The Lost Wife (35 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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That evening, after the others have packed away their work and headed out the door, Petr and I stay at our desks.
Otto lingers a little longer, his eyes shifting from me to Petr.
“Everything good with you, Lenka?” he asks. Again, he reminds me of my father. His sweet concern and the softness of his voice as he asks his questions, always careful not to appear too forward or direct.
I wonder if Otto thinks Petr and I are having an affair. Even though Petr is married, affairs are not out of the question here. When everyone is convinced that they are soon going to die, a warm body, a beating heart, can cause them to do things they would never have contemplated before.
Otto looks at us, then makes his way to the door. “See you both tomorrow,” he says. His voice is sad.
“Yes, Otto.” I try to sound chipper. “See you tomorrow.”
He gives me a slow wave and a paternal look of warning. I smile and shake my head.
Petr does not bother to say good-bye. He pulls five tubes of paint out of the drawers. His hands are strong and assured; he knows the palette he wants to employ even before he makes the first brushstroke.
Cadmium blue. Titanium white. Burnt umber.
“Sit,” he says. I obey without thinking. I am dizzy just at the thought of his eyes fixed on me, and that he has considered me worthy enough to paint.
He squeezes out the pigment carefully, reverently. Little oily blobs on a small, tin tray. He unrolls a piece of canvas, hidden beneath a pile of drawings on his desk. It is ragged at its edges, its shape not quite a rectangle or square.
There are no stretcher boards to staple it around, so I watch as Petr flattens it with his hand and pushes two pins into the top corners to secure it to the top of his desk.
“Don’t look at me, Lenka. Look at the door.”
So I do. I focus on the threshold. The wooden framing. The imagined sight of my colleagues walking in and out, the shadows of those who have come to Terezín before me and left before I knew their names.
The minutes pass. Perhaps now it’s been an hour. We will soon be pressed for time, as curfew will be called. My heart is thundering in my chest. My body is laced with fear that a German soldier might come and inspect the room, and adrenaline from the excitement of watching Petr work. He is painting so quickly now. His wrist travels across the canvas with the speed of an ice skater.
My thoughts are now overtaking me. Part of me wants to leap from my seat and get my own canvas, my own palette of paints. I imagine Petr and me as mirror images, each sketching the other’s reflection.
“Stand still, Lenka,” he says. “Please.”
Now the minutes seem like hours.
I feel so thirsty. I imagine paint bleeding into dry, parched cloth.
My neck begins to ache and the thought I have been fighting to repress surfaces like a wound.
A sense of loneliness overcomes me. I haven’t been touched—not touched the way I am craving to be touched at this moment with Petr’s eyes hard upon me, his hands working deftly, the sound of wet pigment whisking across canvas.
“Lenka,” he says. “Don’t close your eyes.”
I redden. “Yes . . . sorry. Sorry.” I am almost ashamed to be having these thoughts.
I look at his black hair, the angles of his face, the white of his fingers as they hold his brush. I feel a stirring within me, an urge to kiss him. I long to be close to someone. I have almost forgotten what it is like to be held.
I try to conjure up the thought of Petr’s wife, Ilse. I imagine them lying side by side, the hurried passion of their lovemaking, not a feast of the senses, but the quick sating of a hunger.
“Lenka, be still. We’re almost done. Yes . . . there it is, we’re almost done.”
I look over at the canvas. I am a creamy-white skin, dark hair falling behind a sharp edge of shoulders. Two blue-white eyes. My gaze sharp. My focus piercing and unflinching. My face more beautiful than I believe it actually is.
CHAPTER 44
 
LENKA
 
With the painting between us, it is as if Petr and I have become lovers who have never touched. He has looked at me, studied me; he has seen me with razor-sharp eyes. Ask anyone who has been painted and they will tell you they have never felt more vulnerable than when they were sitting for hours under the gaze of another’s eyes. Clothed or unclothed, you are naked all the same.
 
