The Lost Wife (44 page)
Authors: Alyson Richman
All I wanted was palačinka.
“Crêpes,” I told him, and he squeezed my hand as one might a child’s. I imagined my younger self at my mother’s table. The white eyelet cloth, and the china plate stacked with crêpes filled with apricot jam and dusted with powdered sugar.
“How easy you are to please,” he said, smiling. We found a small café and sat down. I ordered crêpes with melted butter and jam and he a croque monsieur. We toasted each other over warm cups of tea and a shared glass of champagne. I misplaced my flowers on the way home.
That night, in a small hotel on the left bank, Carl made love to me, whispering that he loved me, and that he was so happy I was his wife. I remember I trembled in his arms. I saw my white sticklike limbs threading through his, my ankles tucked around the barrel of his back. His words sounded to me as if they were actually meant for another person. Who was I to evoke such feelings? I no longer thought of my heart as an organ of passion, but one whose only loyalty was to the blood it pumped through my veins.
Once in America, I strove to be good and dutiful. I bought the Fannie Farmer cookbook and learned to make a good casserole and a raspberry gelatin with tangerine slivers tucked inside. I told my husband how kind he was to give me a vacuum cleaner for my birthday and to bring home white roses on our anniversary.
But in order to survive in this foreign world, I had to teach myself that love was very much like a painting. The negative space between people was just as important as the positive space we occupy. The air between our resting bodies, and the breath in between our conversations, were all like the white of the canvas, and the rest our relationship—the laughter and the memories—were the brushstrokes applied over time.
When I held my husband of fifty-two years, I could never quite hear his heartbeat the way I did Josef’s in those handful of days and nights we lived together. Was it because I had grown more plump over the years, and the extra padding against my chest prevented me from feeling the rush of blood in his body in the way I remembered it flooding through Josef’s? Or was it that with a second love, we are not as attuned? My heart was thicker with my second love. It had a casing around it and I wonder what else it shut out over the years.
There were also cracks in my heart where feelings so deep and raw managed to flood through. The birth of my daughter was one of those times. When I held her in my arms and saw my reflection in her blue eyes, I felt a more overwhelming sense of emotion than I’d ever felt before. I traced each one of her features in their newborn perfection, and saw my father’s high forehead, my small narrow chin, and my mother’s smile. And I saw for the first time how, despite the isolation of our own lives, we are always connected to our ancestors; our bodies hold the memories of those who came before us, whether it is in the features we inherit or a disposition that is etched into our soul. As I grew older, I realized how little control we really have over what we are given in this world. And I no longer battled with my demons. I just grew to accept that they were a part of me. Like an ache in my bones that I try to shake every day that I awaken, an internal fight within myself not to look back, but to focus on each new day.
I named my daughter Elisa, to honor the memory of my mother. I dressed her in beautiful clothes and gave her a sketchbook when she was barely five. When I watched her clutch the colored pencils for the first time, I knew she had inherited her talent from my family. She knew not just how to replicate what she saw before her but to see beyond it, beyond the surface. To see beneath the line. My own hands were damaged from the years of deprivations, the cold, and the conditions in Auschwitz. But sometimes, for the sake of instruction, I would clutch the stem of a pencil or the handle of a paintbrush and push through the pain in order to illustrate a concept to my ever-eager daughter.
I never told my daughter when she was young the details of my life before she came into this world. She simply knew that she was named after my mother.
But the smoke of Auschwitz I did not speak of. That blackness, the mental scars—the reason for the pain in my hands—I kept a secret. Like a slip of mourning hidden beneath my clothes, sewn to my skin. I wore it every day. But I revealed it to no one.
Not even my painting did I share. Some nights when Carl and Elisa were fast asleep, I would walk into my bedroom closet, turn on the light, and close the door. There, in the corner, behind my sewing box, my plastic containers of shoes and slippers, I kept my treasured painting. It pained me that I kept it among such pedestrian things, that I had not the courage to display it or tell my family about its existence. But it was like a raw wound that I kept hidden, but nursed secretly at night. On the evenings when I could not sleep, when my nightmares got the best of me, I would pull it out from its cardboard tubing and stare at the faces of Rita and her newborn son. I would hear Carl’s breathing, imagine my sweet daughter sleeping next door, and I would finally allow myself to cry.
CHAPTER 57
I gave birth to only one child. A daughter. Carl and I tried for years for another baby, but it was as if my body couldn’t produce more than one offspring. Every stretch of vein, every bit of bone, was pulled from me to make that perfect one.
Elisa grew up strong and tall. She had her father’s American limbs. She ran fast like a colt, her amber legs stretching in mighty leaps. When I saw her on the playground as a little girl racing against the boys, I remember gasping for breath. Who was this child who could leap faster then a gazelle, who tore out her tight braids because she loved the sensation of the wind in her hair? She was mine, but she was so wild and free.
