The Lost Wife

by Alyson Richman

  Mine.

  Silly. Old. Mine.

  And they keep me from ever resting. Perhaps from dying.

  My head full of dreams. My heart full of ghosts.

  I sit up and wiggle my feet into my slippers. I adjust the tuner on the radio and fall asleep to the sounds of Duke Ellington.

  And dream again. Then I wake up, wipe the drool from my lips, and slide a hand down my pajamas trousers to see if I’m still all there.

  And, cruelly, I always still am.

  CHAPTER 47

  LENKA

  I continued my long hours at the drafting board in the technical department. Some days I could hardly see straight as I walked back to the barracks. I often had to redo many of my drawings because my hands had begun to shake. I had heard the others complain of this, too. The fatigue, the dehydration and lack of food, caused our bodies to deteriorate. Our bellies were concave, our skin yellow. We were road maps of bone and bruised skin.

  Despite my physical decline, my admiration for Fritta continues to grow. I never see him doing the work that is intended for Strass, but I do see that he is creating a book to commemorate his son’s third birthday. What a wonderful father, I think to myself. There is so little in Terezín to give to a child—Fritta is creating some joy just with his pen and paints. I begin to create excuses to walk past him, to watch him at work and catch a glimpse of one of his illustrations. I see him drawing the little boy as a small cartoon figure, with two black button eyes, full cheeks, and a button nose. Dimpled legs and a cowlick on his head.

  One afternoon Fritta walks up to me and says, “Lenka, it’s finished.”

  “Sir,” I say. “What’s finished?”

  “My book for Tomáš.” He places it down on my desk. “I know you’ve been peeking.”

  I smile. “I suspect I wasn’t very discreet,” I say.

  He chuckles. It is the first time I’ve heard him laugh in all the months I’ve worked for him. “Tell me what you think.”

  He leaves me there with the book. He must have had someone sew the binding for him, for it was bound in a coarse brown cloth.

  To Tomíčkovi on your third birthday. Terezín. January 22, 1944, Fritta has inscribed on the first page.

  But it is the colorful images on the pages that take my breath away. He draws the little boy standing at a window of a walled fortress, his bare feet atop a suitcase that bears the number of his transport: AAL/710. Outside the window he sees a blackbird flying against the sky, the spindle of a lone tree, and the angle of a red rooftop. The other illustrations that follow, all done in black pen and filled in with washes of watercolor, are his wishes for his son. He paints a birthday cake with three tall candles. He paints him standing with outstretched hands, clad in brightly colored mittens and a wool coat, amid a flurry of snow. He paints him as he imagines him in the future, Tomi in a checkered trench coat, and a matching cap, smoking a pipe. He asks him, in writing at the bottom of one of the pages, Who will be your bride? And he paints Tomi in a tuxedo and matching top hat, bringing flowers to a beautiful young girl.

  The last page of the book is inscribed with a wish: This book is the first in a long line of books that I will draw for you.

  I close the book and hand it back to Fritta.

  “It’s beautiful,” I say.

  But it is more than beautiful. It is touching. It is heartbreaking. More precious than if one of the gift packages Fritta had drawn had come to life off the page.

  I watch as Fritta’s long fingers grasp the book. He gives it a small shake and smiles.

  “You think he’s going to like it, Lenka?” He looks down at the book. “It’s meant to be a primer, to teach him to read and write.”

  Now it is Fritta who seems like the small child, giddy with a gift to give to the person he loves most.

  “He’s going to cherish it forever,” I say.

  “Thank you, Lenka,” he says with such kindness. I’m not sure if I’m more touched by the fact that he let me alone see this beautiful gift he has prepared for his son, or that he said my name with such tenderness. It seemed he looked at me with the same expression I had seen in my own father’s eyes years earlier, and for a brief moment I felt as though I were that little girl again. My father, bearing a secret gift in his pocket, his warm arms around me, and his eyes so happy to see me pleased when he gives it to me.

