The Lost Wife Read online

“Mama,” I told her. “I love you.”

  She looked up, but she didn’t answer. Still, I saw the strain in her throat, her watering eyes telling me she loved me, too.

  I was married at sundown in an ancient brick synagogue with four stained-glass windows, fingers of moonlight illuminating the old stone floor. My chuppah was snow-white silk wrapped around four wooden poles. Candles flickered in iron-roped chandeliers; the rabbi was pale and wizened beneath a tall black hat.

  We had only invited our families to the ceremony, along with Lucie and her daughter and husband, Petr. I had not thought she could come, but she arrived with baby Eliška, now old enough to walk beside her and hold her hand. She wore the blue capelet Mother had given her years before, and her hair was braided behind her head. I smiled at her when I walked down the aisle with my parents on either side of me.

  At the steps to the bimah Josef stood alone waiting for me. We touched fingers. My parents kissed my cheeks and walked up the steps to the chuppah. At the rabbi’s instructions, Josef lifted my veil in accordance with tradition, confirming that I was indeed his bride.

  Then my veil was again placed over my face. We stood before the rabbi and heard the seven marital blessings. I walked around Josef, promising he would be the center of my life. We wrapped our fingers around the wedding chalice and drank the ceremonial wine as the rabbi asked us to repeat: “I am my beloved and my beloved is mine.” We slipped bands over our fingers—a sign of unbroken, seamless love—and Josef broke a single glass underneath his foot.

  We kissed as the rabbi pronounced us man and wife, the taste of salty tears as my lips parted over his.

  That evening, Josef takes me to an apartment on Sokolská Street. He says he needs to tell me something, but I silence him with one finger over his soft, ripe mouth.

  He tells me again that we need to speak. “Urgent matters,” he says. And I tell him, what could be more urgent than this?

  He leans into me and I can taste the powdered sugar on his lips from Mother’s palačinka.

  “Lenka,” he whispers, and I kiss him again. His hands touch my throat, his fingers reaching to the nape of my neck. “Lenka.” My name said again, but this time like a psalm, a prayer, a wish.

  I can feel his heart beating through his shirtwaist, the white cotton dampening from our heat. I pull his hands from my face and turn my back to him so that he will undress me.

  His fingers are nimble over the scale of buttons. He pulls back the cloth, places a single kiss between my shoulder blades, and presses his cheek to my back. I hear him inhale the scent of my skin; I feel him drop lower, offer another kiss to the small of my back, as he kneels even lower to the ground, his hands gliding over my thighs as the material falls to the ground.

  I step out of a puddle of white silk, naked except for a corset of lace and whalebone. Josef’s vest is unbuttoned, his dark throat exposed from his open collar. His hair a black lion’s mane.

  I am no longer a shy student but a wife. I unbutton him as he has done to me. I wrap my hands over the curve of his shoulders, and trace my finger down the line of his chest.

  I feel the weight of his belt buckle in my hands and unlatch it. My hands now feel the back of his thighs, his sex swelling between us.

  Does he whisper my name one more time before he lifts me and brings me to the bed? I can’t remember. I only recall the sensation of my body inching under him, my legs wrapping tightly around his waist, my thighs sealing around his ribs. There is the sensation of him threading through me. Like a needle inching through the cloth. “Josef,” I whisper into his ear. “Josef.” I say his name again.

  His name is an anchor in that bed of naked limbs and twisted sheets. I say it and he, too, whispers mine. And I bite his shoulder as we both climb to a peak and fall.

  If the sound of clinking glass reminds me of my parents, then it is the sound of rattling porcelain that will forever remind me of my marriage to Josef. Over breakfast the next morning, white coffee cups and saucers, jiggling in his nervous hands, he tells me there will be no passage for my parents.

  The table is set like a scene from the theater. The basket of warm rolls, the pots of jam. A china coffeepot. Two folded napkins. A vase with one, tired rose.

