The Lost Wife (7 page)

Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife

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“What could two old people do in a new country anyway,” her father said to his daughters as the three of them sipped their favorite drink—hot chocolate. It was his nature always to make light of things when the family was pressed into a difficult situation. “When this Nazi horror is all over, you will call for us, and your mother and I will come.”

She and her sister then traveled by train to Danzig, where the steamer was to depart from. But when they boarded the ship an SS officer looked at their passports with the word
Jude
stamped on it and blocked their path.

“You can get on.” He pointed to Amalia. He then pointed to her younger sister, Zora. “You will stay.”

Amalia cried to the soldier that she would not leave her sister. It was not fair; they both had their papers, their tickets, and passports all in order.

“I decide who boards this ship. Now you can get on alone, or you can both get off together.”

Amalia turned to disembark with her sister. She would never leave her. To abandon your own sibling simply to save yourself was an act of treason she was not willing to commit.

“Go . . . Go . . .” her sister insisted, but she refused. And then her sister did the unthinkable . . . she ran off alone. She ran down the plank and into the crowd. Her black coat and hat blended in with what seemed like a thousand others. It was like finding a single raindrop in a downpour. Amalia stood there screaming her sister’s name, searching for her frantically. But it was of no use. Her sister had vanished.

The steamship’s horn had signaled its impending departure, and Amalia found herself on the gangplank alone. She didn’t look at the officer as he examined her papers for the second time. She was sure by his lack of interest in her that he didn’t even remember that she had been the victim of his willful and incomprehensible cruelty less than an hour before. She walked into the belly of the ship, carrying her battered black suitcase. She looked back one more time—hoping against hope that Zora had somehow sneaked on board—and then stood by the railing as the anchor was lifted and the boat pulled away. Zora was nowhere to be seen in the faces waving at the dock. She had vanished into the fog.

I tell you Amalia’s story because she is now dead. Dead fifteen years next October. Mr. Abrams gave her money when she arrived in New York. She met him in his office on Fifth Avenue, an office paneled with dark red wood and with a swivel chair that he turned to face the park.

She told me that when he turned to her, Mr. Abrams asked her where her sister was. He shook his head when she told him how Zora had not been allowed to board.

“You were very brave to come alone,” he commended her. But she had not felt brave. She instead felt the weight of her betrayal, as if she had left her only sister for dead. He took some money from a drawer and handed it to her along with a piece of paper with the name of a Rabbi Stephen Wise. He promised he would help get her a job and a place to stay.

The rabbi got her on her feet, setting her up with a seamstress on the Lower East Side, where she worked for twenty-five cents an hour sewing flowers to the brims of black felt hats. She saved what little money she could after paying her landlady for the room she shared with two other girls from Austria, in a vain hope of bringing her parents and sisters over one day. In the beginning, there were letters from them, ones that arrived with thick black lines applied by a censor. But eventually, after the war had begun in Europe, her letters began to be returned to her unopened. She heard her roommates repeat vague rumors of concentration camps and transports, hideous things she couldn’t possibly believe to be true. Gas and ovens, one girl even told her. But that girl, a Pole, was prone to drama. There could be little truth in her stories. Amalia told herself that girl was mad.

She grew even thinner than she was before. So thin you could see right through her skin. Her hands began to bleed from working with a needle and thread so many hours, and her eyesight grew poor. She almost never went out, except to the library, where she practiced reading English, still saving every penny she made to fund her family’s future passage. That first day I met her there, I asked if I could take her to Café Vienna, a hole in the wall on the corner of West Seventy-sixth and Columbus Avenue. Every night it was filled with a hundred fragmented Jews; each of us had someone we were searching for. People showed photos and wrote names of the missing on matchbook covers. We were all adrift, the living lost, trying to make connections in case someone had heard of someone else who had arrived—who had survived—or who knew something. And when we weren’t shaking a hand of someone who knew a friend of a friend of a friend, we drank whiskey or scotch. Except my Amalia. She only ordered hot chocolate.

So I eventually learned whose faces were in the locket, you see. Even though I never saw them until our wedding night, when she took off the necklace and laid it on our nightstand. I came back from the bathroom while my new wife lay sleeping, opened up the tiny gold circle, and silently peered inside.

What do you do with black-and-white faces that do not speak but continue to haunt you? What do you do with letters that are returned to you from across the ocean? The dead do not answer their mail, but your wife still sends them letters all the same.

So I think of what my grandson says about me, that I have no sense of romance.

Did Amalia and I ever really speak of those we left behind? No. Because if we did, our voices would crack and the walls would crush us with the memory of our grief. We wore that grief like one wears one’s underclothes. An invisible skin, unseen to prying eyes, but knitted to us all the same. We wore it every day. We wore it when we kissed, when our bodies locked, and our limbs entwined.