  CHAPTER 48

  JOSEF

  A few months before my grandson’s wedding I made the decision to put my affairs in order. I was now eighty-five years old. My hair was gray, my skin dotted from too many years in the sun, and my hands were so wrinkled I hardly recognized them. For some time I had been thinking that it would be wrong to let my children find my old letters to Lenka. It would tarnish their feelings for me, I was sure of it. They would question my marriage to Amalia, and would despise me for loving a ghost and not the woman, their devoted mother, who served me dinner every night for thirty-eight years.

  And so I took out the box containing my letters to Lenka that had been returned to me, that I had stored beneath my bed for so many years.

  I pulled off the rubber band that had been wrapped around the letters, and set aside the three that she had sent me while I was in Suffolk.

  The white envelopes were now yellow, but the stamp telling the post office to Return to Sender in German was still blood red.

  The letters had not been opened for almost sixty years. It was my intention to read each one, then light the burner of the stove and set each one aflame.

  I did not put the needle on the record player. I would read each letter in silence, one after the other. It would be my kaddish to Lenka, a way to perform a ritual of mourning for her that had eluded me all these years.

  I turned to the first one:Dear Lenka,

  I pray you received my last letter telling you I was rescued off the coast of Ireland. The people in the village where we were taken were so kind. When our ship arrived, they greeted us with food and clothing, and offered to put us up in their homes. I waited for three days for word about Mother, Father, and Věruška, but my worst fears were confirmed when I was told by the village chaplain that their rescue boat had been sucked into the propeller of the Knute Nelson—a ship that was meant to save us. I cannot tell you how much I have wept in these past three days. They are all gone and my loneliness feels like a blackness that threatens to swallow me whole. My only solace is in knowing that you are safe. I pray our child is growing and is healthy. I close my eyes and imagine you with your rosy cheeks, your long black hair loose around your shoulders, and your belly round. It is the image I fall asleep to, my only treasure.

  I am now in New York. I know many weeks have passed and that you are probably exhausted from worry. But do not waste your energy on such thoughts. I am well and I will be working on getting you and your family over here as quickly as possible. My father’s cousin has helped me get a job in a school, and I need to save money so I can prove I have the means of supporting you. Trust me. I will work harder then ever.

  I send you my love and my endless devotion.

  Always,

  J.

  I turn the stove on, the blue flame rising like an orange-tipped sword. Burn.

  The others were more of the same. Lenka, I write, though my letters are returned. Others have received letters from their loved ones in Europe, though much of the writing has been blacked out by censors. But mine continue to be returned.

  I am losing hope.

  Burn.

  Are any of my letters reaching you?

  Burn.

  I am worried.

  Burn.

  And there was the last letter that I wrote shortly before I met Amalia. Dated August 1945.

  Dearest Lenka,

  I have not heard from you in almost six years. It is funny how stubborn the spirit is. I probably could write for an eternity if I thought my words might somehow reach you. You are still alive in my memory, Lenka.

  There is so much regret on my part, my d
arling. It is so clear to me now that I should never have left you. You were so brave, but I should have insisted that you come or I should have stayed until everyone could leave. This mistake haunts me every day.

  Every morning when I awaken and every evening when I bed down, I wonder if you are alive and if we have had a child together. I pray that it is healthy and strong. That it has your blue eyes, your white skin, and that mouth of yours, so perfect that even now when I close my eyes I can imagine its kiss.

  You will be happy to know that after spending two years in night school, I now speak and write English well enough to be accepted to medical school. I am repeating much of what I studied back in Prague, but it is a blessing to be back in school, learning and preparing for the future, whatever that might be.

  I am considering focusing on obstetrics, partly out of respect for my father and partly because the thought of bringing life into this world gives me great solace.

  Darling, please let this letter find you. I am giving up hope, yet I cannot accept that I am writing to a ghost. I love you.

  Always,

  J.

  The smell of singed paper. My fingertips nearly burning as the edges blacken and furl.

  Burn.

