The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  In these moments, their marriage felt full of blood and heat, pulsing with possibilities even they couldn’t name. The risk of having wed a gentile woman, a woman so outside the realm of his family, his neighborhood, his known world, was swallowed up by having Josephine. It was rare, and in some circles unthinkable, that Lev, an Eastern European Jew from Galicia, would come into contact with Josephine, let alone marry her. Her aristocratic German blood, the long line of military men in her family, the castles and estates her relatives had enjoyed for centuries, the horses and fox hunts—such things reflected nothing of Lev’s life. No matter that Lev’s parents had given him music and art lessons, an English governess from Bristol, a Latin tutor, admission into the best schools. This was not enough to skim the world of Josephine. So when he chanced upon her at the Ice Palace and she spoke to him freely, as if there wasn’t any difference between them, as if he had not grown up in the Jewish section of Berlin, a yeshiva student with trousers that were sometimes too short, it seemed as if a pale white light seeped through the cracks of a stone wall he had always thought impenetrable. The light expanded, deepening into that rich golden afternoon when he took her hand, touched her wrist, and she said yes with her eyes, yes through her fingertips, a yes that meant more than coffee under the watchful gaze of her chaperone.

  And why, Lev often wondered, had Josephine chosen him? At the start, he kept waiting for her to discover the error in her ways and apologetically, gently, end their relations. The opposite occurred. She grew more insistent, clinging to him with a fierce determination, as if Lev was her savior from the monotonous line of suitors who all reminded her of her brother, Karl, in their slim-fitting military uniforms, expert at making lighthearted quips while twisting the ends of their mustaches into fine points. “I don’t want to sit under a parasol at a fox hunt and clap breathlessly for my husband,” she would cry. “I’ve been doing that all my life.”

  “What do you want then?” Lev would ask, bewildered by her impassioned speech.

  “You,” she would murmur, lowering her eyes, suddenly aware of her need for him, which felt ungovernable, reckless. “I want to be where you are.”

  But potential, Lev realized, was a treacherous thing, because promises—her hope for a music career, his desire to paint, her plan to sever herself from her family—made in the semidarkness of their bedroom had turned into disappointment, regret, the sense of having overlooked some vital piece of information.

  The phrase a vital piece of information echoed in Lev’s head, the cadence of it taunting and sardonic. His boss, Herr Friedlaender, had employed that exact phrasing. The day war was announced, he had called Lev into his office and said all he needed to do was pass on that vital piece of information to the right government officials indicating how much he needed Lev in Berlin, at the textile plant, to ensure the production of woolen blankets for each soldier. When Lev replied that he was joining up to fight, Herr Friedlaender looked confused. He smoothed down his shiny silver hair, parted expertly to the side, and inhaled deeply.

  “Why would you go to war, perhaps even to your death, when you have everything here?” Before Lev could answer, Herr Friedlaender exclaimed he would happily increase Lev’s salary, and if the title of production manager was no longer satisfactory, he would even consider promoting Lev to vice president. He moved around the perimeter of his large walnut desk, picking up paperweights, putting them down, opening and closing his cigarette case, touching his silver hair. Lev had seen him perform these same fluid movements during client meetings, all the while talking and talking until, as if mesmerized by such a dance, the clients agreed to Herr Friedlaender’s terms, which were always slightly tipped in his favor. But this hypnotic dance did not work on Lev, who remained seated, stoically staring out the large window, which looked out onto other buildings with similar large windows.

  Herr Friedlaender readjusted his suspenders and smoothed down the front pockets of his trousers. “You’re listening, yes? I’ll pass along that vital piece of information regarding your usefulness to the firm, which will enable you to remain here. Josephine will be indebted to me—perhaps she’ll even come to like me.”

