The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  I would often see Rita at one of these performances. She loved the singing, she told me, and she had started seeing a man named Oskar, who had a good voice and was often chosen as one of the leads.

  They were a handsome couple, with her high cheekbones and cropped blond hair, and his broad shoulders and almond-shaped brown eyes. When he sang for the others, he would always take his hand and place it over his heart, as if he were coaxing out each note in the name of his beloved. Of course, that was Rita, who stood in the corner with her radiant smile and shining eyes. In the few moments before curfew sounded, I often saw them sneaking behind doors and other hidden places within the camp to steal a kiss, and I would smile, happy that they had both discovered a bit of romance under such misery.

  As crowded and disease-ridden as Terezín was, romances like Rita and Oskar’s somehow did bloom. I heard lots of the girls in the barracks talking of boyfriends and secret meetings. I saw how they tried to groom themselves with nothing but their bare, dirty fingers and a spot of saliva on their palm. I saw how they pinched their cheeks and bit their lips so the tiny droplets of blood would bring a semblance of color to them.

  But I did not have anyone, just the ghost of Josef in my heart. In the nights I was able to dream, I dreamed only of him.

  CHAPTER 30

  JOSEF

  There were countless times over the years when I swore I saw Lenka. I’d be on the subway and see someone who could have been her. I’d be on vacation with Amalia and the children and think I saw Lenka walking away from the pool. At other times I’d be on a bus, and swear I had seen the back of a head that was the same shape as hers, the hair the same color. I would hold my breath until the woman turned her head and I could see it was not her.

  This is what Amalia referred to as a “ghost day.” When you saw those you’ve been looking for in the shadow of another. Isaac once called it a “projection of your longing,” but I preferred the simplicity of Amalia’s term. She had coined it early on in our marriage. All she had to do when I came home tired from the office was to say she’d had one of those days, and no further words were needed.

  When she had one, I’d simply nod to her, my eyes sincere with understanding. I’d try to smile, and squeeze her hand.

  After she died, I sometimes let myself wonder what her ghost days had been like compared with mine. I was looking for a wife, a lover I had left behind. She was searching for a mother, a father, and a sister who was supposed to have joined her on her journey. Mine was lost love, hers was lost family. But loss was loss, wasn’t it? Cold and white. Blue and dark. Cut a vein and it bleeds.

  I am in love with a shadow. I look for her in the darkness of the hallway. I search for her in the eyes of the old women crossing the street. My second wife, whom I used to spoon every morning as we lay in bed, was not the saddle for my sleep; it was Lenka, who visited me in my dreams. She still haunts me like a lioness, a cat with piercing eyes. Over sixty years have passed and her shadow still walks beside me. Her shadow stretching long and black—waiting for me to reach for her—waiting for me to extend my hand.

  In my old age, I have come to believe that love is not a noun but a verb. An action. Like water, it flows to its own current. If you were to corner it in a dam, true love is so bountiful it would flow over. Even in separation, even in death, it moves and changes. It lives within memory, in the haunting of a touch, the transience of a smell, or the nuance of a sigh. It seeks to leave a trace like a fossil in the sand, a leaf burned into baking asphalt. I never stopped loving Lenka, even when my letters were returned and the newspapers revealed the deaths of millions of Jews who had been incinerated into a ceaseless cloud of black smoke.

  I told my daughter, the first time she fell in love, not to hold it too close. Think of yourself in a warm, summer pool, I told her, concentric circles rippling all around you. Golden beams of sunlight flooding your hair, striking your face. Inhale it. Breathe it. It will not leave you. If you place sunlight in your palms, it will turn to shadow. If you put fireflies in ajar, they will die. But if you love with wings on, you will always feel the exhilaration of being suspended in flight.

  She fell in love with a boy in college who proposed to her the night before graduation. He was tall and dark like I was. He was quiet and loved books. I liked Benjamin. I saw how he sat at the table with Amalia and me, looking at us with a reverent gaze, a trace of confusion in what he saw.

