We left after a few hours to spend our wedding night in a friend’s apartment. My sister had helped me prepare the room. In another time, I would have brought Lenka to the Hotel Europa. I would have laid her down on a bed of white cotton, pulled a coverlet of down over our naked shoulders, and wrapped myself around her until dawn.
But my colleague Miloš had volunteered his flat on Sokolská Street. He was away visiting a cousin in Brno, and I seized the opportunity to avoid having to spend our wedding night under the same roof as my in-laws.
Věruška had taken the sheets that Lenka’s mother had set aside for her dowry. They were white and embroidered years earlier by Lucie; we had pulled them tight over the mattress and Věruška had sprayed a mist of rose water from an atomizer her friend Elsa had given her specifically for this occasion.
“Will you tell her before or after?” Věruška asked me after the apartment had been cleaned, the bed made to perfection, and the vases stuffed with flowers.
“I will tell her before,” I told her. “I promise.”
She shook her head and looked at the bed. In happier times, my little sister would have jumped on it and giggled, kicking her feet up in the shadow of her sisterly destruction. But now she stood solemnly before me, her face white as an egret. “She isn’t going to come with you, you know. I know how she feels about her family.”
I was now the one shaking my head. “She will, Věruška. She will. We are her family now, too.”
My sister then looked at me as if she were the elder sibling and I the child. She took my hand and held it. With her eyes closed, she said not another word and only shook her head.
We drove to Miloš’s apartment in my family’s car, which Father still hoped to sell in the few days before we were to set sail. As we entered the flat, Lenka held her skirt in one hand and a bouquet of violets in the other. Glass globes were lit with candles, and the room smelled of the rose-scented linen and the crisp of the night air.
“I have something to tell you,” I said. The door to the bedroom was ajar, and the majestic sight of our wedding bed caught her eye.
“It can wait,” she said as she pressed a finger to my lips.
“No, it can’t,” I tried to protest.
But she had already pressed herself against me.
“Whatever it is can wait until morning.”
Her perfume smelled of the delicate flowers one collects in the spring. She untucked her hairpins, her dark hair falling to her shoulders.
She whispered for me to come to the bed.
So I let her lead me to that mound of white, leaving the shadow of my failure at the door. I let her turn her back to me, revealing the strip of ivory buttons down her back, and I unbuttoned her. I slipped my hands under the silk, and felt the smoothness of her skin and the sharpness of her shoulder blades.
She turned to face me, her nakedness, for the first time, revealed. I stood there for a second and could barely breathe. Her body, in all its whiteness, was a beauty that I could not believe was now mine to touch, to taste, to kiss. I cupped my hands around her. I closed my eyes. I wanted to feel her before seeing her. I would spend the whole night never taking my eyes off her, that much I was certain. I would memorize her. I would make a mental map of her, trace my finger around her heart, chart every bone. Lenka in my hands. I grasped her. I held her to my heart. My fingers felt the taper of her thin torso, the small circle of her waist, the reassuring curves of her hips.
Her dress was still at her knees and she stepped over it like a puddle of spilled milk. She now loosened in my arms and I allowed her to undress me: my waistcoat, my white shirt, the buckle of my belt, and finally my trousers. We fell into that bed, two warm bodies wrapping and searching for each other. I inhaled every inch of her naked skin, as if hoping I could keep her inside me forever. Like air trapped in my lungs. In those fleeting moments until dawn, we pushed the covers back. We were swimming into each other, each of us clinging to the other, as if we were the other’s life raft.
CHAPTER 19
JOSEF
As much as the evening was white and pure, the morning was dark and haunting.
She took the news with such devastation, it was as if I had witnessed the birth and death of my wife in a matter of hours.
I told her that my father had been unable to get exit visas for her family. “Not yet,” I told her, “but hopefully, soon.” It was my intention to soften the news with the implication that there was still hope.
“Your father already knows.”
She was wrapped in a satin robe, her nightdress peeking out from beneath her hem. She sat down to eat the small breakfast I had prepared. Her cup of steaming coffee remained untouched. She did not reach for her roll.
“When did you find this out?” she finally managed to whisper.
“The night before last. I went to see your father, and he implored me not to tell you until after the wedding. He wants you to go anyway, and once we’re settled, we’ll send for the others.”
She shook her head no.
“Josef, I thought you’d know me better than that.”
“I do know you, as does your father. We both thought you’d refuse. But now we’re married and you and I must live as one.”
She eyed me sharply, her gaze like a hot iron.
“Twenty years with my family does not equal one night with you.”
“Lenka. Lenka.” I said her name over and over. “Please listen to me . . .”
She did not answer me; she was looking out the window. I stood up and went to retrieve our papers from my briefcase.
“Your family wants you to come with me. You may wish to disregard my wishes, but surely you will not disobey theirs also, will you?”