  I wished that had been the last letter. But I knew there was one more. It was the last in the pile. The envelope was still pristine. There was no stamp saying Return to Sender, Address Unknown. There was not even a postage stamp affixed. It had never been sent.

  My beloved Lenka,

  I have no address to post this letter to. But I am writing it anyway because it is the only way I can say good-bye. It has been six years since I last received word from you. Your three letters that were sent to me in England are my life’s only treasure. Every night before I go to sleep I read them and try to conjure up the sound of your voice.

  With each passing day, month, and year, you have never faded from my heart. But it has become harder to imagine the sound of your soft breathing next to me, the cadence of your words, or the smell of your hair.

  Still, memory can also be kind. You are forever beautiful in my eyes. I can remember as clearly as ever the symmetry of your face, the pink of your mouth, the soft, gentle curve of your chin.

  And if God is kind to me, you still visit me at night when I’m dreaming. I can almost touch your skin, feel the graze of your lips, the weight of your body falling into mine.

  The Red Cross tells me you perished in a place called Auschwitz. They say you arrived in one of the last transports from a place called Terezín with your mother, father, and sister.

  Terezín and Auschwitz are names I have seen in the papers. The images they’ve published are so horrific that my mind cannot believe that man could conceive of something so evil. I cannot imagine that you, my beloved Lenka, perished in such a place. I will not write on this paper that you are among the pile of dead, the windstorm of blackened ash. I will only let myself think of you as waiting for me. My bride. You, Lenka, the young girl at the train station in Prague with my mother’s brooch in your outstretched hand.

  I am fooling myself, I know, but it is all I can do to survive.

  Always,

  Josef

  I had put it in an envelope and only labeled it Lenka Kohn.

  Now that envelope was open and the letter fluttered in my shaking hands. Over the smoking flame, I recited the kaddish.

  Yit-gadal v’yit-kadash sh’may raba

  B’alma dee-v’ra che-ru-tay

  Ve’yam-lich mal-chutay b’chai-yay-chon uv’yo-may-chon

  Uv-cha-yay d’chol beit Yisrael

  Ba-agala u-vitze-man ka-riv, ve’imru

  Amen. Y’hay sh’may raba me’varach

  Le-alam uleh-almay alma-ya . . .

  I drop the last letter into the burner and think of Lenka. As the ashes of the letters fly, I see her as my bride in my arms, then let her finally float up into the heavens like an angel. I try not to evoke the image of my children, as they did not need to know the heartache that preceded my years with their mother. It’s mine alone to carry, to take with me to my grave. To incinerate in a single burning flame.

  CHAPTER 49

  JOSEF

  The week before my grandson’s wedding, I find myself unable to sleep.

  Insomnia is the bedroom for the restless. Roll down the covers and pull out your legs. Turn your clock to the wall and don’t bother to turn on the light. For you always see your troubles more clearly in the dark.

  If those we love visit us when we dream, those who torment us almost always visit us when we’re still awake.

  And in those nights of sleeplessness, they all appear. No, not Lenka. But my father. My mother. Věruška.

  Often I can anticipate their arrival, particularly when there is a milestone in my family: the night before my wedding to Amalia, the day before my son’s bris, my children’s Bar and Bat Mitzvah, Rebekkah’s wedding, and now her son’s.

  And other times they appear without reason. Three figures who look the same as they did ten, twenty, now sixty years before.

  To those who believe the dead do not visit them, I say you have cataracts in your soul. I am a man of science, yet I believe in guardian angels and the haunting by ghosts. I have experienced with my own eyes the miracle of life, the complexity of gestation, and still believe that something as perfect as a baby cannot be created without the assistance of God.

  And so, when the dead come to visit me, I don’t bother to try to close my eyes. I sit up and invite them in. Although my bedroom remains pitch-black, I see them as clearly as if they were in my living room, the light of a floor lamp shining on them.

  Father. A gray suit. Broken glasses on his forehead. His bald head and crinkled eyes.

