The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  Lev tried to rearrange his face. He had been smiling at her naïveté—it was charming. He hadn’t been mocking her, not really.

  The music changed from Strauss to Beethoven. The lights dimmed to amber, matching the late afternoon light outside. Josephine had taken out a fan, and the sharp quick movement of her wrist reminded Lev of a hummingbird.

  “I always love this piece,” she said airily, waiting to see if he could name it.

  Men and women paired off, skating arm in arm, long sensuous strides.

  Children waited on the edge of the rink, bored.

  Lev smiled. “Doesn’t everyone love Beethoven’s piano sonatas?”

  She paused, flustered. “But why the adagio sostenuto, in C sharp minor?”

  The thought of kissing her crackled through him. Her mouth, berry-colored, delicately shaped. And her body already promised this kiss, the way she fluttered her hands to make a point, opening and closing with suggestiveness, her neck inclined toward him, as if their bodies were already intertwined.

  She glanced down at the ice. “I mean,” she said, “how does the music make you feel?”

  “Would you like to sit down for a coffee?” Lev asked.

  She shifted her gaze to the other side of the rink where an older woman waved a hat. “That’s my auntie. Well, actually, chaperone. But I call her auntie. She’s been with us forever. Ever since I was seven. She thinks I’ll catch my death bareheaded like this.” Josephine paused, giving Lev the chance to tip his hat to the heavy woman with steel-gray hair who appeared too tired to intervene. “But I refuse to wear a hat because what’s the point of skating with a big hat?”

  Lev reached out and clasped her wrist, his thumb pressing down between the edge of her glove and the beginning of her sleeve, a luxuriant swath of warm bare skin. He led her to one of the tables at the edge of the crowd, next to a tall window. In the sunlight, Josephine’s hair shimmered. The dizzying threads of color—wheat, straw, copper, white-blond, honey—made Lev want to reach out and touch it. Instead, he ordered them two coffees and plum cake with cream. Teacups placed down on saucers, glasses clinking with glasses, spoons knocking against porcelain, and knives scraping the last bits of cake off plates filtered through the long drafty hall, creating a music of its own. For a moment, Lev and Josephine sat silently, listening to the drone of eating and drinking and the skaters on the ice, their steel blades skidding.

  She placed the hand Lev had touched on the table and then quickly overlaid it with her other hand. Lev stared at her, wondering if she wanted him to touch her wrist again. Forcing a smile, she looked out the window and brightly said, “It’s a beautiful day. Summer. And here we are, in the Ice Palace. All winter I waited for summer and now I can’t bear the heat.”

  He couldn’t think of what to say. The bravado he’d felt on the ice had evaporated and now he was back to his clumsy self, with stiff leather shoes that pressed down on his toes. The slanted caved rooftops of Mitte, where he lived, flashed through his mind, and he was sure such a place was far from her.

  Carefully, she sipped her coffee and dabbed her mouth with a handkerchief, asking him various questions, all benign. Did he enjoy music? What was his favorite opera? What was he studying at university? She’s good at this, Lev thought. He wondered how many suitors she had tolerated and entertained, asking them the same questions, smiling at the right moments.

  She stared at him.

  “I’m sorry?” Lev asked. “What did you say?”

  “Oh. I only wondered what you study?” She leaned forward. A waiter poured more coffee into their cups, the black liquid streaming from the chrome pot. He finished off the pour with a flourish.

  “I’m studying law and economics at Berlin University. I’m also working in the accounting department for a large matchstick company. The factories are in Galicia.”

  Josephine raised her eyebrows.

  He went on, “It’s training. I’m more interested in textiles.”

  “Textiles?” she said faintly.

  Lev swallowed down the remains of his coffee. “I actually wanted to be an artist. I still paint on occasion. Oils mainly.” The last time he’d painted was two months ago. A dark derelict courtyard where an old woman leaned against a lamppost. And lurking in the background, a man with a top hat was frequenting a place he wouldn’t normally visit. Framing the scene, brick walls were crumbling, revealing a masticated layer of gray, and the windows in the surrounding buildings were dark, save for a few pools of light here and there, to add depth. The courtyard had captured Lev’s attention on his way home from work, and he reproduced it from memory when early the next morning he brought out his canvases.

