The Lost Wife (6 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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“Your eyes are wide open. I feel as though I could step inside them and make myself at home.”
I was now the one laughing. “You’re welcome to come in. I’ll even make you a cup of coffee.”
“And will you put the gramophone on? Put on a little Duke Ellington on for me.”
“If you like,” I teased.
“And will you offer me your hand to dance, Lenka?” His voice was now full of light and playfulness.
“Yes!” I tell him. I cannot suppress my urge to giggle.
He laughs. And in his laugh I hear bliss. I hear feet dancing, the rush of skirts twirling. The sound of children.
Is that the first sign of love?
You hear in the person you’re destined to love the sound of those yet to be born.
 
We walk farther, across the bridge, down the Smetanovo embankment until we are in front of the large wooden doors of my apartment building.
“I hope I will see you again,” he says.
We smile at each other, as if we both know something that neither of us is brave enough to say.
Instead we simply say good-bye.
There is no kiss between us, just the slightest graze of hands.
 
Věruška, Elsa, and I continued to be a threesome at school that winter of 1937. Dressed in our heavy cloth coats and fur hats, we would climb up the lengthy stairs of the Academy, peel off our layers, and find our seats at our easels. The classrooms were hot, and condensation fogged the windows as our live model stood naked against a draped chair.
Sometimes, I would lie in my bed and try to imagine Josef. I would try to conjure up what his shoulders might look like or the cleaving of muscles in the center of his chest. But my imagination could never convince my hand. My drawings were awkward and almost all of them ended up as crumpled pieces of paper in the waste bin.
I discovered that I did have one talent, which was when I concentrated on drawing my subject’s face. Perhaps it was those years of shyness, my natural tendency to observe, but I found that I was able to see things that my other classmates had often overlooked. When drawing an old woman, I would find myself gazing at her pale, watery eyes.
While others concentrated to get the drape of skin just so, the weight of the flesh falling from a once-robust frame, I focused on the fallen skin of her eyelids. I thought of how I might draw their delicate flesh, like two paper-thin curtains, a veil over her already shaky eyesight.
I smoothed the contours of her face by smudging the charcoal with my thumb. I gave her softness, when the skin on her face was more like parchment than satin. But by doing this, her features—so carefully drawn—were like a frieze telling a story against a stretch of white marble. They seemed as if they were cut from stone.
Another skill I tried to develop in painting class was to bring a certain psychology to my canvases. I used colors that were not typical, sometimes blending pigments of blue and green to my skin tones to convey sadness. Or I might place dots of lavender inside the irises of the eyes for melancholy, or scarlet for passion.
I was intrigued by the paintings of the Secessionists, Schiele and Kokoschka, with their kinetic line and emotional message. Our teacher, Joša Prokop, was hard on me and did not praise me as readily as he did some of my classmates. But near the end of the semester he began to praise my efforts to take risks with my drawings, and I felt myself growing more confident each day. Still, I continued to work late at night on improving upon my weaknesses. Marta would sometimes indulge me and let me draw her. She would unbutton her cotton gown and let me sketch her collarbone or her neck. Sometimes she would even let me draw her back so I could concentrate on drawing the delicate wings of her shoulder blades.
The more I worked, the more I was able to see the human body as connected pieces of a puzzle. With time, I taught myself how each vertebra linked to another to create a stance of posture. I studied anatomy books to learn how each bone conjoined with another, and I came to see that our skin was nothing more than a tarpaulin that stretched over an extremely efficient machine.
 
When I was not at home or at school, I was at Věruška’s. Every invitation I received to go there, I accepted just so I could hope to steal a glimpse of Josef. At night, I dreamed of being able to paint his dark, pensive face, the thick black of his curls, the green of his eyes.
No longer did I dress without a thought as to how I looked. While in class, I dressed conservatively and in dark colors, often in trousers and a sweater. When I went to Věruška’s, however, I picked out outfits I thought accentuated my figure. I was now approaching my eighteenth year and feeling all the pull of my desire. I wanted to draw attention to myself, something I had never done in the past.
I began rummaging through my mother’s vanity when she was out of the house, and started applying powder to my face and applying a faint trace of lipstick and rouge. I was more careful with my hair, no longer braiding it like a schoolgirl in two ropes near my ears, but putting it up and twisting it above my neck.
I’ve often wondered if it is impossible to dress purely for your own indulgence and not in the hope of catching a man’s eye. Some women love the feel of silk in their own hand, the weight of velvet on their skin. I think my mother was like that. She always told us there were two types of women. Those who are lit from the outside and those who are lit from within. The first needs the shimmer of a diamond to make her sparkle, but for the other, her beauty is illuminated through the sheer light of her soul.
My mother had a fire that burned in her eyes. Her skin flushed not from the color of rouge but from the rush of her blood. When she was deep in thought, her complexion changed from milk to rose. When she was angry, she streaked crimson. And when she was sad, she became a shadowy blue. My mother was elegant, but she dressed not for the approving eyes of her husband or any crowd, but for her own secret ideal. A fantasy cut from a nineteenth-century novel, an image that was both timeless and eternal. A romantic heroine clearly her own.
CHAPTER 4
 
