The Lost Wife

  Suddenly a huge splash of water leaped out at me, causing me to squeal.

  “You’ve soaked me!” I laughed as he came up for air.

  “You sure you don’t want to join me? You’re already wet.”

  There was part of me that did, but the daylight made me feel more modest and less daring than I had felt the night before.

  “When I have my suit, silly!” I answered.

  “We’ll be leaving tomorrow . . .” he hollered back. “When will you ever have another chance?”

  I thought about it and decided to go against my nature.

  “Turn your head, Josef Kohn,” I said as I took off nearly all my clothes.

  He turned his head, though I’ll never know if he cheated and looked. I leaped from the nearest boulder and dove headfirst into the water. The sensation of the cold water on my skin, wrapped as I was in nothing more than my drenched underpants and camisole, was thrilling.

  As I swam close to him, he reached for my slippery arms and pulled me close, applauding my bravery with another perfect kiss.

  CHAPTER 8

  JOSEF

  Amalia painted the walls of our apartment the color of chicken fat. She bought carpet the color of earth, and heavy brown furniture with thick upholstery from two Jewish brothers on the Lower East Side. She dressed in simple cotton prints, a ribbon tied around her tiny waist, her hair pulled back, and her face with no adornment except for a few drops of beet juice rubbed onto her lips.

  She always drank her coffee without milk, her tea without sugar. The radio in our living room played Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw, but she never danced. Instead, she would tap her foot against the chair leg when she thought I wasn’t looking. Her face always changed when I placed the needle down on our record player and played the music of Billie Holiday. Those dirges, doleful and blue, pulled Amalia someplace far away. Someplace inside her head, where I was not invited to follow.

  Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,

  Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

  Sometimes I would see her bite the edge of her lip, as if she were stifling an urge to cry. Other times I would watch her nod, as if in a silent dialogue with the singer. Although I never saw Amalia mouth a single word from any of the songs, when the record came to an end, she would rise and walk to the record player and reposition the needle, Holiday’s voice, once again, filling the room.

  Our son’s toys and teddy bears filled the playpen, dolls and pots and pans would fill the same space when our daughter arrived three years later. Our neighbors on East Sixty-seventh Street remained strangers. Every day, Amalia pushed her vinyl grocery cart, filled with fruit, bread from the German baker, and the meat from the kosher butcher, with a well-practiced nod to our doorman, Tom. She forced herself to smile to others on the elevator. If our children were with her, her arms reached for them like a sinking sailor’s to a life ring. Maybe it was the close quarters in the elevator, all those tight bodies packed into a small space, that unnerved her. Or maybe it was just that Amalia didn’t really like to make small talk.

  “Hungry?” she would ask our daughter.

  “Here, toast and butter.”

  At night: “You upset? Hospital problems?” she’d ask me. I’d nod, slipping into faded pajamas.

  In our bedroom there were no photographs, no paintings, no mirror. The only familiar sound was the clink of her old locket falling into the drawer.

  She unbuttoned her housedress without ever speaking. Her naked body ever childlike, even though she had birthed two of her own. Slender, pale limbs, two tiny nipples on a chest that always beat quietly.

  I held her and dreamed of others.

  She let go of me and did the same.

  CHAPTER 9

  LENKA

  In Karlovy Vary we packed our bags like mourners dressing for a funeral. None of us wanted to return to the city. Pavla packed us a basket full of sandwiches and small tea cakes along with a thermos of tea.

  The night before, I could not eat a single morsel of dinner. I felt changed by that first swim, the sensation of Josef’s kiss. The memory of his skin, wet and slippery next to mine. How would I ever bear the train ride home with him, with Věruška in the same compartment? I worried as I descended the stairs to find them waiting for me in the hallway and nearly tripped over my feet.

  Věruška giggled. “You can be so clumsy, Lenka, but somehow you always manage to look beautiful.”

  I considered it a strange comment because Věruška was the one who always looked beautiful. Her cheeks were always flushed from some sort of mischief and she was never plagued by shyness. No one could light up a room like Věruška, especially when she was wearing one of her favorite red dresses.

  When I looked at Josef, I could feel the weight of his concern. It would be difficult not to look at each other. Not to touch.

  Once in the car, he pulled out his book, though I never saw him turning more then a few pages. Every few moments I felt his eyes sneaking a glance at me. I attempted weakly to draw, though I failed. I tried to steady my hand as my pencil wobbled from the wheels of the train.

  Both of us welcomed Věruška’s chatter. We listened to her rattle on about the various boys in our class. Tomáš, who was loud and boorish but had a face that could melt stone, or Karl, the quietest boy, who still seemed intelligent and sincere. I had no such archives in my head. There was Josef and no one else.

  I had only been gone for two weeks, but when I returned home, everything seemed changed. I walked into a silent apartment. My mother sat on one of the red velvet chairs, her powdered face streaked with tears. My father, hands to his forehead, pressed his elbows against the mantel.

  My sister whispered to me that there had been an incident at Father’s warehouse. A bottle of alcohol with a wick soaked in petrol had been thrown through the glass window, setting the place ablaze. Everything was destroyed. Papa, she whispered, had found everything in ashes. Only one wall remained, and on it, someone had scrawled ŽID. Jew.

