The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  The minutes pass. Perhaps now it’s been an hour. We will soon be pressed for time, as curfew will be called. My heart is thundering in my chest. My body is laced with fear that a German soldier might come and inspect the room, and adrenaline from the excitement of watching Petr work. He is painting so quickly now. His wrist travels across the canvas with the speed of an ice skater.

  My thoughts are now overtaking me. Part of me wants to leap from my seat and get my own canvas, my own palette of paints. I imagine Petr and me as mirror images, each sketching the other’s reflection.

  “Stand still, Lenka,” he says. “Please.”

  Now the minutes seem like hours.

  I feel so thirsty. I imagine paint bleeding into dry, parched cloth.

  My neck begins to ache and the thought I have been fighting to repress surfaces like a wound.

  A sense of loneliness overcomes me. I haven’t been touched—not touched the way I am craving to be touched at this moment with Petr’s eyes hard upon me, his hands working deftly, the sound of wet pigment whisking across canvas.

  “Lenka,” he says. “Don’t close your eyes.”

  I redden. “Yes . . . sorry. Sorry.” I am almost ashamed to be having these thoughts.

  I look at his black hair, the angles of his face, the white of his fingers as they hold his brush. I feel a stirring within me, an urge to kiss him. I long to be close to someone. I have almost forgotten what it is like to be held.

  I try to conjure up the thought of Petr’s wife, Ilse. I imagine them lying side by side, the hurried passion of their lovemaking, not a feast of the senses, but the quick sating of a hunger.

  “Lenka, be still. We’re almost done. Yes . . . there it is, we’re almost done.”

  I look over at the canvas. I am a creamy-white skin, dark hair falling behind a sharp edge of shoulders. Two blue-white eyes. My gaze sharp. My focus piercing and unflinching. My face more beautiful than I believe it actually is.

  CHAPTER 44

  LENKA

  With the painting between us, it is as if Petr and I have become lovers who have never touched. He has looked at me, studied me; he has seen me with razor-sharp eyes. Ask anyone who has been painted and they will tell you they have never felt more vulnerable than when they were sitting for hours under the gaze of another’s eyes. Clothed or unclothed, you are naked all the same.

  The next day, over lunch, I ask him if he is doing secret paintings other than the portraits.

  He doesn’t say anything at first. He stares at his bowl of cloudy soup and remains quiet.

  “Lenka,” he says at last. “I don’t want to lie to you . . .” He looks up at me and his eyes meet mine. “But I don’t want to get you involved.”

  “But I want to get involved, Petr. What else can I do? Am I supposed to do drawings of the railroad every day for a gang of Nazis who are waiting for the chance to see me dead?”

  Petr pushes his bowl to the side and stares ahead. In front of us, our colleagues are eating their rations without thinking. Hunger before taste. They remind me of an army of ants performing every motion, every task, without thinking.

  “Yes, Lenka, I’m working on secret paintings, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  He then goes on to tell me what I’ve been suspecting, that there is indeed an underground network of painters illustrating the atrocities. Petr is working with Fritta and Haas and a man by the name of František Strass, who has non-Jewish family members on the outside. They are working to get the paintings to people who want to expose the atrocities of the ghetto.

  Strass, a shrewd businessman who had been a successful merchant with a passion for collecting Czech art, was now running his own trading house from his barracks in Terezín. With some other prisoners, he was exchanging food he received in care packages—jars of marmalade or boxes of chocolate, biscuits, and cigarettes—for things he needed in the camp. But he was also smuggling the paintings done by some of the artists working in the technical department to his Gentile relatives on the outside. Haas and Fritta, a painter named Ferdinand Bloch, and even Petr and Otto were all passing their forbidden paintings on to him.

  Once he had the paintings in his hands, Strass regularly bribed two Czech brothers who were policemen in Terezín to get them out of the ghetto.

  “Strass has succeeded in getting our paintings to some of his relatives and other people who are sympathetic to our cause.”