She shook her head again.
“I will come when you have done what you promised. When there are five passports in your hand, not just two.”
“The German army is on the march. They will be in Czechoslovakia any day now. We need to leave, Lenka! We need to leave now.”
I was loud and impatient. Lenka did not flinch, even when I shouted, even when I knelt down at her knees and implored her to come.
When I could tolerate her silence no longer, I rose from the ground and walked to the bedroom in a trance. I sat on the bed, whose white sheets resembled a deflated sail, and with my head in my palms I began to sob.
CHAPTER 20
LENKA
Father’s eyes are filled with fury and desperation now. Two cups of cold tea sit between us. He is exhausted from trying to reason with me.
“You must go. You must go. You must go.” He says it over and over again, as if he uttered it enough times, I’d be hypnotized and finally agree.
“I will not leave you and Mother,” I tell him. “I will not leave Marta. I will go when Josef does what he has promised. When all our visas are in his hand.”
Father is pulling at his hair. The white of his temples looks like polished bone.
“There will not be enough time to get all five visas!” Father’s fist hits the table. “Don’t you understand how quickly things have already turned for the worse?” He was shaking. In his anger, he was almost unrecognizable to me.
“Lenka, Josef’s family tried their best . . .”
“How could the two of you not have told me the truth?”
“We both love you, Lenka.” His voice was cracking. “One day you will understand when you have your own children.” He had composed himself enough to stare me straight in the eyes.
“But, Papa, you have two children.” I was crying like a two-year-old now. “And how do you expect me to live with the fact that I went to America and left Marta?”
The weight between us was crushing. He raised his head to the ceiling, and the sound of his sigh was more a release of anguish than an act of breathing.
“What can I do to convince you?”
“You can say or do nothing, Papa,” I said through tears.
“Lenka.” His hand is balled into a fist, like a
heart torn out. “Lenka,” he weeps in despair. “Lenka.”
But finally he releases me.
“I have said all I can say. The decision is yours, Lenka.”
There is a momentary silence between us.
“Thank you,” I say, cutting through the quiet. I go over to embrace him. He is shaking in my arms.
“You’ll see, Papa,” I said, taking his hand to my lips. “In the end, Josef will come through for all of us.”
“You will see.” I believed those words as if they were a singular truth. A commandment that I was willing to write in stone.
CHAPTER 21
LENKA
The week before Josef and his family left was agony for me. I wanted to be a good and loving wife, but it was difficult to be close to him when I knew he would be leaving in only a few days.
Josef insisted he would not go with his family either, and this created a terrible argument between him and his parents. They had spent everything they had to secure their passage, passports, and documents to allow them—and me—to leave Czechoslovakia, and they simply were not leaving without their only son.
His parents were furious with my decision. They had gone to great lengths to include me in their plans, and now Dr. Kohn and his wife believed their beloved son had married a fool.
Věruška, however, understood my decision. “They should have told you before the wedding,” she said, shaking her head. “They should have told you the truth.”
I smiled and reached for her hand, squeezing her slender fingers in mine. “Everything is so rushed . . . I want to be mad at my father and Josef, but there doesn’t even seem like there’s time for that . . . Does that seem silly?”
She smiled weakly. “I want you to come with us . . .”
“I know,” I told her. “I just can’t leave my family . . . I just can’t.”
“I understand,” she said, though I could hear the sadness and regret in her voice.
She adjusted the red scarf around her throat. Her eyes were glazed with tears.
“Part of me thinks we should all wait here until we can go together,” she said. “Honestly, what has this world come to? Everything has turned upside down.”
I tried to soothe her, even though it was I who wanted to cry. I took her small fingers and held them. “We’ll go shopping in New York soon. You’ll be wearing a new red dress and shoes with silk ribbons. We’ll drink cocoa in the afternoon, and go dancing together at night.”
“You promise?”
“Yes, of course,” I said. My voice was now close to breaking. I didn’t think I had the strength anymore to maintain this facade of bravery for her—for Josef—for my parents. My own emotions remained behind floodgates that I feared would collapse at any moment. I did not want to think about Josef’s betrayal, my father’s complicity in not telling me. I remained steadfast in my decision to stay in Prague. I did this because it was what my conscience told me to do. But inside, I felt that my entire world was crumbling.
I held Věruška for several seconds. When I opened my eyes, I saw Josef standing at the doorway. He had wrongly hoped his sister could persuade me to join them. I saw him stare at the two of us, then shake his head and go to another room.
“We will see each other soon.”
“Yes,” I said. “Very soon.”
She rose from her seat and kissed me on both cheeks. “I always wanted a sister, but now that I have one, I’m leaving her behind.” She shook her head and dabbed her tears.
“I am coming,” I whispered through my tears. “Just not now.”
In the end, I was the one who convinced Josef to go without me.
