were painted as seen through the bars of an arched window. Their bodies were ravaged by starvation—hollow eyes, sunken cheeks, and elongated necks, twisting underneath the flimsy blankets of their bunks.
“You needn’t get here early, Lenka. The hours you already put in for the Germans are more than enough.”
I nodded and looked again at the sketches on his desk. Fritta must have noticed this, for his eyes suddenly met mine and held my gaze, as if to say,
Don’t question me about those drawings
.
He quickly spun around and flipped the drawings upside down.
A second later, we heard the sound of footsteps. We both turned to look. It was Haas.
“What the hell is she doing here?” he demanded when he caught sight of me.
“I’m sorry . . .” I started to stammer the same excuse I had given Fritta, but Haas lifted his hand to stop me. He clearly had no use for my excuses.
“Kish,” he barked. Kish was his nickname for Fritta. “We said no others.”

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