The Lost Wife (38 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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If those we love visit us when we dream, those who torment us almost always visit us when we’re still awake.
And in those nights of sleeplessness, they all appear. No, not Lenka. But my father. My mother. Věruška.
Often I can anticipate their arrival, particularly when there is a milestone in my family: the night before my wedding to Amalia, the day before my son’s bris, my children’s Bar and Bat Mitzvah, Rebekkah’s wedding, and now her son’s.
And other times they appear without reason. Three figures who look the same as they did ten, twenty, now sixty years before.
To those who believe the dead do not visit them, I say you have cataracts in your soul. I am a man of science, yet I believe in guardian angels and the haunting by ghosts. I have experienced with my own eyes the miracle of life, the complexity of gestation, and still believe that something as perfect as a baby cannot be created without the assistance of God.
And so, when the dead come to visit me, I don’t bother to try to close my eyes. I sit up and invite them in. Although my bedroom remains pitch-black, I see them as clearly as if they were in my living room, the light of a floor lamp shining on them.
Father. A gray suit. Broken glasses on his forehead. His bald head and crinkled eyes.
He holds in his perfectly smooth hands a book he read to me as a child:
The Story of Otesánek.
Mother. She is wearing a black suit with gold buttons. Around her neck is a string of long pearls. She holds in her hands a box of photographs. It contains a photo of me as a young boy on a horse in Karlovy Vary and the one at my Bar Mitzvah. I always wondered if she had ever placed the one of Lenka and me after our wedding with the other ones of our family in that box.
Věruška. Wrapped in scarlet taffeta. Her eyes dark and shining. She is always carrying something I can’t quite place. There are markings on the paper, and I can’t tell if it is writing or images scratched on the pad. Some mornings I am convinced it is a dance card with a few names written on the top. Other times I tell myself it’s a small sketchpad filled with markings for one of her paintings. In all the times she visits, I look at her white lineless face and I want to reach out and talk to her.
Věruška, my sister, dancing and laughing down the hallways of our book-lined apartment, the hem of her skirt pulled above her knees.
Many sleepless nights I wondered if I should call out to them. But I always feared the children might hear me—or even Amalia—as sympathetic as she was, and would worry I had finally lost my mind.
But it was no matter. I didn’t need to speak. For that is the thing about a haunting, it’s almost never communicated through words.
Every time my family came to me, I always knew they’d come back again. The only exception was when they appeared two nights before Jason’s wedding. Then I sensed that they were coming for the last time.
I could tell this was their final visit, for when they appeared, they were all smiling. Even my tempestuous little sister’s eyes were shining.
I lay on top of my bed, my pajamas damp with an old man’s perspiration, and studied them one last time.
Father placed his glasses on his nose, and they were no longer broken. Mother opened her box for me and on top was our group wedding photograph, showing Lenka, the beaming bride.
And Věruška turned her paper pad to me and revealed a drawing of two clasped hands.
I move to get up and touch them. So real they are to me, shining there in the middle of the night. I am older now than Father is as a ghost—that realization striking me deeply—as I extend my hand to touch him.
How can a son be older than his father’s ghost? How can a mother continue to comfort her elderly son from her watery grave? And how can a beloved sister ever forgive her brother when he so clearly let her down?
I am trembling. Convulsing. Wondering if this visit is a signal that I am about to die.
I try to rise, my hands still extended, my legs shaking as I step to where they stand.
I remember the sound of the thud as my body fell to the carpet. I remember vaguely the sound of the door opening, the heavy treading of my son’s footsteps coming toward me, and the sensation of his arms pulling me up.
“Dad,” he whispers. “Are you okay?”
I tell him I am. I ask for a drink of water and he leaves me to fetch it.
I don’t remember seeing him return, but when I awake, the glass is there.
I dreamed that it was not my son who brought me back to bed, but the three members of my family. That they had huddled around me and lifted me back onto my mattress, pulled up the covers, and coaxed me back to sleep.
And I knew that from then on, should any of them visit me again, it would no longer be on a sleepless night. It would be the same as when Lenka comes . . . in my dreams.
CHAPTER 50
 