JOSEF
 
My grandson tells me that I’m not a romantic. I don’t disagree with him. For his impression is shaped by what he has observed over the years. He doesn’t know me the way I was before the war, when my heart soared for a woman whose name he wouldn’t recognize, whose photograph he has never seen.
I married his grandmother in 1947, in a dimly lit apartment within walking distance of the East River. There were snowdrifts piled high outside the fire escapes, and the windows were so foggy they resembled frosted glass.
I don’t think I had known Amalia more than three months when I proposed to her. She was from Vienna, another transplant from the war. I met her in the public library. She was hunched over a stack of books, and I don’t know if it was the way she wore her hair or the cotton wrap dress that was inappropriate for the climate, but somehow I knew she was European.
She told me she was a war orphan, having left Austria just before the war. She had not heard from her parents or sister in months.
“I know they’re dead,” she told me flatly. I immediately recognized that tone of voice: dead to emotions, a mechanical reflex that functioned solely to communicate. She ticked off only the necessary points of conversation like a finger to an abacus, with nothing more.
She was wan, with pale skin, honey-colored hair, and wide brown eyes. I could see her clavicle rising like an archer’s bow from beneath her skin, and a tiny, circular locket resting between her small breasts.
I imagined that within that gold locket there was a photo of a lost love. Another tall, dark boy lost to the war.
But later, after several weeks of meeting at a small café near my classes, I learned there had been no boyfriend left to die in Austria.
Although she was forced to wear the yellow star in the weeks following the
Anschluss
, her family was initially able to keep their apartment on Uchatius Strasse. One afternoon, as she walked home from school along the Ringstrasse, her eyes lingered on the cobblestones. She said she had gotten used to walking with her head down, because she wanted to avoid eye contact with anyone. She no longer knew whom she could trust, who was a friend, or who might report her if she looked at them the wrong way. She had heard too many stories of a neighbor who was falsely accused of stealing, or one who was arrested for breaking a newly issued law affecting the Jews. On this particular day, her eyes caught sight of an envelope fluttering from underneath a bicycle tire. She claimed she didn’t know what made her reach out to grab it, but when she took hold of the envelope she saw the return address was from America: Mr. J. Abrams on East Sixty-fifth Street in New York City.
She immediately recognized that it was a Jewish name. She told me that knowing there was a Jew somewhere across the ocean, in the safety of America, gave her a strange sense of comfort. That evening, she wrote to him in German, not even telling her parents or her sister. She told him how she found his name, that she needed to take a chance, to tell someone—anyone—outside of Europe what was happening in Austria. She told him of the yellow stars that her mother had been forced to sew on their coats. She told him of the curfew, and the loss of her father’s business. She told him how the streets were now lined with signs that said JEWS FORBIDDEN, how windows were smashed with hate, and how the beards of those who maintained the Talmudic code were shorn by young Nazis searching for fun. Lastly, for no other apparent reason other than that the day was approaching, she told him her birthday was May 20.
She had not really expected Mr. Abrams to write back. But then, weeks later, she did receive a reply. He wrote that he would sponsor her and her sister to come to New York. He gave her directions on whom she should speak to in Vienna, who would give her money, and who would secure their visas and transportation out of this wretched country that had forsaken them. He told her she was a lucky girl: they shared the same birthday and he would help her.
He told her there wasn’t enough time for a lengthy correspondence. She should do what he instructed her immediately, and not diverge from the plan. There could be no discussion, he could not arrange for her parents’ transport.
When she told her parents of the letter she had written and Mr. Abrams’s reply, they were not angry as she had feared, but proud that she had shown such initiative and foresight.

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