  With the mention of Josephine’s name, Lev started. “She wants me to join up. In fact, she said so herself. It’s important to her that I fight for Germany, that I prove myself.” Catching Herr Friedlaender’s frown, Lev added, “Almost all the men in her family have fought, at one point or another.” The part about Josephine saying it was important to fight was untrue, but Lev was certain she felt this way. It would allow her to feel proudly patriotic when her mother, the church ladies, the baker’s wife, the seamstress at the tailor’s shop, the teachers at Franz’s school, or even the mail carrier asked after Lev. Josephine could then announce with the appropriate quiver in her voice, “He’s fighting for Germany.” But underneath this, what she really meant was: Yes, I married a Jew, but look how loyal he is to Germany, how good, erasing any question of his Jewishness surmounting his Germanness. German, only German. This was what Lev wanted and what he believed Josephine wanted: to escape the faint doubt, the shadowy presence of another past, another history, he kept trying to outrun.

  Friedlaender stopped what he was doing, holding an unlit cigarette in midair. “If she thinks this, she’s a shortsighted woman—the most important thing is survival, personal survival. If you haven’t learned that yet, I don’t know what else to say.”

  And then Friedlaender added, “I’ll save your place here, for when you come home.” He paused, observing Lev, his sharp dark eyes running over the contours of Lev’s face as if he might be seeing him for the last time. Then the question of Lev’s loyalties, how German he really was, would no longer matter to anyone.

  Lying next to Lev on the transport train, the sleeping men looked peaceful. To escape the flies, many of them had placed pine branches over their faces. A forest of breathing wood. Outside, the trees exhibited the first signs of destruction. Bullet holes had pierced long delicate birches. Then there would be stretches of unmarked trees, white and gleaming. He wondered how recently the Russians had been here. The task of the Eighth Army, according to the officer who’d announced this when they’d boarded the train, was to regain areas that had been occupied by the Russians, as well as advancing over the border area in combat. It was impossible to tell if they’d crossed over the border or not. Lev also did not know if he would be stationed in Königsberg, northeast along the Baltic Sea near the Nemen River, or Mitau, which was more isolated, closer to the Russian border. The Russians had deserted both towns, leaving behind a wake of women and children, probably starving. When Lev had left his house, it smelled of bread. His children’s skin shone from plentiful amounts of milk and butter. Berlin, of all places, would not suffer food shortages, he hoped.

  Leaving Vicki behind had felt especially painful. On his last night at home, he tucked her into bed as he usually did. In the next room, he heard Josephine reading to Franz, stories about soldiers fighting in the snow, in the forests, and against all odds, winning. The window was open, letting in warm summer air. In a thin white nightgown, dark curls spilling over her shoulders, Vicki sat propped up on pillows asking him to sing song after song, delaying the moment when he would switch off the light and darkness would envelop the room.

  “When you’re gone, what if I can’t sleep?” she asked.

  He told her to think of her best memory, and she asked him how large or small the memory should be, and could the memory include other people, like her best friend, Greta, and could she change a memory so that, for instance, Franz would not have gone along to the candy store with them on the last day of school, and then he would not have picked out the best salted caramel piece, stuffing it into his mouth.

  Amused, Lev had said, “It’s your memory. You can do with it what you please.”

  “I wouldn’t be lying?”

  “No,” he said, holding her small hand, hoping this moment would stick in his mind months from now, years from now: the warmth
of her palm, the healthy pink under her fingernails, her brown almond-shaped eyes scanning his face, trying to decipher how serious it really was, his leaving.

  “You’re coming back by Christmas?” she asked for the fourth time that night.

  He squeezed her hand. “Yes, Christmas.”

  She looked doubtful. Possibly she read the fear on his face, which he tried to mask with an overconfident tone.

  “Are you sad?” Lev asked. But she only nestled into him, the side of her head pressed against his chest, her body curled into a ball. He stroked her back, her hair, and tears pricked his eyes. He didn’t want her to see the anguish distorting his face, and so he swiftly switched off the lamp next to her bed. He held her for a long time, until, from the hallway, Josephine’s voice cut through the stillness, asking if he’d finished packing his things.