  It was the confusion that made me think he was the right man for Rebekkah. He looked at the quiet between Amalia and me, the careful, almost cautious compassion, and I could read his mind: Let this never be me.

  And that is what bound me to him. Yes, let this not be you. Kiss my daughter and feel the warm breeze in your face, the warmth of the sun on your eyelids. Embrace the fluttering of butterflies in your stomach. If I give you my blessing, marry her and make love to her as if you were the king and queen of your own kingdom. Feel the beating of her heart on top of yours. Seal yourself to each other.

  But betray her and I will burn your eyes out. Love her purely and do not let her go. May the two of you be rewarded with the songs of angels in your ears.

  When he finished his dessert and reached for her hand, placing his on top of hers, I saw the confirmation I needed. I saw how his eyelids closed, as if he were slipping into her. As fluid as honey. As strong as a current of waves.

  And I, too, closed my eyes.

  CHAPTER 31

  JOSEF

  My grandson was born five years later. I stood in the waiting room with Benjamin and Amalia. The doctor handling the delivery was a protégé of mine. I knew his hands at the sight of them. They were large and strong. He had delivered over three hundred babies and I trusted him implicitly. His cesareans were flawless, and his sutures were seamless and healed without the faintest trace of scarring.

  Rebekkah had never been more beautiful than when she was pregnant. Her long hair grew thick and glossy, her pale skin glowed.

  Amalia sewed her maternity dresses. Benjamin brought her milk shakes and bouquets of lily of the valley on his way home from the office. He had grown wiry after law school, and the two of them looked like one of the medieval paintings I remembered in the churches back in Prague, my daughter, the Madonna with her swollen belly, and Benjamin one of the wise men bearing her gifts.

  When Rebekkah went into labor, Amalia and I walked from our apartment to Lenox Hill Hospital. I knew the walk by heart. I had done it for twenty years: seventeen minutes if we made every light. Twenty-one if we missed more than three.

  Amalia was fifty-two and I was fifty-six. We were already gray. I had a bit of a paunch but Amalia was still thin as a reed; only the skin on her arms betrayed her age.

  I could see in her eyes how nervous she was on the way to the hospital. “She’ll be fine,” I told her, and I squeezed her hand and then put my arm around her shoulders. The bones of her back shivered as I held her close.

  At the nurses’ station, I was welcomed like a king. “Congratulations, Dr. Kohn,” they all chirped, even before the birth was over. “She’s doing great. Four centimeters already.”

  Benjamin was sitting on one of the vinyl couches, his face white from lack of sleep.

  “Dad,” he said, standing up. “So glad you’re finally here.”

  I loved Benjamin like a son, and every time he called me Dad it was like an extra shot of paternal love straight into my heart. “Don’t worry,” I said, and hugged him. I was like a general comforting my troops.

  I brought them coffee—black for Amalia, lots of milk and sugar for Benjamin—and then went to check on Rebbekah.

  She was lying on her side, the pain clearly visible on her face.

  “Hello, sweetheart,” I whispered.

  She smiled, though I could see how forced it was. A doctor can measure a patient’s pain just by looking at her, and Rebekkah’s was escalating. I could also see the fear in her eyes.

  I took her hand. Oh, that hand of my daughter. Her grip took hold of my h
eart, threads of warmth soaking into my fingers.

  “Where’s Dr. Liep?” I asked softly.

  “He just checked on me a few minutes ago and said I still have to wait.”

  “Hurry up, already! Motherhood is waiting,” I joked, patting her leg through the thin hospital sheet. It was a line I had used many times before.

  But my Rebekkah didn’t laugh, which was unusual for her, because Rebekkah always laughed when I tried to be silly with her. That was the kindness of my daughter; she laughed even when I wasn’t funny. She laughed with me so I wouldn’t feel alone.

  “I’ll go look for him,” I reassured her. “Are you comfortable?”

  “Yes,” she said bravely. But I knew she wasn’t. She had told us she didn’t want any Demerol because she was going to go through labor without drugs, not in a twilight sleep. She was going to give birth with her wits about her and her eyes wide open.