  I ran to my mother and embraced her. She held on to me so tightly I thought her nails might tear the cloth from my back.

  “I am so frightened, Lenka,” she cried. I had never heard her voice so full of fear before. That terrified me.

  My father’s hands were now thrust into his hair. His knuckles white as marble, the striations in his neck pulsing blue.

  “We are Czech.” He cried out with anger. “Whoever calls me Žid and not Czech is a liar.”

  “What did the police say?” I asked them. My suitcase was still at the front door and my head was a blaze of images and thoughts I couldn’t sort out.

  “Police?” My father turned, his face turning in a blind rage. “The police, Lenka?”

  And then, just as my mother had surprised me, my father did the same. But this time it was by the insanity of his laugh.

  CHAPTER 10

  JOSEF

  I bought a television for Amalia in January of 1956 as a gift for our tenth anniversary. The man at the appliance store had tied it with a large red ribbon and I was so pleased to have found the perfect gift. When I walked through the door that evening, Rebekkah burst out, “Oh, Daddy!” and rushed toward me with such emotion that I was afraid I might drop the darn thing before I even had a chance to plug it in.

  The box that talked. The box that broadcast a hundred happy faces beaming back at us each night. Amalia did smile. I caught the flicker across her face, like a line drawn in the sand before the water washes it away.

  We ate on trays in front of the television that night. Plates of breaded chicken cutlets, wilted asparagus with a moat of melted butter, and baked potato without any sour cream.

  I loved our new television not because I particularly enjoyed the broadcasts (I couldn’t believe Milton Berle was the best the Americans could come up with), but because it provided a welcome distraction to our household.

  With my children on the sofa, their little chins held up by their hands and their heads tilted tow
ard the screen, I could watch them without interruption. I have never been a great one for small talk. My books have been my primary companions.

  Even my patients, whom I care for dearly and whose pregnancies I monitor as diligently and as compassionately as I can, I do not pepper with personal questions.

  I watch my daughter in front of the television and notice that her profile is identical to my wife’s. She has the same thin face, skin the color of navy beans, and hair the color of sun-bleached wheat. Her mother has made two tight braids for her that she plays with when she watches. On her elbows, with her legs stretched behind her like two straight sticks, I see her body is all sharp angles like her mother’s. The circle of her collarbone pronounced like its own necklace, and the razor edge of her jaw. I see the flash of her grin, those broad white teeth that are mine.

  My son is soft and round. His chubby limbs remind me of myself at his age. His skin is deeper, browner than my wife’s and daughter’s. His eyes look sad even when he’s happy. His kindergarten teacher told us he appeared to have no interest in playing with the other children, that he could spend hours on a puzzle yet have no patience to learn to tie his shoes. I can hear no criticism of him. I love my children like a tiger. I love my wife like a lamb.

  Amalia. Sitting there with your knees pinned together, your fingers gingerly in your lap. The black-and-white image from the screen paints you blue. I look at you and wonder how you were as a child. Were you feisty like our daughter, all words and fire? Or quiet and thoughtful like our son?

  I imagine you running home before the war, with the fateful letter from America in your hands, your face bright like a full moon. Those large brown eyes and cheekbones that could slice bread. When your parents packed you off to safety, did something else get packed away as well?

  Under the forgiving buzz of the television, I unpack my own memories.

  My own mental suitcases unlock. My father’s spectacles—a silver and round pince-nez—no longer on his narrow face, but floating in a bottle-green ocean. I see my sister’s childhood bear with its brown, matted fur. Its torn velvet paw, its glass eyes and ribbon mouth. I see my mother rushing to pack what is dear to her: her wedding handkerchief, the portraits of us as children, all her jewels that she hides in the silk seams of her coat, which she opens and recloses like a surgeon. And books that I left behind. Those that littered the shelves of my room, piled at my nightstand, toted on my back. My favorite novel about the Golem. What I would do to have that book now and read it to my son.

  CHAPTER 11

  LENKA

  In Mala Strana, in a café with ice-colored walls, I order a hot chocolate for Marta.

  “Tell me the story about the Golem,” she says again.

  I tell her the legend that was first told to me when I was a little girl. How under Czech lore, Rabbi Loew ben Bezalel, the chief rabbi of Prague, created a protective spirit by mixing the clay and water from the Vltava River with his own hands.

  My own hands, white like powder, tremble as I try to remember the details of the myth. “The rabbi, he created this Golem to protect the Jews,” I tell her. “Rudolf the Second—the Holy Roman emperor of the time—had declared that all the Jews either be killed or expelled, but the Golem rose up from the earth and dust and became a living warrior. He killed anyone who hurt the Jews.”

  There is steam rising from Marta’s untouched cup of cocoa. Her eyes are filled with tears. Her red hair limp behind her ears. I drink my coffee black without sugar.