  After he mentioned painting, there was a pause, almost as if he could feel her body softening, her face opening into a new expression, one that did not intend to delight or to show off the best angle of her face, which she knew could be accomplished by tilting her head to the right, revealing the long run of her neck. He savored this unadulterated version of herself—her eyes open and clear, her lips slightly parted, the sheen of her pearl earrings unself-consciously catching the late afternoon sun. If they were alone under trees, if he knew her better, he would kiss her on the mouth, his palm against her neck, the fine boning of her corset pushed up against him, their breath mingling in a shaded reprieve, away from all the brightness and chatter.

  Lev noticed, from the other side of the rink, her chaperone lumbering toward them, moving at a slow but steady pace.

  Propelling himself forward, Lev asked in a hurried whisper, “May I call on you?”

  “We are in Wilhelmstadt, Spandau. Wasserstrasse ten. If you get lost, ask the grocer where the Von Stressings live. Our family is very old. It’s easy to find us.”

  “Josephine.” Out of breath, her chaperone clutched the back of her chair. “It’s time for us to say good-bye to this young gentleman. He is a friend of Karl’s?”

  She shook her head. “He doesn’t know Karl.”

  The woman reminded Lev of a ruffled dusty bed skirt. Her wrist wobbled on the cane in front of her, which upheld her momentous weight. She thrust an elaborate hat with flowers and a tiny fabricated bird in Josephine’s direction. Josephine absently took it. After this, she said lightly how very enjoyable the coffee had been and how pleased she would be if he cared to call on her. The words grated, but such phrases were reserved for chaperones and introductions in public places—it seemed to Lev most of his daily interactions were composed of these airy words that, once uttered, took flight and meant nothing.

  After she left, Lev sat in the café, fingering the prongs of the fork where she had put her mouth.

  3

  Already it was late September, and the Indian summer rolled on, bringing heat and rain followed by sun-drenched days. The temperate climate tricked Lev into thinking this war was barely a war, that he had somehow skirted it, or skipped it, or managed to delay it. He fell into a routine—the hospital by day, then five hours off, then night watch at the ward again, where he often dozed, only awakened by the occasional call for water or morphine. And yet even as he reveled in his luck, he knew it was precarious, this delight in his surroundings, in the friendship he shared with Hermann, in the joy he took in constructing the dollhouse for Polina.

  She was a small girl from the village, nearly the same age as Vicki, with the same mischievous eyes. Her hair was blond, but her black eyes, almond-shaped, always made him feel as if he were seeing a version of his daughter. One day, he’d seen her traipsing along the road with her doll. Her small body against the large trees generated a surge of fatherly concern. She was crying and holding her doll to her chest. The doll had no arms or legs. He’d picked up a little Russian, but children didn’t need much to communicate. When he asked her what happened, she mumbled something about a beast who’d chewed off the baby’s limbs. Then she took his hand and said she wanted to show him the house where they played. She pointed to an abandoned estate, which rose up in the distance. Lev knew the place—it
had once belonged to the Vichniakov family, Russian nobles who had fled, leaving trunks full of silk and silver the German army then confiscated.

  She led him through the broken-down estate, filled with light and shadow and dust. Gangs of children had proclaimed ownership of different rooms. The blue room, with its torn and ripped satin paneling along the walls, belonged to Uri and his gang. The boys huddled together, protecting their loot of fallen Greek statues, heads broken off, wielding the torsos as if they’d found swords. They eyed Lev suspiciously.

  Polina’s tiny hand swept over the long grand hall. “This is where they had parties.”

  “Yes,” Lev said, “it must have been spectacular.” He looked up at the chandeliers, broken in so many places, and at the oil portraits of the Vichniakovs’ ancestors in gilded frames, each one sliced through with a blade. A lanky boy, his fiery hair like a torch, sprinted down the hall wearing a brocaded drape slung over his body. “Come back here,” he shrieked to no one in particular.