  He holds in his perfectly smooth hands a book he read to me as a child: The Story of Otesánek.

  Mother. She is wearing a black suit with gold buttons. Around her neck is a string of long pearls. She holds in her hands a box of photographs. It contains a photo of me as a young boy on a horse in Karlovy Vary and the one at my Bar Mitzvah. I always wondered if she had ever placed the one of Lenka and me after our wedding with the other ones of our family in that box.

  Věruška. Wrapped in scarlet taffeta. Her eyes dark and shining. She is always carrying something I can’t quite place. There are markings on the paper, and I can’t tell if it is writing or images scratched on the pad. Some mornings I am convinced it is a dance card with a few names written on the top. Other times I tell myself it’s a small sketchpad filled with markings for one of her paintings. In all the times she visits, I look at her white lineless face and I want to reach out and talk to her.

  Věruška, my sister, dancing and laughing down the hallways of our book-lined apartment, the hem of her skirt pulled above her knees.

  Many sleepless nights I wondered if I should call out to them. But I always feared the children might hear me—or even Amalia—as sympathetic as she was, and would worry I had finally lost my mind.

  But it was no matter. I didn’t need to speak. For that is the thing about a haunting, it’s almost never communicated through words.

  Every time my family came to me, I always knew they’d come back again. The only exception was when they appeared two nights before Jason’s wedding. Then I sensed that they were coming for the last time.

  I could tell this was their final visit, for when they appeared, they were all smiling. Even my tempestuous little sister’s eyes were shining.

  I lay on top of my bed, my pajamas damp with an old man’s perspiration, and studied them one last time.

  Father placed his glasses on his nose, and they were no longer broken. Mother opened her box for me and on top was our group wedding photograph, showing Lenka, the beaming bride.

  And Věruška turned her paper pad to me and revealed a drawing of two clasped hands.

  I move to get up and touch them. So real they are to me, shining there in the middle of the night. I am older now than Father is as a ghost—that realization str
iking me deeply—as I extend my hand to touch him.

  How can a son be older than his father’s ghost? How can a mother continue to comfort her elderly son from her watery grave? And how can a beloved sister ever forgive her brother when he so clearly let her down?

  I am trembling. Convulsing. Wondering if this visit is a signal that I am about to die.

  I try to rise, my hands still extended, my legs shaking as I step to where they stand.

  I remember the sound of the thud as my body fell to the carpet. I remember vaguely the sound of the door opening, the heavy treading of my son’s footsteps coming toward me, and the sensation of his arms pulling me up.

  “Dad,” he whispers. “Are you okay?”

  I tell him I am. I ask for a drink of water and he leaves me to fetch it.

  I don’t remember seeing him return, but when I awake, the glass is there.

  I dreamed that it was not my son who brought me back to bed, but the three members of my family. That they had huddled around me and lifted me back onto my mattress, pulled up the covers, and coaxed me back to sleep.

  And I knew that from then on, should any of them visit me again, it would no longer be on a sleepless night. It would be the same as when Lenka comes . . . in my dreams.

  CHAPTER 50

  LENKA

  In the spring of 1944, we are told that special visitors are coming to visit Terezín and that certain improvements will be made. Commandant Rahm, who is in charge of the ghetto now, orders additional transports east to make room for the “beautification” of the ghetto. Already eighteen thousand had been transported from Terezín, and now he was demanding that all orphans be sent east. Next were those sick with tuberculosis. A few weeks later, he orders an additional seventy-five hundred prisoners transported. A panic rushes over the ghetto as families are broken apart. One woman begs to be put on a list after her son is selected for a transport. At the station, with the train about to depart, she notices her son is not present and his name not called. Pandemonium breaks out when she is forced onto the cattle car by the SS. She is screaming for the soldiers to remove her, but they cannot make an exception, for the quota ordered by Rahm must be maintained. That evening I see her teenage son crying inconsolably outside the Sudeten barracks. A few people are trying to comfort him, but he is flailing about like a dying animal.