The Lost Wife (36 page)

Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife

11.07Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

I am sure he sees both. But he chooses to respond to only one.

“Give your painting to Jíří, and don’t do anything else to put yourself in jeopardy,” he says. “Things are more dangerous now than ever. The searches will continue . . . they might even intensify.” I see pain in his eyes. “I should never have told you, Lenka.”

I feel our fingers loosen, the fire between us suddenly feels like bathwater. Petr’s hand falls to his side before fumbling to retrieve a black pen from his pocket.

“Don’t get involved in any of this, Lenka. Promise me.”

I nod my head.

Jíří is one of the most trusted and talented engineers in Terezín. Like Fritta, he was a member of the prestigious
Auf kommando
, ordered to draft the technical drawings for the expansion of the camp.

“I’ve been here since the beginning,” he tells me. “ I know every nook and cranny of this place.”

He unrolls my drawing. “It’s beautiful, Lenka.”

“Did you know Rita Meissner?” I ask him. “It was of her and her baby son, Adi.”

“No, I’m sorry, I didn’t.” He is still looking at my drawing.

“He died right after being born, and they sent Rita and Oskar East a few months later.” I paused. “I promised her and her husband I would take care of it as best I can.”

Jíří nods. “I know how important these drawings and paintings are. They are the only documentation future generations will have of Terezín. Don’t worry, Lenka, I will hide your painting in a safe place.”

He tells me that he will make a metal canister for it and bury it in the basement of the Hamburg barracks.

“There is a small antechamber when you first come down the stairs,” he says. “When it’s time for you to reclaim it, dig there.”

He does not tell me that he has performed this task for Fritta and Haas many times already. Years later, I would learn that he had wrapped the tin canister in a piece of torn cloth like a shroud and then placed it carefully in the ground. Fritta’s and Haas’s works were buried elsewhere: Fritta’s in the field and Haas’s bricked up within the walls of one of the barracks. But my drawing was just like theirs—a time capsule of the pain of Terezín, planted in secret within the camp’s own walls.

CHAPTER 45

LENKA

There was severe hunger in Terezín. There was disease. There was exhaustion and there was overcrowding. But despite the horrific conditions and overwhelming sense of despair, we still somehow managed to create art.

The Nazis had forbidden anyone to bring musical instruments into Terezín, as they were not considered a necessity. Karel Frölich smuggled in his violin and viola, Kurt Maier an accordion. Then there was the legend of the cello: its owner, prior to his transport, carefully dismantled it into a dozen pieces; once he was inside Terezín, he put them back together. An old piano, with only one leg, was discovered. It was propped up against a wall and bolstered with some extra support and under Bernard Koff ’s masterful fingers, it came to life.

Eventually the musicians of Terezín grew defiant. Gossip floated around the camp that Rafael Schachter, one of the most talented and beloved conductors in the ghetto, was organizing a performance of Verdi’s
Requiem
.

“A requiem is a mass for the dead,” Otto told me, shaking his head. “Has the man lost his mind?”

“He’s being brave,” I said. “He’s standing up to the injustice of being imprisoned.”

“He’s going to get a bullet in his brain. That’s what he’s going to get if he goes ahead with it.”

“They didn’t do anything when the children staged
Brundíbar
.”

“This will be different, Lenka. This is the musical equivalent of an uprising.”

I didn’t know what to believe. What I did know was that the Council of Elders had gotten wind of Schacter’s idea and were not keen on the idea of a Jewish choir performing a Catholic mass. “Terezín is the only place the Nazis control where anything Jewish can still be performed,” they argued. “They’ve banned it everyplace else.”

Schachter would not be deterred.

“It is one of our few remaining freedoms,” he said in his defense. “The Germans sing their Nazi slogans, their marching song. Let us do our own requiem on our terms. Our voices rising and united.”

Schachter campaigned for the support of people within the camp and many joined with him. His performance of
The Bartered Bride
was legendary. He had conducted the opera while standing at the half-broken piano, the instrument now supported by several stacked, wooden boxes. I was in the audience when the opera was performed, the night so freezing that water that had been left in pots froze and audience members had to cluster together to keep warm. But I remember that the performance transported us. Many people even wept, they were so grateful. Against the austerity of our surroundings, the sound of those voices evoked such a strong storm of emotion that, when I scanned the audience, I saw not only tears of joy, but tears of hope and rapture as well.

Schacter’s choral singers remained fiercely loyal to him. Once he gained the approval of the Council of Elders to perform the requiem, he set out to work on what became a theatrical tour de force. It would be his own act of mutiny against the tyranny of Nazism, set to Verdi’s score.