  Polina shrugged and then she continued to lead Lev through the rooms, each with its own vibrant color, as if passing through a prism of semiprecious stones. The emerald room. The sapphire room. The crimson and the canary-yellow room. After a succession of rooms, a smaller one stood at the end of the hallway. A diamond window let in some dull light, but otherwise, it was shadowy and decrepit.

  “My room,” Polina said, gesturing to the canopy bed with silk pillows in the shape of logs positioned at the foot and the head. The canopy bed was missing its canopy. Lev immediately thought of the boy tearing through the hallway, and how he must have ripped off the blue silk canopy from the wooden carapace, which appeared barren and desolate. One salvaged portrait, of a little girl holding a gray poodle in an oval frame, hung next to the bed. Her rosy cheeks gleamed with health and her lips curled into a faint smile. The poodle’s gray curls tickled her dimpled chin. Polina tucked her legless baby underneath the soiled bedcovers. She patted the baby’s chest. “This is where we live.”

  Lev knelt down to her level. “What about your parents?”

  “I don’t know them.”

  No parents? Would Vicki say the same when asked about her father? What if she was forgetting him—his face, the sound of his voice? He felt his lungs shrink, his throat tighten. “But you mustn’t sleep here—”

  She rolled her eyes. “We don’t really live here. Even though the cow lives inside with us, my aunt’s house isn’t terribly bad.” She wrinkled her nose.

  “Oh,” Lev said, sighing.

  In the meantime, Polina had busied herself with rearranging the baby’s bed and feeding the baby an imaginary piece of apple and brushing the baby’s imaginary hair. “Now, now,” she whispered, “don’t cry. I have to brush your hair; otherwise it will be a horrible mess in the morning.”

  Lev watched her, both saddened and cheered by her playing. He noticed the peeling wallpaper, a pattern of interlocking garlands, and how a few of the wooden floorboards had been pulled loose, and the general destruction of the room, and then he had an idea. He tore off a bit of wallpaper and held it between his fingers, reminded of Vicki’s dollhouse, an opulent three-story one he bought her for Christmas last year, and how she loved it, peering inside the rooms, tinkering with the furniture, tracing her finger along the brocaded wallpaper, looking in on the nursery with motherly concern. Yes, that was it! He would build Polina a similar dollhouse. Of course it would not be as professional, but he had all the materials he needed right here, in this abandoned estate—the fabrics, the wood, the scraps for those little details he knew would bring her such delight.

  He told Polina his plan, and she listened with rapt attention, her dark eyes alight. Tomorrow could she bring him some ribbon? Yes, yes, she said, I will get ribbon! But then she brooded over what color. Lev, to humor her, said red or blue would be best, but anything would do. Yes, yes, she said more to herself than to him, red or blue. I think I can snatch it from Anna. Perfect, Lev said, as he peeled off a swath of wallpaper and stuffed it into his pocket.

  Over the next days and weeks, Lev amassed the materials, as if he was a rabid collector. He filched gauze from the hospital for the coverlets that would grace each miniature bed. When Hermann received a pack of letters wrapped in navy silk ribbon from an old sweetheart, Lev asked for the ribbon.

  Hermann grinned, twining the ribbon around his finger. “For Polina’s dollhouse?”

  Lev smiled. “What else would I want your ribbon for?”

  Hermann handed Lev the strip of ribbon and then tossed the stack of letters over to the side. “Keepsakes. Amulets. These things from home. They won’t save us when the bullet goes through.”

  Lev gestured to the return address. “Tell me you won’t think of Elena, sweet Elena Karpovich, who wrote you all those letters in such a fine hand.”

  Hermann’s thin mouth formed a bitter smile, cold and sardonic. “She had small pitiful breasts and she would never let me touch them, as if they were such a prize, those wilted drooping pendulums of flesh.”

  “Aha! So you do remember her.” Lev slipped the ribbon into his back pocket. Perhaps it would serve as a runner along the miniature grand piano he planned to carve and place in the sitting room.

