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the ceiling.
    Lucie took the key and opened our locker. Papa’s bike was there, along with labeled boxes of china and even more boxes of glasses. We found the pump. It sat next to at least a dozen canvases that rested against the wall, covered by a white sheet.
    I remember Lucie moving them cautiously. “I think these are your mother’s,” she said, whispering even though we were the only ones in the basement. Her fingers worked gently to separate each painting so we could both see the images.
    Mother’s paintings shocked me. They were not elegant, meticulous reproductions of great masters, or sweet, bucolic landscapes of the Czech countryside. They were sensual and dark, with palettes of plum and deep amber. There was one of a woman reclining on a divan, her pale arm resting behind her head and a naked torso with two rosy nipples and a blanket draped carefully across two crossed legs.
    I later wondered about these paintings. The bohemian woman who painted them before she became a wife and mother was not my mother who was running her household upstairs. I tried to revise my image of her, imagining her as a young art student and in the arms of Father when they first met, and wondered if that part of her had disappeared completely, or whether it occasionally resurfaced when Marta and I were fast asleep.
    Lucie never mentioned these paintings again. But years later—when I desperately tried to create a full and accurate picture of my mother—I would return to them. For the contrast of the woman and her paintings was impossible to erase from my mind.

     
    I was accepted to Prague’s Academy of Art in 1936, when I was seventeen years old. I walked to school every morning with my sketchpad underneath my arm and a wooden box filled with oil paints and sable-haired brushes. There were fifteen students in my class, and although there were five girls in total, I quickly became friends with two girls, Věruška and Elsa. Both girls were Jewish and we shared many of the same friends from our grade school years. A few weeks into our first semester, Věruška invited me to her house for Shabbat. I knew little about her family except that her father and grandfather were both doctors, and her older brother Josef was now at university.
    Josef. I still can see him so clearly. He arrived home that night wet, his curly black hair slick from the rain, and his large green eyes the color of weathered copper. I was standing in the hallway when he first arrived, the maid just slipping my coat from my shoulders. He had come through the front door just as I was heading toward the living room.
    “Josef,” he said, smiling, as he put down his book bag and handed his coat to the maid. He then extended his hand to me and I took it, his broad fingers wrapping around mine.
    I managed to utter my name and smile at him. But I was battling my constant shyness, and his confidence and good looks had rendered me mute.
    “Lenka, there you are!” Věruška chimed as she bolted into the hallway. She had changed from the clothes I had seen her wearing in class that afternoon into a beautiful burgundy dress. She threw her arms over me and kissed me.
    “I see you’ve met my brother.” She went over and pinched Josef’s cheek.
    I was blushing.
    “Věruška.” He laughed and swatted her away. “Go tell Mother and Father I’ll be there in a moment.”
    Věruška nodded, and I followed her down the hallway to a large living room where her parents were deep in discussion.
    The Kohns’ apartment was not unlike ours, with its antique red velvet walls, the dark brown wooden rafters, and large glass French doors. But there was a somber quality to the household that unsettled me.
    My eyes scanned the parlor. Around the perimeter of the room there was evidence of the family’s scholarly life. Large medical journals in heavy bindings were stocked on the shelves along with other collections of leather-bound books. Framed diplomas from Charles University and a