  I tell him I don’t understand what he is saying to me. I tell him I thought he promised me their safe passage.

  “There are laws . . . restrictions, Lenka. Our cousin writes he can sponsor only my family and no one else’s.”

  “I am not your family,” I whisper. My voice trembles.

  “You are my wife.”

  And I think, though I don’t have the strength to say: And my mother is my mother. My father my father and my sister, my sister.

  “I have already told your father and he wants you to come with me.”

  As he speaks, I can feel the blood running through my veins and my heart stopping as if it were tied off by a tourniquet. I know my eyes are too much for him and that he feels my anger, my disappointment, cauterizing his skin and slicing him to the bone. For months now, I know I have been selfish. I have heard my parents’ desperation at night, and have seen it on their faces. I have felt it as I saw the riches of our once-lavish lifestyle vanish. But only now, with the threat of being separated from my family, do I feel myself forced into a reality I’m ill-prepared to accept.

  “Josef,” I say. “How can I accept this?”

  “We don’t have a choice, Lenka. This is the only way.”

  “I can’t. I can’t.” I say it over and over again. Because I know it’s the truth. I know that if I go with him and something happens to my parents, to Marta, I will never recover from the guilt.

  “You can’t be telling me that you refuse to come?” He buries his forehead in his palms.

  “Yes, I am, Josef.” I am crying now. “That is what I’m telling you.”

  “What can I do, Lenka?”

  “You need to get us all visas. That’s what you promised . . .” I am shaking so much that I can’t even stand up. I reach for a chair and collapse.

  “Your father wants us to go . . .” Josef’s arms are now wrapped around my shoulders.

  “I cannot do that. Don’t you understand me?” Suddenly I wonder if our whole courtship has been a fantasy. That he doesn’t realize that I can be stubborn and willful. That as much as I love him, I could never abandon my family.

  I feel sick. I feel the heat of his body flowing through mine. The warmth of his breath, the wetness of his tears on my neck. But for the first time, I am incapable of giving him what he wants.

  I know only one thing. One doesn’t abandon family. One doesn’t leave them, even in the name of love.

  I left Josef that afternoon in that beautiful apartment, and arrived at my parents’ home with my hair still braided and twisted upward like a bride.

  “What are you doing here, darling Lenka?” Father cried when he opened the door. “You should be enjoying the day with your new husband!”

  My mother took one look at my face and knew that Josef had told me about the lack of passage for them. “Lenka,” she said, shaking her head. “You cannot take on the sorrows of the world.”

  “No, but I can take on the sorrows of my family.”

  They shook their heads and Marta wrapped her thin arms around my waist. When she looked up at me, her eyes were wide and far more childlike than her teenage years would suggest. I knew in my heart, no matter the consequences of my marriage to Josef, I had made the right decision. I would never, under any circumstances, leave behind those I loved.

  It was not that my parents did not try to dissuade me. Over and over again they tried to convince me to go where it was safe.

  “You will go first and we will follow later,” they both said.

  “Josef will go first and we will all join him later,” I replied.

  They looked at me with sad, fearful eyes. My father implored me. He spoke of the comfort he would feel in knowing that even just one of his children was safe. My mother held my hands c
lasped to her breast and told me that I must now follow my husband. It was my duty as a wife. But my sister never said a single word, and it was her silence that I heard the loudest.

  CHAPTER 17

  JOSEF

  Sometimes, when the children ask about our wedding day, I can see the apartment in Queens with the blue-white snow on the fire escape. The bridge table with the plates of creamed herring and baskets of sliced rye. I can hear Frank Sinatra on the radio and imagine our living room filled with a few people we knew from Café Vienna. But I still have difficulty remembering Amalia’s face.

  I remember that she had made the dress herself. She had spent nearly two days cutting and sewing a dress that, in the end, seemed rather unremarkable. A square collar and two bell sleeves, without a stitch of lace or ribbon. Her shoes were the same brown pumps she wore every day.