LENKA
 
In the spring of 1944, we are told that special visitors are coming to visit Terezín and that certain improvements will be made. Commandant Rahm, who is in charge of the ghetto now, orders additional transports east to make room for the “beautification” of the ghetto. Already eighteen thousand had been transported from Terezín, and now he was demanding that all orphans be sent east. Next were those sick with tuberculosis. A few weeks later, he orders an additional seventy-five hundred prisoners transported. A panic rushes over the ghetto as families are broken apart. One woman begs to be put on a list after her son is selected for a transport. At the station, with the train about to depart, she notices her son is not present and his name not called. Pandemonium breaks out when she is forced onto the cattle car by the SS. She is screaming for the soldiers to remove her, but they cannot make an exception, for the quota ordered by Rahm must be maintained. That evening I see her teenage son crying inconsolably outside the Sudeten barracks. A few people are trying to comfort him, but he is flailing about like a dying animal.
“I’m all alone,” he says over and over. “I’m all alone.”
That night I can’t get the sound of his cries out of my head. I reach over to touch my sister, who now shudders when she feels my fingertips.
She does not awaken from her sleep. But I’m comforted just to have her body close to mine. Anything but to be here all alone.
 
Terezín is becoming a stage. Over the next few months, fresh paint is applied to the outside of the barracks, a makeshift café suddenly appears, and the fence comes down from the central square.
We see men removing bunks from some of the barracks so that now half as many people will sleep and occupy the space. Many of us, especially the women and children, are given new clothing and shoes that actually fit.
The men who organize the operas and the concerts are told they will be able to perform, and that they should prepare something to impress the visitors.
Hans Krása rallies the children for an encore performance of
Brundibár
. Rudolf Schachter convinces the choir to sing something the observers will never forget.
My father, who, now well into our second year here, is nothing but skin and bones from working so hard, has been told to help create a small sports stadium.
Teams are established for a soccer game. The infirmary is cleaned and provided with fresh linens. The nurses are given crisp new uniforms and the sickest patients are sent on the next transport east. A large circus tent in the ghetto’s center, where more than a thousand inmates were forced to do factory work, is dismantled, and in its place grass and flowers are planted. A music pavilion is built next to the square, along with a playground for the children across from one of the barracks.
 
Three months before the delegation from the Red Cross is to arrive, the guards carry out a search both in the technical department and in František Strass’s sleeping quarters. One of the drawings that Haas had sent to the outside has been published in a Swiss newspaper and the Gestapo back in Berlin is up in arms. This will be bad publicity for the Germans, and could undermine their attempt to conceal the true conditions at Terezín from the Red Cross and the world at large.
During the search, the officers in charge find more banned drawings in Strass’s barracks, but the compositions are unsigned. The bulk of Fritta’s drawings have already been buried in the cylinder Jíří made for him. Otto has bricked his own work within a wall in the Hannover barracks, and Haas has hidden his in his attic room in the Magdeburg barracks. My own painting, thankfully, has been buried, too.
 
No arrests are made, but the tension in the technical department is thick in the air. Every time I go to work, I smell the fear.
“Keep working,” Fritta tells us as we sit at our drafting tables. “We must not get behind in our work.”
 
On June 23, 1944, the Red Cross delegation and members of the Danish ministry arrive. They are accompanied by high-ranking officials from Berlin. Commandant Rahm has scripted a filmworthy scene for their arrival and, in fact, the entire visit is filmed to be broadcast to the world. The movie is entitled
Hitler Gives a City to the Jews
.
As the men disembark from their military jeeps, they are greeted by the most beautiful girls in Terezín, their pretty figures wrapped in clean aprons and rakes in their hands. They sing as the men walk through the gates.
The Terezín orchestra plays Mozart. Fresh vegetables are on display in a shop. White-gloved bakers load fresh bread onto the shelves. There is a clothing store where you can repurchase your own confiscated pants or dress.

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