The Lost Wife

  “ ‘What’s this?’ he asked us, when we placed it down on his desk.

  “ ‘He’s sick, Papa,’ I remember Věruška saying. Her voice was so small and pleading. We had brought our father something we were so confident he could fix.”

  I was looking at Josef now. His eyes were full of memory.

  “My father took the kerchief with the trembling bird and cupped it in his hands. I could see the small creature’s body soften from the warmth of my father’s palms. He held it for what seemed like several minutes before the bird’s movements stopped.”

  Josef took a breath.

  “The bird had died in his hands.”

  “Oh, how terrible,” I said, bringing my hand to my mouth. “You and Věruška must have been devastated.”

  “You probably thought I was going to tell you I wanted to be a doctor because I saw my father resurrect something so frail and wounded, didn’t you?” He was shaking his head.

  “But you see, Lenka, I return to that incident over and over again. My father must have realized he couldn’t have saved the bird. So he gently held it in his hands until its life flowed out from it.”

  “But how painful for you and Věruška to see . . .”

  “It was,” he said. “It was the first time I realized that my father couldn’t heal every broken thing. That, sometimes, even he could fail.”

  He looked at me again. “I try to remember that when I feel I disappoint him.”

  I wanted to reach out to him as he said this, but my hands remained at my side.

  “What is it about you, Lenka, that I want to tell you every story from my childhood?” He turned to me, and his face transformed into a grin. He gave a little laugh and I could tell he was trying to lighten the mood.

  “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.

  “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 fami
ly’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.