The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  He placed his finger beneath my chin and lifted me one last time to his mouth.

  “I love you,” he whispered. And then I let go of him and stood at the platform as the train pulled away from the station.

  The box contained a small cameo, carved from a smooth, pink carnelian stone, the face in white relief.

  I could hear his voice telling me the face resembled mine. The long, narrow eyes. The full waves of hair.

  I knew this was a conciliatory gift from his mother. A thank-you for convincing Josef not to stay with me.

  I knew their travel plans by heart. First the train through Germany and Holland, and then a ferry from Calais in France that would bring them to England. There my beloved Josef would write me daily, and we would begin the countdown until we were together again.

  It seemed as if the moment Josef left, events turned even bleaker.

  On March 14, just two weeks after my wedding, with my husband already in England, Hitler gave the Czech government an ultimatum to surrender. Later the same day, the German army rolled its tanks across the Czech border. By morning, the Germans were in Prague. Slovakia declared its independence, calling itself the Slovak Republic, and what was left of our country was annexed to the Reich and renamed the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia.

  I stood at the long windows of our apartment watching the motorcades and tanks driving down the streets. The roads were lined with onlookers. There were a few cheers, but mostly the other Czechs watched with sadness as our city was taken over.

  Within days, Hachá, the newly imposed president, abolished the parliament and all political parties, and also vocally condemned the “Jewish influence” in Czechoslovakia. As the Germans marched into Prague to the cheers of the German-speaking Czechs, he closed the borders and initiated the Nuremburg laws.

  Konstantin von Neurath was soon appointed Reichsprotektor of all of Bohemia and Moravia. Already, we began to see our freedom evaporating before us.

  He instituted German laws to control the press, crack down on student protestors, and abolish any conflicting political parties or unions.

  That spring, I continued to receive letters from Josef. He spoke of the warm, generous family they were boarding with in Suffolk, and of the tall oak trees that were beginning to grow fat with green. He wrote how his father had delivered nine babies since his arrival, and how the English were bracing themselves for a second world war. He wrote that he worried about me and that every night he had a recurring dream.

  In his dream, the two of us are near a foxhole in the middle of a forest. In Czech folklore, the foxhole is a magical place where children secretly placed pieces of paper inscribed with wishes. In his dream, we jointly stick our folded paper into the foxhole, and when we withdraw our hands, we are holding a small baby.

  I laughed when I read this because every night I go to sleep I remember our wedding night, his long body stretching and pressing into mine.

  By early April, I sensed that I was pregnant, but I delayed telling my mother or sister until the start of May. By that time, my breasts were so tender and swollen that I had begun to undo the buttons on my shirt at night when everyone was asleep. I was barely eating breakfast in the morning, and I was spending most of each afternoon only wanting to sleep.

  I suspect my mother also knew I was pregnant. She looked at me as if she suspected something, but kept her words to a minimum during those first few months of the German occupation. Finally, as I began to worry that I should consult a doctor and after my second period never appeared, I burst into tears as I helped prepare the afternoon tea.

  “Mama,” I whimpered into her thin arms. “I’m pregnant.” I began to cry as she tightened her arms. I didn’t tell her that I feared I would never see Josef again, or that I felt ill-prepared to bring a child into a world when a war was becoming more likely each day.

  “I know you’re scared, my love. But you will be fine, Lenka. Even if you have to raise the child without Josef for a little while, you will have us. You will never be alone.”

  My heart flooded with love for her. I was right not to leave my family. Never would I want my parents or sister to think that they were ever alone.

  I wrote to Josef that I was expecting and he returned my letter saying that he was overjoyed, but sick over the fact he couldn’t be with me. He included the name of the doctor who had taken over his father’s practice and told me I should visit him immediately. There, I would receive the best care. At this point Jewish doctors were no longer on the Czech national insurance policy, so all patients who went to Jewish doctors had to pay cash. Dr. Silberstein saw me free of charge. He was a kind, middle-aged man who felt my abdomen with gentle hands and reassured me that I was in perfect health and would deliver without difficulty.

  My abdomen thickened by my fourth month. Mother helped let out the waistbands of my skirts and she began to unpack the baby clothes that had once been Marta’s and mine. I had welcomed my pregnancy even though things were so difficult for us. It was wonderful to feel that there was life swelling inside me and that that life was created with Josef. With the baby growing every day, our connection deepened in my mind. Life in Prague, however, had become increasingly difficult. We always thought the worst was behind us, until the next week when there was a new law passed and our freedom was restricted even further. We seldom left home unless it was necessary. That June, von Neurath issued a decree excluding all Jews from economic life and ordering them to register their assets. Jewish companies were officially taken over by the German Treuhand who would oversee their sale or “Aryanization.” The day after this order was decreed, Adolf Eichmann arrived in Prague and set up house in a confiscated Jewish villa in Střešovice.

  By August, Jews were segregated in restaurants and prohibited from public bathrooms and swimming pools. A curfew was initiated that forbade us to be out after sunset, and even our radios were confiscated. My belly was now noticeably bigger and I tried to tell myself that the restrictions were not so bad, that I should welcome the opportunity to rest and keep off my feet. Once the baby arrived, I knew I would be busy and tired. I only hoped that things would improve by then and I would be able to take the baby for fresh air and walks.

