Wedding Bells… Not! - Part III
I married well known Czech photographer, Werner Forman, on a dark rainy day at a registry office in London, largely because my mother, who had a crush on him, insisted. Her feelings for Werner, her desire to keep him in the family, were what led to his proposal of marriage and everything that followed.
THIS IS PART 3 of a NINE-PART STORY
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9
I knew next to nothing about my new husband’s former girlfriend, Trude. She was from Vienna, he’d met her just after the war when she was working at a displaced person’s camp, she was Jewish, and she’d been trained as a nurse. She was sixty years old (Werner was forty-eight). I was terrified of meeting her.
Werner led the way into her apartment building. I probably had scotch on my breath. She lived on the fourth floor and before we even pressed the button for the elevator, she leaned her head over the upstairs railing and yelled, “Halloooo!”
All I could see were blond curls. “Hallo!” I yelled back. And then, impetuously: “I’m a little drunk.”
“So am I!” she sang out.
I entered the elevator, thinking maybe this wouldn’t be too bad.
And I was right. Trude was drinking scotch, too, and she immediately poured me a glass, saying, “You may have to catch up.” Werner wasn’t a drinker, so she and I were on our own, and we proceeded to get quite tipsy, toasting each other with each of the many glasses we downed. So booze was one thing we had in common, but also cigarettes… that afternoon Trude and I must have gone through well over a pack-and-a-half as we kept lighting up and talking, talking, talking about everything under the sun. Werner was the odd man out. I don’t remember what we talked about, only that we genuinely liked each other, and that, for some reason, Werner seemed unimportant. I think we would have been drawn to one another no matter what. Trude was short, energetic, youthful-looking, with bright blue eyes and an attractive, highly intelligent face. She worked as an editor for a local publisher, which meant she had a better, brighter, more accessible apartment than most people. She and Werner hadn’t been lovers in years, but they were family to one another, extremely close, and looking back on it now, I’m surprised she approved of me at all since I was so young and frankly foolish, just a girl who hadn’t even finished school and didn’t really know yet what she wanted to do with her life.
A girl who drank too much and clearly had a problem with booze -- a problem everyone would ignore for years until it brought me to my knees and nearly killed me.
But on that day with Trude, it was all laughter and light-hearted conversation. Werner and I would be leaving for a month in Morocco twenty-four hours later (he was working on a book called Cities of a Thousand and One Nights), a trip that I thought would be the beginning of our true honeymoon.
Cover photo: Anastasia Zhenina