  “With your wits about you?” I remember Benjamin shaking his head in our living room. “Dad, how many natural deliveries have you seen where the women still had their wits about them?”

  “Not many. Not many at all,” I said with a laugh. “But Rebekkah can handle it.”

  “Great,” Benjamin said. “We’ll know just what to do if things get a little rough in there.”

  I smiled and recalled the sight of Rebekkah only a few days before, sitting on the couch, her stomach round as a watermelon, her slender arms defiantly folded on top.

  I remember thinking, here I was, an obstetrician looking at my own daughter about to give birth, and I was still capable of being amazed by her.

  Under the fluorescent lights of the doctors’ lounge, I find Dr. Liep looking over a folder of papers.

  He looked up when he heard my footsteps. “She’s fine, Josef. Another five centimeters, and we’re there.”

  I knew I had looked over thousands of papers while my patients lay in their beds and nature took its course, but I would be lying if I said I didn’t expect Dr. Liep to be in the room with Rebbekah for the majority of her labor.

  I escorted him back to her room but left when he went to check her. My daughter wanted me to respect her privacy, and I wanted to keep that promise.

  If she was now at five centimeters, I estimated that she would start full labor in three to four hours.

  I went back to the waiting room. “We’ll be here for some time,” I told them. “Benjamin, why don’t you and Amalia go and get a bite to eat downstairs, and I’ll man the fort up here.”

  They agreed, and I settled into one of the hospital chairs. It was such a strange thing for me to now be on the side of the family awaiting the good news—that the baby was healthy, that the mother was doing just fine, and to tell the family whether they now had a new baby boy or girl.

  I had to admit, I didn’t like the loss of control. I wanted to be in the room with Rebekkah, with her chart in my hand and my gloves on in case there was an emergency.

  But even I knew that wasn’t a good idea. I think in my heart I thought everything would go smoothly. So when Susan, one of my favorite nurses, appeared and told me the baby’s shoulder had gotten caught in the birth canal, she and another nurse had to hold me back from racing to the room.

  Shoulder dystocia is every obstetrician’s worst nightmare. There is nothing worse than seeing a head and watching it turn blue.

  A cesarean was almost always impossible because the baby was typically trapped too far down.

  As I struggled to break myself free, Eleanor put both of her hands on my shoulders.

  “Phillip thinks it is better if you stay out here, Doc.”

  I knew I would have given the same instructions were our situations in reverse. No one wants to bring familial emotions into the operating room. But the thought of Rebekkah suffering and frightened in the delivery room, the thought of my grandchild possibly not making it or having a limp arm for the rest of his or her life—a very possible complication of a dystocia delivery—terrified me.

  Susan took my arm. “C’mon, Dr. Kohn. Let’s take a walk.”

  “You need to have someone waiting here to keep Amalia and Benjamin calm when they return,” I told her. “Have one of the nurses say there is a complication but everything is going to be fine.”

  “Absolutely,” she told me. “Consider it done.”

  She guided me down the corridor. I had walked this length of linoleum a thousand times, but this time fear nearly froze me in my tracks.

  My grandson was born blue. I have often returned to that image of him, a limp nine-pound boy on the warming table, his skin mottled like a plum. Rebekkah told me his first cry sounded like he had been lost to water, a gurgled wail from the bottom of an ocean.

  “He fought his way out of the womb,” the doctor said. “A little warrior, he is.”

  “McRoberts position failed, but suprapubic pressure worked like a charm.” He was smiling at me but I could read his face perfectly: he had been terrified. The exhaustion and fear were still just behind his eyes, and if I hadn’t been so drained at the time, I would have hugged him and told him how thankful I was that he had delivered my grandson healthy.

  “We’re calling him Jason, Dad,” Rebekkah told me. “After Benjamin’s grandfather, Joshua.”

  “A fine name,” I told them.