  I tried to remain as positive as I could, although at times it seemed almost impossible to be happy with so much tension and fear surrounding my family and our situation. I imagined the baby was a boy and thought I would call him Tomáš, after my grandfather who had died when I was three. At night, I’d lie in bed and try to remember our wedding night, the sensation of Josef’s arms around me. The moonlight pouring through the window, and our naked bodies entwined.

  When I felt the first kicks of life, I was bursting with happiness. No matter how bleak our circumstances had become, those first movements made me feel that life was continuing.

  Marta, however, had grown restless from the curfew and the loss of freedom. She seldom saw her friends. I could sense her increasing frustration. She said little to our parents and had no interest in talking to me about my pregnancy, but occasionally I would catch her eye and see how miserable she was. Her long red hair was a mane of unruly curls, defiant and glorious as it rolled down her back. She refused to braid it even though her school demanded it. It was the only protest she was allowed.

  I tried to remain optimistic, hoping a letter would arrive from Josef telling me he had secured our visas to England and that our exit stamp from the Gestapo had been arranged. But that letter never arrived. Instead, Josef’s letters became more frantic and steeped in frustration. War was now almost certain, and the borders were closed. We both knew he was going to have to go to the United States without me and then hope he could somehow arrange for passage for me and my family later.

  I accepted this with little protest. I lacked the strength for such a strenuous trip and I feared giving birth in a foreign city.

  I placed my hands on my belly each night and closed my eyes. I welcomed each kick as though it were a knock heralding a better life,
one in which Josef and I were together, our baby rolling on the floor to the sounds of laughter, rather than sirens and warplanes overhead.

  Josef’s family would leave on the SS Athenia from Liverpool on September 1, arrive in Canada a few weeks later, and then travel on to New York. Josef promised to send a telegram as soon as they had arrived safely.

  The newspapers, however, were the ones who informed me of his status. The SS Athenia was torpedoed off the coast of Ireland by a German U-boat, the first civilian casualty of the war. Although most of the passengers were saved from the sinking ship, the Kohn family was listed among the ninety-eight dead.

  CHAPTER 22

  JOSEF

  On the deck, the sky was black as ink. I remember not a single star, only pale light from the moon. We stood in the cold, the wind lashing our faces. My mother was wearing her fur coat. She had sewn her remaining jewelry and Czech crowns in its lining. My sister was still in her favorite red dress from dinner. She had been dancing with a boy from Krakow, and the color that had flushed her cheeks over cordials was now erased to an unearthly white.

  When they called for the women and children, my father pushed Věruška and Mama ahead of us. I had just said good-bye to Lenka months earlier, and now my mother and sister were clinging to the lapels of my dinner jacket, their soft, damp faces pressing against mine for the last time.

  Věruška’s final words were like an absolution to me. “She was right not to come.” I watched speechless as she took my aging mother toward the lifeboats.

  She turned to look back at me one last time as one of the deckhands helped her and Mother into the boat. As the pulleys lowered them down into the sea, her dress was like a plume of red smoke rising against the darkened sky.

  A half hour later, Papa and I were still waiting to be put onto one of the last lifeboats. I stood there thinking that those who remained would now drown together. I looked at the faces around me. There was a boy next to me, no older than seventeen, with a small white face and a thick head of black hair. In one of his blue hands, he held his bow; in the other, he held his violin. The instrument dangled like a wounded appendage. I had made up my mind that I would not ask him his name. I did not want to know the names of the ghosts who would be sharing my tomb, but Papa reached and put his arm around him. The boy shook at Papa’s touch.

  “Is your family already on another boat?” Papa asked him.

  The boy shuddered. “No, I am alone.”

  “I am Dr. Jacob Kohn and this is my son, Josef,” Papa said, pointing to me.

  “I’m Isaac Kirsch.” He clumsily switched his bow to the same hand that held his violin and shook Papa’s and my hand. Later I would learn he had been practicing on the deck when the torpedo hit. He said his violin case had been thrown into the water during the impact.

  This was a hasty introduction against a backdrop of chaos and death. Women were screaming from down below as the crew frantically rushed around the deck. They were boys who were not navy men but simply “extra” sons who needed a job and found themselves on a cruise ship bound for Canada.

  There were still hundreds of people on deck as we were pushed to an available lifeboat. What happened next haunts me to this day. I have relived it in my head so many times. Second by second.

  Papa pushes Isaac and me ahead of him. “The young before the old,” he says. “I’ll take the next boat.”

  I say, “No, Papa.” He reaches for my cheek. I feel the warmth of his palm. And in that rushed second, I am that shuddering bird of my childhood, cupped in a single hand. “Papa,” I say, but he has already decided. He pushes me away and forces me and Isaac to climb into the lifeboat alone. We are lowered into the water, a pool of black. As the stern of the enormous ship begins to dip lower and lower, I see bodies jumping from the deck. In the chaos of our lifeboat, Isaac manages to hold on to his violin but drops his bow.