One hundred and twenty singers elected to lend their voices in support of Schacter’s cause. At one rehearsal, he rallied his singers. “You are all brave for joining me,” he told them. “Yes, we are Jews singing a Catholic text.” He took a deep breath. “But this is not just any requiem, this is one that will be sung in honor of all of our fallen brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. Our friends . . . who have already perished at their hands.”

On the days leading up to the performance, Petr paints posters in black and gold ink announcing the production. I help him tack up the announcements around the camp. I am giddy with excitement to hear it.

My frail parents see this evening as a big night out. Mother does her best to enhance her appearance, biting her chapped lips for lipstick and squeezing her cheeks for rouge. But there is no gilded state theater, no velvet dress and string of pearls for Mother, no black suit and silk waistcoat for Father. Mother is in rags, and her hair has turned completely white. They are two old people, transparent shadows of what they once were.

That night, my parents, sister, and I huddle with hundreds of others around the makeshift stage. The one-legged piano is in the center of the stage and comes to life under the masterful hands of Gideon Kein. Frölich stands with his violin, caressing the strings to make it sing, rivaling even the best voice within the choir.

Even now, as an old woman, when I hear a violinist, no other musician reduces me to tears the way Karel Frölich did when he played in Terezín. As I watched him that night, the instrument cradled between his neck and bony shoulder, his eyes closed and his hollow cheek pressed against the wood, both man and violin appeared locked in an eternal embrace.

I’m sure I was not the only one who felt chills run through her body. With linked hands, those hundred and twenty singers sang more beautifully, more powerfully, than any others I had ever heard before or after.

But a few days after the performance, the underlying message was not lost on the Nazis. Every one of the singers who had participated in it was sent on the next transport east. Rafael Schachter remained at Terezín.

Schacter repeated the performance, and again, all one hundred and twenty singers were sent on the next transport east.

The third and last time the requiem was performed in the camp, Schacter only managed to corral sixty singers to perform.

The irony was not lost on anyone.

Every singer who performed in the requiem was singing a mass for his or her own death.

CHAPTER 46

JOSEF

In the years since Amalia’s death, I often wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing and my mind addled by dreams I can’t understand. I imagine that I hear the sound of my beeper, or the voice from my answering service, telling me that I am late to a delivery. I hear the sound of my daughter calling out, as she so often did when she was a little girl, for a glass of water or a lost teddy bear or a simple reassurance that my wife and I are home. And then there are the panic attacks that begin late at night, when the house is quiet, when Jakob has fallen asleep to the sound of the television and I lie awake thinking,
How have I managed to grow so very old? To be so very alone?

I push the covers back with my wrinkly feet. The hems of my pajama bottoms are frayed and parts are threadbare, but I have yet to replace them. They were a gift from Rebekkah for Father’s Day years before. I can still remember the Lord & Taylor box, the longstemmed rose with the black script writing, and the thick white bow. “Green to match your eyes,” she said. And as I crumpled up the clouds of white tissue and placed the pajamas back in the box, I wanted to kiss my baby girl in the middle of her forehead, even though she was then nearly forty years old.

I often wonder if it’s the curse of old age, to feel young in your heart while your body betrays you. I can feel the slackness of my sex, curled underneath my boxer shorts, yet I still can close my eyes and remember those few days with Lenka before my family and I left for England. I can see her lying on my bed, my torso rising above her, her eyes burning into mine.

I can see her arms reaching for me, sliding around my shoulders, her fingers clasping behind my neck. I can see the pale of her throat as she tosses her head back, that fountain of dark hair grazing the pillow. Her narrow waist held between my two hands.

I torture myself sometimes by conjuring up the weight of Lenka in my arms. I try to force myself to remember the sound of her laughter, that giggle as I playfully lay her down on the bed. The sense of bottomlessness as I enter her, travel through her. When I made love to her—was within her—there never seemed to be an end.

In my dreams, I pull up her hair. I kiss her neck, her eyelids. I kiss her shoulder, her perfect mouth.

I find her spine with my finger and trace each vertebra as she pulls herself around me. Her legs lock like she is climbing a tree, clutching my back so tightly that I am pressed into her, so hard that I feel my bones imprinted on her flesh.

And in these thoughts I am still a young man in my twenties, vital and strong. I have a head full of black hair and a chest that is not concave but robust, and a heart that needs no medicine. I am Lenka’s beloved and she is mine, and in these dreams there is no threat of war, no dire need for passports and exit visas, for ships that will be torpedoed and letters that will remain unanswered. They are dreams.

Mine.

Silly. Old. Mine.

And they keep me from ever resting. Perhaps from dying.

My head full of dreams. My heart full of ghosts.

I sit up and wiggle my feet into my slippers. I adjust the tuner on the radio and fall asleep to the sounds of Duke Ellington.

And dream again. Then I wake up, wipe the drool from my lips, and slide a hand down my pajamas trousers to see if I’m still all there.