The Lost Wife (16 page)
Authors: Alyson Richman
I will remember her always in her long white dress, her veil an airy gauze over her strong, chiseled face. I can see her tapered fingers reaching to grasp mine, and feel the delicate weight of her soft rosebud kiss. Lenka, beautiful, my bride.
I do not remember the words of the ceremony, or the signing of our wedding
ketubah
. But at night, I can take myself back to that evening, when the chandeliers were lit with a warm orange light and the ancient stone floor was pitted and cold. The air damp, and the bricks so gray they appeared almost blue.
ketubah
. But at night, I can take myself back to that evening, when the chandeliers were lit with a warm orange light and the ancient stone floor was pitted and cold. The air damp, and the bricks so gray they appeared almost blue.
The rabbi was the same one who had officiated at my Bar Mitzvah more than ten years earlier. He was an imposing figure, with ice-blue eyes and a long silver beard that grazed his prayer book. As he began the incantation of the seven blessings, he took my tallis and wrapped Lenka and me in it together.
I remember the look in the rabbi’s eyes as he pronounced us man and wife. He looked at our hurried, anxious faces, and did not have the calm that I remembered as a young boy.
“Remember the tears when the synagogue in Jerusalem was destroyed,” he said as my foot broke the glass. “Remember as a Jew there is always some sadness, even on your happiest day.”
Looking around at the faces gazing at Lenka and me on the bimah, I knew none of us needed any reminding of that. We all wore our fears as visibly as our wedding finery.
At her parents’ apartment, we drank wine from glasses rimmed in gold. Her mother had made a wedding soup with dumplings. There were small trays with delicate pastries and a honey cake with a small violet flower placed at the center.
Marta played the piano and Lucie’s child, Eliška, livened up the modest festivities by clapping her hands and twirling her skirt. Věruška was in the corner, her eyes glassy, her fingers twitching at her side. When I looked to her for a smile, she turned her face from me and shuttered her eyes.
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
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
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?”
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
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.
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