Did we ever make love with a sense of vitality, or unbridled passion and lust? It seemed to me that we were both two lost souls holding on to each other, fumbling for some sense of weight and flesh in our hands—reassuring ourselves that we were not simply two ghosts evaporating into the cool blankness of our sheets. We each could barely stand to think of our lives and families before the war, because it hurt like a wound that would never heal. It stank with rot and clung to you like soaking-wet wool.

Amalia and I were at battle with our memories. That is what I remember mostly of our marriage. We feared we might drown in all those lost voices and other lost treasures from our homelands. I became a doctor, and she the mother of our two children. But every night in the thirty-eight years that I held her, it was as if she wasn’t really there.

CHAPTER 5

LENKA

Josef became my secret. I carried his image with me every morning as I walked the steps into the Academy. When Věruška would mention her brother in passing, I was helpless to stop my cheeks from turning red.

At night, I would imagine his voice, try to conjure up the exact inflection of his speech when he had asked me if I liked to dance. And then I would imagine us dancing. Each of our bodies softening into the other like warm clay.

When Věruška and Elsa spoke of their crushes, I listened intently. I watched as their faces came alive at the prospect of a secret tryst and how their eyes widened when they described the heat of a stare or the graze of a certain hand. I asked them questions, and made a concentrated effort to show enthusiasm regarding the boys whose affections they courted. All the while I was keeping a secret that I sometimes felt would choke me.

I struggled with whether I should tell my friends how I felt about Josef. There were several opportunities to confess my feelings. But every time I got close to opening up, I feared Věruška’s disapproval. How many times had I heard her complain about Josef being the focus of her parents’ attention, or the afternoons she loathed to return home because her father insisted on complete quiet in the house so Josef could study.

“Let’s go to Dåum Obcenci for cake,” she said, trying to rouse us all one afternoon after class. “It’s final-exam time for Josef, and I’ll have to walk on tiptoe if I go home now.”

“Why doesn’t he study at the medical library?” Elsa shook her head.

“I think he’d prefer that,” Věruška said as she placed her sketchpad in her satchel. “But my father wants to make sure he’s really studying.”

“Your poor—”

“Don’t say it!” Věruška lifted her hand up to Elsa. “Poor nothing. He’s their diamond. Their treasure. Their only
son
.” She let out a mocking sigh.

My eyes flickered with the thought of him hunched over the dining-room table, his fingers running through his hair as he struggled to concentrate.

So for now, I kept him a secret. Every word he had said to me on our walk home was committed to memory. Every one of his gestures now moved across my mind like a carefully choreographed dance. I could see his eyes turning to me, envision his hands on my cheeks, feel his cloud of breath in the winter air.

First love: there is nothing like it. All these years later, I can remember the first time I looked up and saw Josef’s face, the flash of recognition that defied words.

It was in those first glances, those first exchanges, that I sensed not the uncertainty of love between us, but rather the sheer inevitability of it.

And so at night, I allowed those feelings to swim through my body. I closed my eyes and colored my mental canvas with strokes of red and orange. I imagined myself traveling to him, my skin against his, like a warm blanket, wrapping him in sleep.

Věruška, Elsa, and I spent much of the autumn of our second year struggling with our classes. We were being pushed harder than in our first year. Life-drawing class, which had once been off-limits to female students, was now part of our curriculum. We had not yet seen a male model, as only women had appeared on the small draped bed in our classroom, but we all still struggled to get the accuracy of every limb, curve, and angle.

At lunchtime, we sat in the school’s courtyard and ate our packed sandwiches while enjoying the sun and fresh air. Elsa would sometimes bring little samples of cream and perfume from her father’s apothecary. Everything was packaged in little glass vials that were elegantly labeled.

“Try this,” Elsa said to me. “It’s rose oil.

“It’s my favorite,” she said as she moved my hair behind my ear and dabbed a little of it on my neck.

“Oh, that’s such a nice smell,” Věruška agreed. “How come you never tell us about your crushes, Lenka?” She poked me. “Elsa and I blabber on and you never mention a single boy!”

“What if I’m afraid you’ll disapprove?”

“Never!” She let out a little squeal. “Tell us!”

I laughed. “I’m not sure you’d be able to keep a secret, Věruška,” I teased.

She giggled and reached for the little vial of rose oil from Elsa’s hand.

“I don’t need for you to tell me,” she said as she applied some oil behind her own ears. “I already know.”

“Who?” Elsa was now in on the excitement. “Who is it?”

“It’s Freddy Kline, of course!” Věruška said between giggles.

Freddy Kline was a very short classmate of ours. He was sweet and kind, but I suspected he didn’t have any interest in girls whatsoever.

I laughed.

“Věruška, you’ve found me out.”