“You will be the scout,” I told him like a general giving orders. “You’ll go and make a home for us. You will take English classes so you can start medical school there. You’ll get the American government to support my family’s application for asylum, and then we will all be together. There’s simply no other way.”
I said it as if it were written in stone. Clearly. Strongly. So ultimately, he believed he was doing the right thing for all of us until my family and I could join him.
Two days before they were to leave, however, Josef came home waving a letter. “I have good news,” he told me, kissing me on the lips.
“We are going to stay in England through the summer. Papa just heard there’s a Czech doctor running a clinic in Suffolk who needs obstetricians. He’s been able to rearrange our passage with the ship company, so we’re now booked to depart from Liverpool in September, first for Canada and then on to New York. This will buy us some more time to work on passage for your family.”
“That’s wonderful!” I cried, and let him wrap me in his arms.
“I’ll tell Papa that I will stay here with you until the end of the summer, and then join them in London before the boat leaves.”
I looked at him with such sweetness. “Josef, leave with your family now and don’t cause them any more stress. I’ve already complicated things enough. Hopefully, we can get visas for my family over the summer and we’ll all join you in England and board the boat together.”
I kissed him again. The letter fluttered against my back.
The day soon arrived for their departure to England. Josef and I were still using Miloš’s apartment. We woke up early and made love one last time.
I remember that he cried in my arms before he got dressed; his face was sealed to my breast as my fingers touched his curls.
“There’s nothing to cry about,” I lied. “We will see each other soon.”
My voice was flat and the words practiced. I had rehearsed them in my head while I had lain underneath him, my head staring at the ceiling. I had not slept the entire night. Josef had fallen asleep on my chest; his cheek was warm against me, his fingers laced through mine. In his slumber, he had looked like a sleeping child, an image that both filled my heart and wounded it at the same time. As I watched the clock, counting the hours we still had between us, I had marveled at his capacity to dream.
I would never tell him what I was secretly thinking—that I was tired of having to pretend to be stoic. I did not doubt my decision because I truly believed that Josef and I would eventually be reunited. But I was still secretly heartbroken that I was forced to make a choice between the man I loved and my family. It seemed terribly unfair and, again, I was afraid that if I let myself cry, I would never be able to stop.
Josef packed little to take on the journey so he could help his parents carry their trunks and valises. We had little as a married couple. Even our wedding portrait, taken by my mother with a family camera, had yet to be framed.
I had carefully placed it in a piece of folded brown paper. I wrote on it in pen, our names and the date of our wedding.
“You take it,” I told him. I bit my lip. I was forcing back my tears. “Place it by your bed in England, and when we’re finally in the States we’ll have it framed.”
He took it from me and placed it not in his suitcase, but in the breast pocket of his jacket.
We ate breakfast in a reverent silence, gazing at each other over steaming cups.
When we dressed, we stole greedy glances at each other, as if trying to store the sight for the months ahead. The entire time I felt as though I were holding my breath. A sob felt only seconds away. Again, I told myself, our separation was only temporary. We would see each other soon.
At the door, before we were to leave for the station, I stood next to him, my cheek pressed to his lapel.
When I pulled back in an effort to compose myself, I noticed a stray hair—a solitary brown string—dangling to the fiber of his coat. I took my finger to pull it away, but Josef caught my wrist.
“No. Don’t, Lenka.”
“Don’t what?”
“Leave it be.”
I can still see the glassiness of his eyes. Staring at me. Holding my wrist.
“Let me bring that little bit of you with me,” he said.
That little stray hair. He cupped his han
d over it, as if it were a shield.
At the station, we met his family at the track. They were wrapped in heavy coats, a stack of suitcases on the cart. Věruška looked grave.
I went up to them and greeted them, taking their hands and warming them with my own. I looked at their faces and tried to press them into my memory. I pulled each of them close and kissed them on both cheeks.
“Good-bye, Lenka,” each one said to me. “We will see you soon.”
I nodded and tried to push back the tears. Josef’s mother and father were stoic, but Věruška could hardly look at me, there were so many tears rolling down her face.
When the train pulled into the track, his parents and sister boarded first so that Josef and I could have some privacy in our last moments together.
We no longer spoke of my decision to remain behind. He understood my reasons by now.
And perhaps that was the beauty of our farewell. The unspoken understanding between us.
He stood before me and reached out to kiss me. I placed my mouth over his and felt his breath within my own. He placed both of his hands over my head and caressed my hair.
“Lenka . . .”
I pulled back and lifted my head to his. I was fighting back tears.
“Please just hurry and send for us.”
He nodded. I took a step back to look at him one last time. Then, just as the train whistle began to sound, Josef reached into his breast pocket and retrieved a small package. “This was my mother’s,” he said, placing what felt like a miniature box wrapped in brown paper in my hand.
“She wanted me to give it to you. Open it when you get home.”