  The emperor, seeing the destruction cast upon his city and its people, begged the rabbi to stop the Golem. In exchange, he promised to stop the persecution of the Jews. “To stop the Golem’s deadly and vengeful path,” I explained, “the rabbi only needed to erase the first letter of the Hebrew word emet or ‘truth’ from the creature’s forehead. The new remaining word would thus read met, which translated as ‘death.’”

  This act of ending the Golem’s life was done with the understanding that should the Jewish people ever be threatened within the walls of Prague, the Golem would rise again.

  I took a deep breath and looked at my sister. Her crying had stopped and her color was less pale. Still, she was clearly shaken from the fire at Papa’s warehouse and by the motive of the attack.

  To reassure her, I added what was always my favorite part of the story. Legend has it that the Golem’s body is stored in the attic of the Old New Synagogue. There he waits to have the missing letter on his forehead replaced so he may avenge any who seek to harm the Jews.

  I can see the eyes of my twelve-year-old sister at the end of this story, like a child who still wants to believe that magic could exist.

  “Will the Golem wake up and protect us now?” she says, staring down at her cold cocoa.

  I tell her he will. I tell her if not Rabbi Loew’s Golem, I will take the clay from my modeling class and make one of my own.

  CHAPTER 12

  JOSEF

  I have always believed in the mystical. One cannot study the science of conception and the practice of obstetrics without being in awe of how the human body can create new life. In medical school, we learn that everything that is essential to life exists in the midline of the body. The same can be said about love.

  The mind, the heart, the womb. Those three are all threaded in a sacred dance.

  A woman’s pelvis is like an hourglass with the capacity to tell time. It both creates and shelters life. When the mother’s diet is insufficient, nutrients are pulled from her own teeth and bone. Women are built to be selfless.

  As a young man, I fell in love with a girl who loved me. Her smile was a golden rope around my heart. Wherever she pulled me, I followed.

  But sometimes even the thickest rope frays and one gets lost.

  I still dream of her. The first girl whose hand ever laced through mine. Even when there was another woman in my bed, I’d dream only of her. I’d try and conjure her face at twenty, then thirty or forty years of age. But as the years passed and I grew older, I stopped imagining her with a face that was lined or with hair tarnished like silver.

  Every person has an image or a memory that they hold secret. One that they unwrap, like a piece of hidden candy, at night. Pass through there and you will fall into the valley of dreams.

  In my dreams, I imagine her naked. Long white limbs, reaching to thread through mine. Hands reaching to undo damp, fragrant braids. Chocolate-brown hair falling over a collarbone as sharp as an archer’s bow.

  She crosses her arms over her breasts.

  I kiss her hands, the pale of her fingertips. I turn up her palms and lift them from her breasts to my cheeks. She finds my temples, then my hair, pulls me toward her lips, and kisses me.

  The kiss. The kiss. I am haunted by that kiss.

  Sleep.

  If only I didn’t have to wake so soon. The beeper sounding that I am needed. The number at the hospital telling me I must go.

  To sleep, where I am young again. To wake, where I am old, with weary limbs. The sound of that beeper that tells me where I need to go.

  CHAPTER 13

  JOSEF

  I no longer could stomach the taste of strawberries after I arrived in America. It wasn’t that their sweetness could not compare to those we had every summer, but because they reminded me of Lenka.

  Lenka, sitting under the shade of our garden in Karlovy Vary, her white shoulders bare in her cotton sundress. Her blue eyes. Her clavicle, the shape of a heart I long to kiss.

  I sit across from her. Watch her as she scans the long wooden table that Pavla has crowded with plates of smoked meats, jars of homemade jam, and a basket of warm rolls. But it is the bowl of handpicked strawberries that delights her. She reaches for the bowl and brings one berry to her perfect mouth.

  Her mouth. Her mouth. Am I such a beast because I cannot suppress the urge to bite it? Nibble at its tender flesh. Feel the softness of its inside. Run my tongue over her teeth. Feel the velvet of her tongue.

  Sitting there, I watch
her. All I can do to stifle my urges is to stare at her. How stupid I must look in this memory. Awkward and hunting her all the same.

  When I walk next to her, I can barely breathe. I cannot speak. Four years older than she and I feel like I am without experience. There have been other girls, but their faces and their touch have all vanished from my memory.

  I walk behind her. The taut muscle of her calves, the gentle slope of her backside, the glimpse of her neck, are a seduction all their own.

  When she places her sketchbook down, I can feel the heat of her body next to mine. I can smell her. I want to breathe her into me like a child’s first breath. I want to wrap my arms around her and melt her heart against mine.

  I want to taste her. I want the sweet syrup of her mouth. I want the flesh of her tongue. I want to kiss her more than anything in the whole world.

  The kiss. Am I too forceful? Am I too eager? That mouth sealed to mine . . . the taste of freshly picked strawberries.

  I am gasping. My mouth open. My heart cracked like a smashed pomegranate. Ruby seeds heaping in my hands.

  But then I awake.

  I open my eyes and Amalia is reaching to turn the radio alarm off.

  She kisses me.

  Dryly. Absently. The taste of water.

  My Amalia kissing me.

  There isn’t the faintest taste of strawberries in her kiss.

  It is the taste of a snow cone without the juice.

  Ice, without the color blue.