  The rescue ship, the Knute Nelson, has come to help us. But its propeller accidentally tears into one of the bobbing lifeboats. I hear the screams, witness the carnage of blood spilling into the sea illuminated by the rescue ship’s floodlights. Red silk spreading over the water like a parachute. I see my sister falling into the water like a drowning rose.

  CHAPTER 23

  JOSEF

  When Isaac plays the violin at my thirtieth birthday party years later, he is the one person who knows me for the man I really am. He plays the music that I am partial to. The melancholy music of Brahms, or the second movement of Dvořák’s American string quartet. The melody played by the first violin makes me cry every time I hear it.

  He is seven years younger than I. He is now a violinist in the New York Philharmonic. He eats Amalia’s dry cakes and drinks sweet wine.

  I like to think we are cut from the same cloth. We each arrived here with no one. I carry the weight of my wife and baby trapped in Europe; he carries his violin as if it could serenade his ghosts.

  He tells me he plays for his mother, who loved the folk music of her village outside Brno. He plays for his father, who loved the simplicity of Mendelssohn, for his little brother, who hated the sound of the violin and cried every time he played a single note.

  My Amalia sits in her kitchen listening to him. She folds her hands and closes her eyes. Sometimes when he plays, I watch her, her face transported to someplace far away.

  The three of us eat around our modest table, the basket of bread passed between us. The flowers that Isaac brought are placed in a glass milk bottle that Amalia had saved.

  And our lives quietly continue in peace and safety.

  I learn the comfort of a good glass of whiskey. I find solace as I clean the corridors of a sticky primary school, and teach myself English by reading the books that are kept in desks by children fifteen years younger than I am. These are the things I do as I put myself through medical school.

  The letters I had written to Lenka to tell her I am safe and working to get her out of Prague are all returned unopened and placed in a box under my bed that also contains my first wedding photograph. Next to the wooden toys and miniature airplane I had bought nearly a decade earlier in London, in the giddy anticipation of the birth of my son.

  CHAPTER 24

  LENKA

  My world went black after I knew of Josef’s ship’s sinking. I became consumed with grief.

  It was my mother who told me I had lost all color in my face. You must go to the doctor, she urged as she wrapped me in not one coat but two. It was the end of September and we were now officially at war. Two long lapels dripped from my chest; my belly made it impossible for either coat to close.

  Dr. Silberstein took his stethoscope from his bag and held it over the stretched skin of my abdomen.

  “When was the last time you felt movement?” he asked. My eyes were full of tears. I could not answer him; since the minute I read of the sinking of the Athenia, I had lost track of everything.

  “I can’t remember,” I told him. “Is it the baby?” I felt the floor sliding out from me.

  He had me lie down again and struggled to find the heartbeat. “I can’t find it,” he told me, “but it could just be the position. Go home and we will find out in a few days.”

  I woke up to a rush of blood the following evening. Everything was sliding out from me. My husband was dead, and my baby was now a jelly of blood on the sheets.

  All I wanted was to join them.

  My mother bathed me and cared for me, and the doctor was kind enough to give me some precious morphine so that I could sleep.

  I slept and slept as if I were sleeping into my own death. I dreamed of nothing. I dreamed black. No images, no memories, no thoughts of the future. When you dream of darkness, you are all but dead.

  In the months that followed, my mother took care of me as if I were a newborn child. She washed me, fed me, and read to me as I lay like my own stillborn baby. Lifeless, with eyes like frosted glass, in my own childhood bed.

  As I struggled to come to terms with my loss, things only worsene
d for my family and our community around us. Freedoms we once never considered freedoms were taken from us. We could no longer drive, own a pet, or even listen to the radio. We were given two days to surrender our radios and I remember foggily as Father bundled up the radio he had bought for Mother years before and turned it over to the authorities.

  Lucie seemed like the only person we could count on as our former life crumbled around us. She appeared every Monday, arriving like an angel, with fresh eggs and milk from Petr’s brother’s farm. These visits were mother’s lifeline to the world outside the apartment. The tables had clearly turned; instead of offering Lucie decadently sumptuous Saturday meals and gifts commissioned from the seamstress, Gizela, we were reduced to humbly accepting whatever was in her basket that week.

  Lucie’s daughter, Eliška, was now speaking her first sentences, and her chubby legs and doll-like face made Mama and Marta temporarily forget their unhappiness. I, however, could not bear to look at the child. I would see Lucie smiling as Eliška twirled around in her pinafore or nibbled on a crust of bread and I would be filled with an envy that made me loathe myself even more. It was terrible to be jealous of another person’s child, especially someone you loved so much. But I felt so empty that all I could think of was craving a replacement for what I had lost.

  Still, it was Lucie who saved me from my grief. She arrived one afternoon with her basket of food but also with a little package just for me. She brought the present, wrapped in brown paper and twine, to my bed.

  “Lenka,” she ordered. “I want you to open it now . . . not later.”

  My hands were weak from lack of use. They trembled slightly as they went to undo the string and remove the paper. Inside was a little tin of pastels and a small sketchpad.