The Lost Wife by Alyson Richman Page B

seamstress Gizela. Instead, she took out a large wooden box and did the job herself.
    The silver shears sounded like blades over ice as Mother cut through the skirt. I was standing on a small stool, the same one that Lucie had stood on the weeks before her marriage. The irony of it had not escaped me as I looked into the gilded mirror in our living room. I looked at my reflection, with my mother now on her knees, the pins in her mouth, her scissors slicing through her own dress. I wanted to cry.
    “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