  “Remember is a strong word.” Hermann flopped down on his cot. He put his hands behind his head and gazed up at the water-damaged ceiling. “More like a flash of thigh, the rub of her smooth pubic hair against my groin, the way she moaned and convulsed, as if I was stabbing her.”

  “Delightful,” Lev said.

  Hermann rolled over onto his side and stared at Lev. “Better than nothing.”

  The word nothing cut to the quick. Could Hermann tell Lev often got nothing? The nothing of Josephine’s silent refusal, the nothing of her ghostly vertebrae when she turned away from him in bed, the nothing of her garnet lamp on the bedside table switching off, an act so much more definite than extinguishing a candle, which still left that burnt earthy smell in the air long after the flame was gone.

  After a month, Lev was relieved from night watch in the hospital, and Hermann convinced him to go to the taverns. The taverns were strategically placed close to the front. On the way there, Hermann told him it was army supervised, meaning the women had been checked for VD. “They’re clean. Just don’t go sneaking into any villages. One night over there”—Hermann gestured toward a dense grouping of trees through which a few lights glimmered—“you’ll come back with your dick burning off.”

  “I’m married.” Again, he felt like a schoolboy after the words escaped him. Hermann had this effect.

  “I would say that’s irrelevant.” Hermann’s eyes glinted in the moonlight. “At the edge of the earth, there are no judges.”

  Lev lit Hermann’s cigarette. “And you?”

  “Once.”

  “Not anymore?”

  Hermann took a drag. “She left.”

  Lev did not ask why. He knew how easy it was to fall out of love, like sand falling through a half-clenched fist. He had felt twinges of this with Josephine before he left, when she would turn her back to him in the kitchen and he did not know to whom that back belonged. Or when she talked over dinner, the way her mouth moved would suddenly appear grotesque, the food churning around her tongue, followed by a forceful swallow. He would watch her throat working so that she could resume her sentence. And it would end up being such a meaningless sentence, not worth the effort or the patience. But these flashes of un-love lasted only momentarily, and in a rush, Lev would feel at home with her again, triggered by an equally small but valuable gesture. She might stroke his forehead in bed. Or run her lips under his ear when he came home at night, whispering, “Have you eaten?” But Lev worried that over time the un-love moments would gradually overtake the other moments, and that in a decade or less, they would be left with nothing to bind them. It was pessimistic, yes, but he had watched his parents’ affections dissolve into a haze of tobacco smoke, which thickened as the night wore on, the arguing climbing to a pitch of hyste
ria in the crammed living room. The porcelain plates in the glass armoire vibrated as the noise level increased, his mother’s voice high and tight, a rising crescendo of accusation. She had held a longstanding hatred for what his father did, for his talent of twisting numbers so people paid less taxes. A Communist, an admirer of Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, she had even wanted to change her name from Mara to Rosa, but his father forbid it. And then he stopped coming home for dinner.

  It took Lev and Hermann thirty minutes, wading through the wide flooded roads, mud splashing on their boots and pants, to reach the tavern. The moon shone brightly, revealing the scurrying of large rats alongside the road. The rats burrowed into the ditches created by past explosions, searching for food and cover. Hermann aimed at one, but it got away. The bullet ricocheted off a birch tree. They silently walked on. Lev saw another one in plain view. He could easily shoot it. He placed his hand on his pistol, the cool gunmetal welcome to his sweaty palm. The dark fur under the white moon gleamed, raised up and wet. Hermann didn’t notice, and Lev let the rat dissolve into the darkness. Silently slipping into the dense foliage, the rat reminded Lev of himself walking in the shadow of Hermann, who was by contrast much more forthright and direct. If he wanted to kill a rat, he did so, whereas Lev wavered and waited and developed an association with the vile animal, which prevented him from killing it. And Hermann advertised who he was, even if many men disliked him for such brashness. His voice was the last one they heard before they dropped off to sleep. His laughter trailed his own jokes. But Lev treaded carefully within his surroundings, first observing the various alliances and then calculating where he fit in, not revealing too much of himself lest someone dislike him. He was careful not to discuss his background, which he had buried long ago, just as these rats burrowed into the fetid soil, leaving behind only the thin line of their tails, until those too disappeared.