  The day he left, Lev watched Josephine through the train window. All in white, standing on the platform, she examined her fan. She didn’t even bother to look up when the train started moving, until the last minute, as if she feared holding his gaze too long, as if such emotion would seem indulgent. She peered at the car behind his, and he could see that she searched for his face, but Lev did not call her name or wave a handkerchief to attract her attention. He had wanted her to feel remorse, to suffer his absence, to curse herself for missing the vital moment. But, Lev thought, nudging the knapsack with the edge of his soiled boot, perhaps she did not really suffer, at rest within her imperial bearing. Maybe she had walked home and felt more bothered by the afternoon heat than his departure. Maybe she stopped for a lemon ice and fanned her moist face, hoping the powder she had so carefully applied that morning had not streaked. She might pass another soldier and his wife walking to the train with stricken faces, and then she would nod to them in solidarity, reveling in the performance of mourning without really mourning him. And if she sought comfort in the church’s lit candles, Lev knew she would pray for Germany and victory and large faceless things, because praying for a husband was ungenerous to the rest. A monarchist, with her fervent loyalty to the Son and the Holy Ghost, after crossing herself, would she linger a moment and pray for him?

  His head rested on his rolled-up canvas pack, which was jammed against the train window. Before the others woke and started arguing about whether they were bound for Mitau or not, Lev slept. Already the coolness of early morning was gone and a thick heat bathed his face, softening the thoughts that kept him up at night: Josephine spending countless hours with her mother, or the fact that her brother, Karl, had been sent to the Western Front to build the first trenches, which somehow seemed more heroic than Lev’s coming here.

  It was a deep sleep, and Lev dreamed the unspeakable, as if the morning hours permitted obscenities. A woman with marble skin and dark-red hair, the color of October leaves, was naked save for a green velvet vest. She writhed beneath him, and his tongue explored her cunt, the smooth contours of it, although they were in the army medical office, in the white antiseptic room where Lev had been examined before joining up. The whole time Lev felt nervous a doctor might open the door and discover them beneath the bright medical lights. The urgency and uneasiness he felt melded into another dream, in which his mother would not let him wash his hands before dinner, forbidding him to use the same sink basin as she. When Lev asked why, she called him a Jew in disguise as a goy, and she grimaced when she said this, half smiling, half taunting. Lev froze, his hands outstretched before him.

  He woke up with the sun bright on his face, his hands outstretched as if carrying something sacred, a tallith, or a Torah wrapped in embroidered velvet. A man leaned over him, trying to jam the window farther down, cursing the stubborn wooden frame. Lev peered up at his unshaven chin. It was an odd sight, made odder when the man vigorously shook his head in disapproval, the skin hanging from his chin swinging back and forth. Dazzled by the bright sun coming through the trees, Lev’s eyes watered, blurring the sight of men milling about, spitting morning phlegm out the windows, scratching themselves, sharing cigarettes. The man above him cursed and stared down at Lev. His eyes were savage, bloodshot. “Does this damn window open any farther? It’s sweltering.”

  Lev got up. He still felt the light warmth of the red-haired woman’s body. They pushed down the window in a joint effort. The man grunted with satisfaction when gusts of hot wind blew into their faces. He poked his head out the window, grinning through his unruly mustache, and said, “Smells like horse shit and burning fields.”

  Lev grinned back, not wanting to betray his fear. He smelled fire. “Are we near the front?”

  The man basked in the wind, his hair wild around his face.

  Lev rested his forearms on the window ledge, almost touching the other man’s elbow. He asked again, “Are we near the front?”

  “Who knows?” the man said into the wind.

  Gradually, the lushness and green protection of the forest grew sparse. Acres and acres of farmland on either side of the train had been scorched, burned out by the Russians before their retreat. Along the road, destroyed houses were bullet-ridden, and in the remaining potato fields, Lev saw oblong little mounds with wooden crosses stuck into them, helmets on top, cocked to the side. If the other man saw the helmets, he didn’t let on. Lev could tell they were German helmets because of their pointed spikes catching the light. They passed through towns filled with deserted houses, no one on the streets, the gutters full of horse manure. A few starving cows blinked from a field. Lev breathed into his sleeve, the smell of manure and ash overpowering. Diaphanous farmhouses followed one after another as if ghostly bones hung languidly in midair. The man pointed to a broken-down doorway, and then a person appeared, gripping the wooden door frame, only to vomit on the doorstep before retreating back inside. The man grinned again, as if the burnt fields and the people left behind already proved a German victory. He held out a cigarette.