  I want to be able to tell my children and grandchildren that she looked beautiful and that her face beamed clearly through the absence of a veil. But, for some reason, her face remains a mystery. Was it because she kept her eyes lowered? That her hair, braided and lifted behind her ears, was an artful distraction? Or was it because I was somewhere else, even at that moment. Somewhere that Amalia also understood. The strongest force attracting us to each other, the reason we were there holding hands.

  We were not married by a rabbi, but by a judge. There was no religious ritual when we exchanged our vows. There was no cantor. I didn’t even break a glass.

  I simply held Amalia’s small hands in mine and slid a gold ring on her finger, kissing her with a dry, careful mouth.

  I did love Amalia. Those who ever doubted that are wrong. One finds love in transparency. To see wholly and without question. No one was standing there with a shucking knife trying to pry open my past. I told Amalia only once about the boat. The loosening of hands. The waters the color of coal.

  But once was all that was needed.

  I loved Amalia because she let me be. Who else could just let me stare out the window and not get annoyed by my silence? Who else would not mind the stack of books on my nightstand, and the lonely nights when I was at the hospital?

  I tell my children I can remember Amalia’s face most clearly on the days she gave birth to them. To my daughter, who wriggled into this world with a cry that struck me straight to the heart, I tell her that her mother was like a dreaming angel during her birth. I see Amalia with a cone of ether over her mouth. She is in a twilight sleep. Her face like a doll’s, her eyes closed, her blond lashes pale against even paler skin.

  She is so peaceful as the forceps bring our daughter kicking and screaming into this world. Hours later, Amalia will hold her, nurse her, and look into her baby’s eyes and see her own mother reflected there. She names our daughter Rebekkah after her mother, her middle name Zora, after her sister. She dangles the locket with the photo over her newborn head and says the kaddish.

  I kiss both of their foreheads and I pray with her for the first time in years.

  CHAPTER 18

  JOSEF

  My sister and I had barely spoken since the wedding. Initially she was furious that neither Lenka nor I had told her about our courtship. And now she was furious that I had agreed to leave my new bride behind. Věruška’s silence sliced through me like a saw to the bone.

  The truth was, Lenka’s father always knew that mine could not secure enough visas for the rest of her family. We had a distant cousin who was sponsoring us and the U.S. State Department had told our cousin he could sponsor no more. I had come to her father before our wedding and told him so.

  I had assured her father that we would have one visa for Lenka, and he seemed to breathe easier knowing at least she would get out of Czechoslovakia soon.

  “It will be good that you all get abroad first,” he had said, trying to sound hopeful. “You can get things settled and then send for us.” He shook my hand. “I am entrusting my daughter to you and your family. Promise me you will always take care of her.”

  It was his idea that I not tell Lenka until after the wedding, thinking that it would only upset her on what would otherwise be a beautiful, sacred day.

  “Let’s not disturb her joy,” he said. He embraced me as we parted.

  I had been conflicted by this suggestion. I certainly did not want to spoil our wedding day, but I thought it only fair to enter into this already rushed matrimony with Lenka knowing the truth.

  But that afternoon, when I saw her radiant with the thought of our impending nuptials, I just didn’t have the heart to say anything.

  Was I a coward? Probably. But, like her father, I thought I had her best interests at heart. Was I selfish? That was certain. But I wanted to look into her eyes after her veil was lifted, and only see tears of joy.

  And so it was that I held the news from her. As I bathed the afternoon before the ceremony, I imagined her doing the same. Her white body deep in the warm and scented water. Her skin soft and awaiting my touch. I had memorized every feature of her face, every small line, as if committing it to part of me.

  I shaved carefully with my face turned up to the mirror, a warm towel around my neck. As the sun began to set, I walked over to my bed and got dressed. My darkest wool suit, my whitest shirt, and my cuffs clasped with the links my father had given me when I entered university.

  From my room, I could hear my mother and sister talking softly. They had spent three days packing our apartment, and their arguing had temporarily ceased only because I was to be wed that evening.