  “Oh my goodness,” I say, barely able to contain my elation.

  “I know, Lenka, but this has to remain a secret. Promise me. The situation is more dangerous than ever now. Strass’s relatives have made contact with people in Switzerland. There is talk that they might even publish some of our paintings to show the world what is really going on.”

  I tell Petr about the drawing of Rita and her baby that I’ve hidden in my suitcase.

  We are outside the Magdeburg barracks before curfew.

  “Lenka, there might be searches.” He is visibly worried for me. “There was a raid on Strass’s barracks a few weeks ago. They found paintings underneath his mattress that were, thankfully, not political. But still, the Germans are on the lookout for Greuelpropaganda now.”

  “Greuelpropaganda?” I did not know the meaning of the word.

  “It means work that portrays the Reich unfavorably. The literal translation is ‘horror propaganda.’ ”

  “Horrific images of Terezín?” I ask Petr.

  “Yes, Lenka.” He pauses for a moment and looks me straight in the eyes. “In other words, the truth.”

  Petr and I sit with each other for what seems like hours. I am wringing my hands.

  “What do I do with the painting I’ve done of Rita and Adi?”

  He looks at me as though he is not focusing on my question, but searching for what to say. Am I the only one who feels that strange sense of hunger between us? That feeling I remember from that summer so long ago in Karlovy Nary.

  There are no wedding rings in Terezín. But I try to force the image of one on Petr’s hand.

  I feel like I am choking as he stares at me.

  Was it my hand that reached out to his first or was it his that reached out for mine?

  I still can’t remember, but I do know that I felt the warmth of his hand flooding through me as it first covered my knuckles, then squeezed the fingers so tightly I felt I might break from the intensity of his touch.

  “Petr,” I whisper. But he interrupts the thought that is about to fall from my lips, suddenly bringing us back to the painting.

  “Give it to Jíří. He’ll know what to do,” he finally says.

  Again he squeezes my hand. Although both of our hands are cold, I feel like I’m on fire. And I want to cry.

  For months I have wanted to tell him that I, too, yearned for a chance to record the truth, to send my paintings out to the world like Haas and Fritta were doing, but now those feelings are muddied with a desire for something that is even more impossible.

  He does not kiss me as I imagined him doing. As I hoped he would do. He just looks into my eyes.

  And when he looks, does he see a woman who is hungry for his touch? Or an artist who is nearly as hungry to use her talent for the good of her people?

  I am sure he sees both. But he chooses to respond to only one.

  “Give your painting to Jíří, and don’t do anything else to put yourself in jeopardy,” he says. “Things are more dangerous now than ever. The searches will continue . . . they might even intensify.” I see pain in his eyes. “I should never have told you, Lenka.”

  I feel our fingers loosen, the fire between us suddenly feels like bathwater. Petr’s hand falls to his side before fumbling to retrieve a black pen from his pocket.

  “Don’t get involved in any of this, Lenka. Promise me.”

  I nod my head.

  Jíří is one of the most trusted and talented engineers in Terezín. Like Fritta, he was a member of the prestigious Auf kommando, ordered to draft the technical drawings for
the expansion of the camp.

  “I’ve been here since the beginning,” he tells me. “ I know every nook and cranny of this place.”

  He unrolls my drawing. “It’s beautiful, Lenka.”

  “Did you know Rita Meissner?” I ask him. “It was of her and her baby son, Adi.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I didn’t.” He is still looking at my drawing.

  “He died right after being born, and they sent Rita and Oskar East a few months later.” I paused. “I promised her and her husband I would take care of it as best I can.”

  Jíří nods. “I know how important these drawings and paintings are. They are the only documentation future generations will have of Terezín. Don’t worry, Lenka, I will hide your painting in a safe place.”

  He tells me that he will make a metal canister for it and bury it in the basement of the Hamburg barracks.