  I held Jason in my arms and wept. My daughter’s son. My grandson, with my blood running through his. Another life in this world to love, to sing, to do all sorts of good. My heart leaped at the thought of him traveling through life and all the milestones he would eventually reach: his first words, his first steps.

  His first love.

  I read his features like a map. I looked at his high forehead and the curve of his lip and saw my daughter. The strong brow framing two scallop-shaped eyelids were my son-in-law’s, and the small chin was Amalia’s. I did not see myself until he opened his eyes later that evening. In the watery gaze of newborn indigo, I saw myself reflecting in his gaze. As dark as my memory, as deep as the sea, I loved that boy from the moment he was born.

  I have skipped the story of my son, Jakob. My little boy with his chubby limbs, his deep thoughts, and his quiet way.

  After his bris, Isaac serenaded him with the melodies of Brahms and Dvořák, and years later when I brought him to the doctor, I wondered if it was on that eighth day that all of our sadness had been saturated into his little soul.

  Of course, how could our child not have grown up sad and quiet with the two of us as parents? Rebekkah somehow was blessed with a fire within her, like my sister, her spirit bathed in red.

  But Jakob’s eyes were sad from the moment we held him. Amalia spoke of it before I did.

  “His is different,” she told me when he was less than two weeks old. “I can hear it.”

  I told her she was imagining it. “He is perfectly fine,” I told her. “He is healthy and strong.”

  “His isn’t a cry of hunger or for sleep,” she said. “It is crying for the sake of crying.”

  “Babies cry,” I told her. “They can’t speak yet.”

  “I feel it in my bones,” she said. “It is a cry of sadness.”

  My son needed to be held. In the months following his birth, we took turns cradling him at night. Amalia sang him the songs her mother had sung to her. Her quiet, lilting voice would temporarily soothe him—as if the melodies were as familiar to him as they were to her. When it was my turn, I would take him to my office that was adjacent to our bedroom. We’d sit at my desk, with his little face turned toward my chest, and I’d read to him. I probably should have read him a children’s book like Babar or Benjamin Bunny instead of the novels I preferred, but he always quieted when we were together.

  At preschool, they said he was unusually bright and that he could work with puzzles all day long. He didn’t enjoy playing with the other children, but who could blame him? I thought. He is a deep thinker, the teacher told us, exquisitely sensitive. He had noticed that the rain fell against the windowpane like tears, that the lin
oleum titles were speckled with amber freckles. To this, Amalia and I smiled. A three-year-old who gazes out the window, who prefers solitude to playing with others on the jungle gym or in the sandbox. I told myself to take my son as he was.

  When Rebekkah was born, it only emphasized Jakob’s difference. She was a ball of constant energy, and her eyes danced when you held her. She giggled. She only cried when she was hungry or overtired, but Amalia was right in what she had sensed about our son. Rebekkah’s cry had a definitive beginning and end. It wasn’t a long, mournful wail like Jakob’s.

  What do you do with a child who has no interest in making friends? Who instead invents imaginary playmates when he is alone in his room, with the blocks piled high, and the LEGO towers colorcoordinated, and who only wants to wear the color blue?

  Blue T-shirt. Blue pants. Blue socks.

  “He likes the color blue, so he’s decisive. He is passionate about what he likes,” I tell Amalia.

  She shakes her head. “No. There is something wrong.”

  I’m the doctor, I want to tell her. He is a little strange, yes, but he’s ours and he’s fine.

  But a mother’s intuition is always right. Shouldn’t I have known that? How many times have I seen a woman come to my office saying she sensed something was wrong with her pregnancy, and she turned out to be right?

  As Jakob entered elementary school, it became clear he couldn’t function in the structure of a classroom. His dark brown hair was often in his eyes, and his once-chubby body had now lengthened and thinned. He reminded me of a sickly colt, floundering as he tries to get himself up on his legs. Noises bothered him, any adjustment the teacher made to the schedule sent him into a tantrum, and he could not bear to have anyone but Amalia or me touch him. It was as if his skin burned if someone else even grazed him.