  “Thank you,” Lev said, surprised at how the man lit it, with the courtesy of a headwaiter. The train stalled. “Perhaps we’re here.”

  The man shrugged, unconvinced.

  Lev hoped this might be their stopping place, as the redness of the sun sadly vibrating through the fir trees struck him as beautiful. Beside the train tracks, two women wielded picks in the potato fields, backing away from the ground with alarming force before plunging into the soil again. One of the women looked up at him with eyes as black as prunes, and Lev detected both reproach and fear in her glance. The other woman paid them no notice, as if the bouts of bloody turmoil, whether it was the Russians or the Germans or the French or another invading group, were always occurring and would continue to occur. The way she wielded her pick said this much, radiating a passive acceptance of tragedy, an enduring knowledge that it was not that this one terrible thing had happened to her, but terrible things were always happening. Her passivity was galling, an affront to everything Lev put stock in. It reminded him of his parents. They had left Galicia for Berlin when Lev was two years old—their one act of will. But after this, they lived snugly in the Jewish quarter speaking only Yiddish and treating the rabbis as if they were gods. They refused to venture outside the limits of Scheunenviertel because they did not feel entitled. When Lev asked why, his mother would throw her hands into the air and exclaim, “We should be happy for this much.” Her mouth would set into a tense line, and she would point to Lev’s light eyes as if this caused his arrogance. “You always want so much. You always ask why, why. This,” she yelled, waving a cloth around the dimly lit kitchen, “is more than enough.”

  Lev took the last drag of his cigarette, watching the women walk away, retreating into the thick woods, their scythes on their shoulders.

  “I think,” the man said after flicking his cigarette out the window, “we’re here.” His face glowed in the red sun. “But we’re not at the front.” He tapped his ear. “No artillery fire.” His head tilted to the right, as alert as a bird listening for a mating call. “Faintly. I hear some fire faintly in that direction.” He gestured
in the opposite direction of where the women had gone.

  Lev’s stomach knotted with hunger. They had not eaten all day. He tasted nicotine mixed with the orange peel he occasionally bit into. The man told him at camp a hot meal would be served. “And maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll have a wash and some whiskey.”

  “Where are you from?” Lev now felt convinced this man was a Berlin waiter in one of the posh dining clubs where he liked to take Josephine dancing.

  “Dachau.” The man twisted one end of his mustache into a fine point. “I was a policeman there.” He paused and then began twisting the other end. “Have you been?”

  “I haven’t been south of Frankfurt.”

  “It’s a beautiful place.”

  The general hum of discussion, as they lined up in the aisles of the train, established they were at Königsberg. The man with the mustache forged ahead and then blended in with the other men as they waited to debark the train. Lev could still see the back of his clean neck, the close shave he must have enjoyed before leaving Dachau. A huddled silence fell, followed by one voice speaking above the rest, a confident and conspiratorial stream of words radiating from the front of the train, where one man stood, small in stature with sharp clear eyes that roved the crowd as he described what lay ahead. Lev heard snatches of conversation from others commenting on what the man was saying. Most of them couldn’t hear him very well. Someone standing behind Lev breathed in quickly and asked, “Did he say we’re leaving for the front today?” Lev felt a renewed shower of sweat break over his chest. The man spoke quickly and energetically and had a lean animated face. His eyes darted around the car as he explained that the front line was only a few kilometers away, that some of them would be sent there, and some would be held at camp until needed.

  The engineer clamored toward the man, placing a thin hand on his shoulder. “Do you think I’ll be sent to the front directly?”