  “There is a small antechamber when you first come down the stairs,” he says. “When it’s time for you to reclaim it, dig there.”

  He does not tell me that he has performed this task for Fritta and Haas many times already. Years later, I would learn that he had wrapped the tin canister in a piece of torn cloth like a shroud and then placed it carefully in the ground. Fritta’s and Haas’s works were buried elsewhere: Fritta’s in the field and Haas’s bricked up within the walls of one of the barracks. But my drawing was just like theirs—a time capsule of the pain of Terezín, planted in secret within the camp’s own walls.

  CHAPTER 45

  LENKA

  There was severe hunger in Terezín. There was disease. There was exhaustion and there was overcrowding. But despite the horrific conditions and overwhelming sense of despair, we still somehow managed to create art.

  The Nazis had forbidden anyone to bring musical instruments into Terezín, as they were not considered a necessity. Karel Frölich smuggled in his violin and viola, Kurt Maier an accordion. Then there was the legend of the cello: its owner, prior to his transport, carefully dismantled it into a dozen pieces; once he was inside Terezín, he put them back together. An old piano, with only one leg, was discovered. It was propped up against a wall and bolstered with some extra support and under Bernard Koff ’s masterful fingers, it came to life.

  Eventually the musicians of Terezín grew defiant. Gossip floated around the camp that Rafael Schachter, one of the most talented and beloved conductors in the ghetto, was organizing a performance of Verdi’s Requiem.

  “A requiem is a mass for the dead,” Otto told me, shaking his head. “Has the man lost his mind?”

  “He’s being brave,” I said. “He’s standing up to the injustice of being imprisoned.”

  “He’s going to get a bullet in his brain. That’s what he’s going to get if he goes ahead with it.”

  “They didn’t do anything when the children staged Brundíbar.”

  “This will be different, Lenka. This is the musical equivalent of an uprising.”

  I didn’t know what to believe. What I did know was that the Council of Elders had gotten wind of Schacter’s idea and were not keen on the idea of a Jewish choir performing a Catholic mass. “Terezín is the only place the Nazis control where anything Jewish can still be performed,” they argued. “They’ve banned it everyplace else.”

  Schachter would not be deterred.

  “It is one of our few remaining freedoms,” he said in his defense. “The Germans sing their Nazi slogans, their marching song. Let us do our own requiem on our terms. Our voices rising and united.”

  Schachter campaigned for the support of people within the camp and many joined with him. His performance of The Bartered Bride was legendary. He had conducted the opera while standing at the half-broken piano, the instrument now supported by several stacked, wooden boxes. I was in the audience when the opera was performed, the night so freezing that water that had been left in pots froze and audience members had to cluster together to keep warm. But I remember that the performance transported us. Many people even wept, they were so grateful. Against the austerity of our surroundings, the sound of those voices evoked such a strong storm of emotion that, when I scanned the audience, I saw not only tears of joy, but tears of hope and rapture as well.

  Schacter’s choral singers remained fiercely loyal to him. Once he gained the approval of the Council of Elders to perform the requiem, he set out to work on what became a theatrical tour de force. It would be his own act of mutiny against the tyranny of Nazism, set to Verdi’s score.

  One hundred and twenty singers elected to lend their voices in support of Schacter’s cause. At one rehearsal, he rallied his singers. “You are all brave for joining me,” he told them. “Yes, we are Jews singing a Catholic text.” He took a deep breath. “But this is not just any requiem, this is one that will be sung in honor of all of our fallen brothers and sisters, mothers and fathers. Our friends . . . who have already perished at their hands.”

  On the days leading up to the performance, Petr paints posters in black and gold ink announcing the production. I help him tack up the announcements around the camp. I am giddy with excitement to hear it.

  My frail parents see this evening as a big night out. Mother does her best to enhance her appearance, biting her chapped lips for lipstick and squeezing her cheeks for rouge. But there is no gilded state theater, no velvet dress and string of pearls for Mother, no black suit and silk waistcoat for Father. Mother is in rags, and her hair has turned completely white. They are two old people, transparent shadows of what they once were.