  As I walked into our living room, I hardly recognized it. The bookshelves were empty, and mother’s treasures were no longer on display. All that remained were the walls and the furniture. If someone were to enter, they would have thought we had already gone abroad.

  Father had sold so much in order to pay for our passports and passage to America. My mother had no particular attachment to clothes, and parted easily with what she had brought into the marriage years earlier. Her mother’s china and silver were sold for a fraction of their worth. How many Jewish families had already sold all their valuables in the same way? Czechoslovakia was already flooded with so many abandoned china services and cut crystal, the entire Vltava couldn’t have washed them all.

  My family was dressed in what finery they still had left for the occasion. Věruška was dressed in a red gown, and her hair was pulled up and tucked with two beautiful combs.

  They all turned to congratulate me.

  “Josef,” my mother said quietly. “You look so much older today. How can that happen in just one day?”

  I smiled and walked over to her and kissed her on her soft, powdered cheek. She was wearing a long black dress and a string of white pearls.

  Father was smoking a pipe and his eyes, through his silver round spectacles, seemed to be taking every inch of me in.

  “Mazel tov,” he said as he shook my hand and handed me one of the four remaining snifters of brandy.

  “Have you told her?” he asked. I swallowed, and my belly filled with warmth and a false sense of calm.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Josef!” Věruška let out a small cry. “You must tell her!”

  “Let the boy have his wedding, Věruška,” Papa said sternly. “We can have all the tears tomorrow.”

  “It was her father’s idea,” I offered as an excuse.

  She shook her head and turned from me. “To start out a marriage like this . . . I don’t even know what to say.”

  “Then say nothing,” Father snapped. He took another strong swallow of brandy.

  “Everybody’s saying nothing now. But—” Father cut her off again.

  “Enough talk already, Věruška, we need to go now, or we’ll be late!”

  She looked at me with an expression of such disapproval it could have broken glass. My sister did not like to be silenced. Smart as she was, she now let her eyes speak for her.

  Under a descending sun, we walked to the synagogue. I remember looking at every building, every
lamplight, and trying to force them into my memory. I didn’t know when we would return to Prague, and I wanted to remember its beauty on the eve of my new life.

  I will remember her always in her long white dress, her veil an airy gauze over her strong, chiseled face. I can see her tapered fingers reaching to grasp mine, and feel the delicate weight of her soft rosebud kiss. Lenka, beautiful, my bride.

  I do not remember the words of the ceremony, or the signing of our wedding ketubah. But at night, I can take myself back to that evening, when the chandeliers were lit with a warm orange light and the ancient stone floor was pitted and cold. The air damp, and the bricks so gray they appeared almost blue.

  The rabbi was the same one who had officiated at my Bar Mitzvah more than ten years earlier. He was an imposing figure, with ice-blue eyes and a long silver beard that grazed his prayer book. As he began the incantation of the seven blessings, he took my tallis and wrapped Lenka and me in it together.

  I remember the look in the rabbi’s eyes as he pronounced us man and wife. He looked at our hurried, anxious faces, and did not have the calm that I remembered as a young boy.

  “Remember the tears when the synagogue in Jerusalem was destroyed,” he said as my foot broke the glass. “Remember as a Jew there is always some sadness, even on your happiest day.”

  Looking around at the faces gazing at Lenka and me on the bimah, I knew none of us needed any reminding of that. We all wore our fears as visibly as our wedding finery.

  At her parents’ apartment, we drank wine from glasses rimmed in gold. Her mother had made a wedding soup with dumplings. There were small trays with delicate pastries and a honey cake with a small violet flower placed at the center.

  Marta played the piano and Lucie’s child, Eliška, livened up the modest festivities by clapping her hands and twirling her skirt. Věruška was in the corner, her eyes glassy, her fingers twitching at her side. When I looked to her for a smile, she turned her face from me and shuttered her eyes.