I loved that about my daughter. I loved that she was fearless, that she had passion in her heart, that she thrilled to the sun on her face and rushed to the shoreline, just so she could feel the lapping of water at her toes.
I would be the one who secretly worried. I never told her how each night I had to fight the anxiety that raced through my head, the worry that something awful might befall my child.
I would wrestle the thoughts in my head like they were lions inside me. I would fight with myself not to let the blackness of my past seep into any part of Elisa’s life. She would have a pure, golden life without shadow, I swore. I swore it up and down.
My daughter was five when she first asked about my tattoo. I will never forget the near weightlessness of her finger tracing the numbers on my arm.
“What are those numbers for?” she asked, almost mesmerized.
I had dreaded this day since her birth. What would I tell her? How could I spare her the details of my past? There was no way on earth I’d allow a single image of my nightmare to sneak into her beautiful, angelic head.
And so, that afternoon, as Elisa sat in my lap, her finger against my skin, her head against my breast, I lied to my daughter for the first time.
“When I was little, I always got lost,” I told her. “This was my ID number in case the police needed to know where to return me.”
She seemed to accept this for a while. It was when she became a teenager that she learned about the Holocaust and figured out what those numbers really meant.
“Mom, were you in Auschwitz?” I remember her asking the summer she turned thirteen.
“Yes,” I answered her, my voice cracking.
Please. Please
, I prayed, my heart thundering in my chest.
Please don’t ask me anymore. I don’t want to tell you. Leave that part of me alone.
Please. Please
, I prayed, my heart thundering in my chest.
Please don’t ask me anymore. I don’t want to tell you. Leave that part of me alone.
I could see her eyebrows rise as my own body stiffened, and knew she had recognized the fear crossing my face.
She looked at me with those ice-blue eyes of hers. My eyes. And in them I saw not only sadness, but also my daughter’s capacity for compassion.
“I’m so sorry, Mom,” she said, and came over and wrapped her long arms around me, then rocked my head against the thinness of her chest.
And she knew enough not to ask me anything more.
Although I never uttered another word about Auschwitz to my family, I still dreamed of it. If you have lived through such a hell, it never leaves you. Like the smell of the crematorium that is forever in the back of my nose, my dreams of Auschwitz are always at the back of my mind, despite all the efforts I’ve made to push them away.
How many times did I dream of the last time I saw my mother, my father, my sister? Every one of their faces appeared to me like apparitions over the years. But it was the dream where I am in Auschwitz with my daughter, Elisa, that was always the worst. That one, when it came, tortured me for days at a time.
The dreams changed as Elisa changed. When she became a teenager, my daughter grew lazy like her American friends. How many times did I ask her to clean her room, pick up her clothes, or help me peel a bowl full of vegetables before her father came home from work? But Elisa never tolerated such tedium. It was all about meeting her friends or boys.
And in those years, my dreams always began with the selection process at Terezín. She is standing next to me, my beautiful daughter. And in my dream I am begging the SS officer to send her to the right with me. I tell him: “Please! She is a good worker!” I beg him to send her to the line that I am in. But always in the dream he is prying our hands apart. He sends my daughter to the left. And I awaken, my nightgown wet with perspiration and Carl comforting me, whispering that it was only a terrible dream.
It was always in those moments, when my husband held me, that I knew that I was lucky to have found him. Those hands on my shoulders never lost their warmth during all the years of our marriage. They were always the hands of the young soldier who found me in the DP camp. Who brought me a blanket and a warm meal. Who told me in broken German that he was Jewish, too.
Every night as I went to bed, I looked at the black-and-white photograph of him in his army uniform. His thick head of hair, his dark brown eyes full of the compassion he had since that first day. This is how I filled the canvas of our marriage. I filled it with gratitude. For no matter what else happened, I would always think of Carl as the one who saved me.
He Americanized my name to “Lanie,” and gave me a good life with a healthy daughter. She learned the highly prized craft of art restoration and became a mother herself to my beautiful Eleanor. Eleanor, who inherited her swanlike grace from my mother and made heads turn whenever she walked into a room. She took to languages the way a duck takes to water. At her graduation from Amherst, she took home nearly every prize.
When Carl fell ill, I finally became the caretaker in our marriage. I held his head when he needed to vomit, and I made him only soft food when his stomach couldn’t digest anything else. When the chemo claimed his thick white hair, I told him he was still my handsome soldier. I held his brown-spotted hand to my lips and kissed it every morning and every night. Sometimes I’d even place it in the center of my half-buttoned nightgown so he could feel the beating of my heart. I could see the end of the painting of my marriage, and I was racing to fill it with just a few strokes more.
I will tell you, though I am a deeply private person, that our last moment together was perhaps our most beautiful. That final night after he had been tucked into bed. I had given him his pain medicine and was getting ready to take a bath.
“Come here,” he managed to whisper. “Come next to me, before the medicine clouds my head.”
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