  That night, my parents, sister, and I huddle with hundreds of others around the makeshift stage. The one-legged piano is in the center of the stage and comes to life under the masterful hands of Gideon Kein. Frölich stands with his violin, caressing the strings to make it sing, rivaling even the best voice within the choir.

  Even now, as an old woman, when I hear a violinist, no other musician reduces me to tears the way Karel Frölich did when he played in Terezín. As I watched him that night, the instrument cradled between his neck and bony shoulder, his eyes closed and his hollow cheek pressed against the wood, both man and violin appeared locked in an eternal embrace.

  I’m sure I was not the only one who felt chills run through her body. With linked hands, those hundred and twenty singers sang more beautifully, more powerfully, than any others I had ever heard before or after.

  But a few days after the performance, the underlying message was not lost on the Nazis. Every one of the singers who had participated in it was sent on the next transport east. Rafael Schachter remained at Terezín.

  Schacter repeated the performance, and again, all one hundred and twenty singers were sent on the next transport east.

  The third and last time the requiem was performed in the camp, Schacter only managed to corral sixty singers to perform.

  The irony was not lost on anyone.

  Every singer who performed in the requiem was singing a mass for his or her own death.

  CHAPTER 46

  JOSEF

  In the years since Amalia’s death, I often wake up in the middle of the night with my heart racing and my mind addled by dreams I can’t understand. I imagine that I hear the sound of my beeper, or the voice from my answering service, telling me that I am late to a delivery. I hear the sound of my daughter calling out, as she so often did when she was a little girl, for a glass of water or a lost teddy bear or a simple reassurance that my wife and I are home. And then there are the panic attacks that begin late at night, when the house is quiet, when Jakob has fallen asleep to the sound of the television and I lie awake thinking, How have I managed to grow so very old? To be so very alone?

  I push the covers back with my wrinkly feet. The hems of my pajama bottoms are frayed and parts are threadbare, but I have yet to replace them. They were a gift from Rebekkah for Father’s Day years before. I can still remember the Lord & Taylor box, the longstemmed rose with the black script writing, and the thick white bow. “Green to match your eyes,” she said. A
nd as I crumpled up the clouds of white tissue and placed the pajamas back in the box, I wanted to kiss my baby girl in the middle of her forehead, even though she was then nearly forty years old.

  I often wonder if it’s the curse of old age, to feel young in your heart while your body betrays you. I can feel the slackness of my sex, curled underneath my boxer shorts, yet I still can close my eyes and remember those few days with Lenka before my family and I left for England. I can see her lying on my bed, my torso rising above her, her eyes burning into mine.

  I can see her arms reaching for me, sliding around my shoulders, her fingers clasping behind my neck. I can see the pale of her throat as she tosses her head back, that fountain of dark hair grazing the pillow. Her narrow waist held between my two hands.

  I torture myself sometimes by conjuring up the weight of Lenka in my arms. I try to force myself to remember the sound of her laughter, that giggle as I playfully lay her down on the bed. The sense of bottomlessness as I enter her, travel through her. When I made love to her—was within her—there never seemed to be an end.

  In my dreams, I pull up her hair. I kiss her neck, her eyelids. I kiss her shoulder, her perfect mouth.

  I find her spine with my finger and trace each vertebra as she pulls herself around me. Her legs lock like she is climbing a tree, clutching my back so tightly that I am pressed into her, so hard that I feel my bones imprinted on her flesh.

  And in these thoughts I am still a young man in my twenties, vital and strong. I have a head full of black hair and a chest that is not concave but robust, and a heart that needs no medicine. I am Lenka’s beloved and she is mine, and in these dreams there is no threat of war, no dire need for passports and exit visas, for ships that will be torpedoed and letters that will remain unanswered. They are dreams.