The Lost Wife (34 page)

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Authors: Alyson Richman

BOOK: The Lost Wife
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The fights increased within the barracks. The girls were irritated from lack of sleep and hunger, and from working so hard that the skin of their once-elegant fingers was worn to bloody tatters.
One girl steals from her own mother. Her younger sister accuses her. Their fight begins as verbal insults; then it escalates. Soon they are fighting like animals, pulling hair, one even biting the other’s arm. The dorm matron tries to break them up. I watch, speechless. I have often shared what little bread I have with Mother or Marta, but I cannot help but wonder how much longer it will be before I become like them.
The stealing in the barracks has gotten out of control. Articles I would have once considered garbage—a broken comb, a single shoelace, a wooden spoon—are now commodities that can be used for bartering for something more precious: a single cigarette, a pat of margarine, a piece of chocolate. We sleep in our clothes. Some of us even in our shoes—frightened that if we leave them below our bunk, someone will steal them.
Everything is at risk for pilfering by another pair of hungry hands. And anything that isn’t of use, people will think nothing of throwing onto the brazier as fuel. I think of my drawing in my suitcase and know that when winter comes, someone will find it and use it for kindling, one more discardable thing someone will decide to throw into the empty stove for an extra second of warmth.
 
In November 1943, a census is ordered from Berlin. The entire ghetto is summoned one morning at 7 A.M. to a large field at the outer perimeter of the ramparts. We are forced to stand without our coats, some of us without shoes, until every head is counted. We stand there through the morning, through the afternoon, and then the evening. We are given no food, no water, and are not allowed to go to the toilet. After they finish their tally, reaching a total of more than forty thousand, we are led back in the darkness to our barracks. We walk past the bodies of hundreds of people who were too weak to endure the seventeen-hour ordeal, their corpses remaining in the exact spots where they fell.
 
In the technical department, I continued to work on my assigned project. I completed fourteen drawings illustrating the ongoing construction of the railroad into the ghetto, and began others that showed the addition of new barracks. Fritta told me he was pleased with my work, though Leo Haas rarely looked my way. Sometimes, I would hear the two of them arguing in a corner about something. Haas would raise his arms and his face would be red with frustration.
“These are excellent,” Fritta said one afternoon as he lifted my pages to the light. “Too bad you have to waste your energy on this nonsense.” He shook his head. “In another time, your talents would be put to better use.”
While he is saying this, I want to interrupt him and shout,
Yes! Let’s put this hand of mine to a higher purpose! Let me in on what you and Haas are working on. Let me paint pictures of the transports, or the smoke from the new crematorium . . .
But my voice is caught in the back of my throat. I look up at him, hoping he understands that I am eager to work in any kind of underground movement that is taking shape within the concentration camp.
I think he senses what I am thinking. He takes one of his large hands and places it on my shoulder. “Lenka,” he whispers, “when this is over, you’ll always have your brush and paper to record it all. Until then, don’t do anything that might jeopardize you and your family’s safety.”
I nod and take my drawings back with me to the drafting table. I put my elbows down and rest my head in my hands for a few minutes to compose myself. When I straighten up, Otto is looking over at me and I manage a smile.
 
One afternoon, when I am waiting on line to receive my lunch ration, I find Petr Kien standing behind me.
“What is it today, Lenka? Water soup with a slice of potato or water soup with one black turnip?”
I am surprised he knows my name.
“I think it smells like rotten cabbage.”
He laughs. “It always smells rotten, Lenka. You must have figured that out by now.
“Where’s Otto?” he asks.
I look at him. The handsome face, his shock of thick black hair that reminds me of Josef.
I am suddenly flushed. Could it be that he has been watching me?
“Otto’s wife was able to have lunch with him today,” I say. I had been so happy to see the rare look of pleasure on Otto’s face when he set out to see her.
Petr doesn’t mention his wife, though I know he’s married. We sit on a bench outside the Magdeburg barracks, sipping our soup without tasting it.
A single cabbage leaf floats on top.
 
Petr was clear bright light. Otto, a melancholy slip of shadow. I loved them both. Being friends with men of such contasting personalities helped sustain me. Petr volunteered to illustrate every operatic program, every poster promoting a play or concert. He could not stop drawing even at lunch, even when we were done with our work in the technical department, even when only a few hours remained before curfew.
Although Petr took risks to paint openly, what he chose to paint was by no means controversial. He painted mostly portraits.
I watched him one evening as he worked on a study of a woman named Ilse Weber, her hand touching her cheek, her eyes dark and intelligent, her lips slightly upturned. Another time, he drew Zuzka Levitová in black ink, her large froglike eyes rendered like a caricature, her enormous bosom protruding from a checkered dress he did in quick crosshatched strokes.
“I wish I could work as quickly as you do,” I tell him one night. Just watching him brings me so much joy. He paints a watercolor of Adolf Aussenberg in a palette of rose and blue, the slender figure looking downward, his hands resting on his knees. But it is the drawing of Hana Steindlerová that is the most beguiling.
“A woman in the four stages of life,” he explains to me. First, he draws Hana as a young girl, her features in soft focus, his pencil smudging light shadows across her face. Next to this, a quick sketch of her as seductress, her hands behind her head, her hair tousled, her blouse undone, showing the faint outline of breasts, a naval, the gentle curve of hips. The largest image of her is as a wife and mother, her face now more serious, the youthfulness replaced by maternal softness, her expression one of distant thought. At the far bottom corner, the final image is a quick study of a girl with bobbed hair, her gaze downward, her smile almost impish.
“I love that,” I tell him. “It’s both the image of Hana’s daughter and Hana herself as a young girl.”
“Exactly,” he says, and I can see in his eyes a sense of happiness that comes from being understood.
Every day, I see him working in the courtyard on another portrait. There is the portrait of Frantiska Edelsteinová. The portrait of Eva Winderová with her thick eyebrows and hopeful gaze. The striking rendering of Willy van Adelsberg, the young Dutchman, his long hair and ripe mouth so seductively drawn he appears as beautiful as a girl. With Petr, I am constantly awed.
Then there is Otto. My sweet, soulful Otto. He works in color. Watercolor. Gouache. He paints the images that haunt him. The crematoriums, the coffin storeroom in front of the morgue, the long queues for food, the old praying over the dead.
I see him slide his drawings between pages of his official work. He never shares them with me, but he doesn’t hide them from my view either. When he leaves for the day, he tucks them into his waistband. I always pray that no one will stop him on his way to his barracks. I cannot imagine him withstanding any form of physical punishment, and I shudder at the thought of him being transported east.
 
After months of observing Petr work on his portraits, I finally hear him ask if he can paint me.
We are sitting on the same bench we always sit on, but now the air is pregnant with fall. I can detect the wind cooling, and smell the perfume of drying leaves. The red, dry earth is a dusty veil on my shoes.
He asks me to stay later one evening in the technical department. There is risk involved in this. The obvious risk of a German soldier discovering we’ve broken the rules and the risk that I will break my promise to Fritta not to come to the office after hours.
“But Fritta will want us to leave with everyone else,” I tell him. I don’t want to seem cowardly in mentioning the risk of being discovered by a German. “He doesn’t like people alone there. I once made the mistake of coming early . . . I promised I never would do it again.”
“Don’t worry. I’ll speak with him. We have an understanding.”
I raise an eyebrow. But he is evasive, giving little other explanation.

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