The next day, over lunch, I ask him if he is doing secret paintings other than the portraits.
He doesn’t say anything at first. He stares at his bowl of cloudy soup and remains quiet.
“Lenka,” he says at last. “I don’t want to lie to you . . .” He looks up at me and his eyes meet mine. “But I don’t want to get you involved.”
“But I want to get involved, Petr. What else can I do? Am I supposed to do drawings of the railroad every day for a gang of Nazis who are waiting for the chance to see me dead?”
Petr pushes his bowl to the side and stares ahead. In front of us, our colleagues are eating their rations without thinking. Hunger before taste. They remind me of an army of ants performing every motion, every task, without thinking.
“Yes, Lenka, I’m working on secret paintings, if that’s what you’re asking.”
He then goes on to tell me what I’ve been suspecting, that there is indeed an underground network of painters illustrating the atrocities. Petr is working with Fritta and Haas and a man by the name of František Strass, who has non-Jewish family members on the outside. They are working to get the paintings to people who want to expose the atrocities of the ghetto.
 
Strass, a shrewd businessman who had been a successful merchant with a passion for collecting Czech art, was now running his own trading house from his barracks in Terezín. With some other prisoners, he was exchanging food he received in care packages—jars of marmalade or boxes of chocolate, biscuits, and cigarettes—for things he needed in the camp. But he was also smuggling the paintings done by some of the artists working in the technical department to his Gentile relatives on the outside. Haas and Fritta, a painter named Ferdinand Bloch, and even Petr and Otto were all passing their forbidden paintings on to him.
Once he had the paintings in his hands, Strass regularly bribed two Czech brothers who were policemen in Terezín to get them out of the ghetto.
“Strass has succeeded in getting our paintings to some of his relatives and other people who are sympathetic to our cause.”
“Oh my goodness,” I say, barely able to contain my elation.
“I know, Lenka, but this has to remain a secret. Promise me. The situation is more dangerous than ever now. Strass’s relatives have made contact with people in Switzerland. There is talk that they might even publish some of our paintings to show the world what is really going on.”
 
I tell Petr about the drawing of Rita and her baby that I’ve hidden in my suitcase.
We are outside the Magdeburg barracks before curfew.
“Lenka, there might be searches.” He is visibly worried for me. “There was a raid on Strass’s barracks a few weeks ago. They found paintings underneath his mattress that were, thankfully, not political. But still, the Germans are on the lookout for
Greuelpropaganda
now.”
“
Greuelpropaganda
?” I did not know the meaning of the word.
“It means work that portrays the Reich unfavorably. The literal translation is ‘horror propaganda.’ ”
“Horrific images of Terezín?” I ask Petr.
“Yes, Lenka.” He pauses for a moment and looks me straight in the eyes. “In other words, the truth.”
 
Petr and I sit with each other for what seems like hours. I am wringing my hands.
“What do I do with the painting I’ve done of Rita and Adi?”
He looks at me as though he is not focusing on my question, but searching for what to say. Am I the only one who feels that strange sense of hunger between us? That feeling I remember from that summer so long ago in Karlovy Nary.
There are no wedding rings in Terezín. But I try to force the image of one on Petr’s hand.
I feel like I am choking as he stares at me.
Was it my hand that reached out to his first or was it his that reached out for mine?
I still can’t remember, but I do know that I felt the warmth of his hand flooding through me as it first covered my knuckles, then squeezed the fingers so tightly I felt I might break from the intensity of his touch.
“Petr,” I whisper. But he interrupts the thought that is about to fall from my lips, suddenly bringing us back to the painting.
“Give it to Jíří. He’ll know what to do,” he finally says.
Again he squeezes my hand. Although both of our hands are cold, I feel like I’m on fire. And I want to cry.
For months I have wanted to tell him that I, too, yearned for a chance to record the truth, to send my paintings out to the world like Haas and Fritta were doing, but now those feelings are muddied with a desire for something that is even more impossible.
He does not kiss me as I imagined him doing. As I hoped he would do. He just looks into my eyes.
And when he looks, does he see a woman who is hungry for his touch? Or an artist who is nearly as hungry to use her talent for the good of her people?

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