The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  Inside the tavern, people carried on as if they did not hear the thundering guns echoing from the front. Lev recognized the policeman from Dachau sitting on a woman’s lap, his arm slung over her flushed neck. In the corner, a man played the accordion accompanied by a boy, possibly his son, who sat with a violin positioned under his quivering chin. The policeman was drunk, his head lolling. He sat with three other soldiers, all of them with their shirts open, their pistols still in their holsters, their boots kicked up onto chairs in front of them. He saw Lev through the dense smoke and gestured for him to come over. Hermann whispered into his ear, “He’s being sent to the front tomorrow.” His breath was stale from hunger.

  Three Rubenesque women approached, their skin glowing in the dim candlelight. They spoke with their eyes, velvety and dark. Lev felt the heat and pressure of their bodies, solicitous and warm. They spoke Russian, from what he could decipher, and pantomimed drinking, tilting their chins back, leading Hermann and Lev to an empty table near the blaring music. The women were burned from working outdoors, the strength of the sun evident on their high cheekbones, delicate creases fanning out at the sides of their eyes. Josephine’s preserved white face remained smooth and untouched by the elements. Lev preferred her when she woke in the morning, a disheveled and messier version of herself, before the perfection of the day crowned her. The women leaned forward, laughing strangely at a joke Hermann made. One of the women, with reddish hair braided into a thick plait, came up behind Lev, massaging his neck, her breath in his ear. She smelled of beets and hay, and when he glanced down, he noticed how her nails carried a line of dirt beneath them, the same dirt that corrugated under his boots from the roads and that was now crusted on his pants. He caught the sour scent of dried sweat from her armpits. So different from pine and soap and lavender. The policeman and the other soldiers had peeled off their shirts, their bare chests shining with sweat, small crosses dangling. They clapped in time with the music. Flushed women danced around them, their hands on their hips. The men playfully slapped the women from behind, and the women threw back their heads. The musicians stomped their boots on the wooden floorboards. Lev wondered absently if one of the women belonged to the accordion player.

  Hermann nudged him in the ribs. “Coming upstairs?”

  The bare-chested men stumbled toward the dim stairwell with their women in tow. They sang in unison, an old drinking song. A song from home. The women struggled to sing along, their voices bending to the German.

  Hermann added, “They have three rooms up there. Five marks for both.” He looked at Lev savagely, his jaw slack from too much drink.

  The women cooed and pressed their soft bodies against them. Lev felt his groin tighten, a building pressure. He tapped his boot methodically on the floor, frustrated by his hesitation. Again, the image of the sleuthing rat crouching alongside the road came to mind—why could he not emit a simple yes to pleasure? What did it matter if it was base? They were all, at bottom, base creatures. The thundering guns continued—so close, and yet such amorous activities continued as if it was a Saturday night in Berlin and all they cared for was plentiful schnapps and the feeling of a woman moving beneath them.

  “Are they safe?” Lev whispered hoarsely, stalling.

  “Hoffman was here last week. Inspecting the cleanliness of the”—a slyness enveloped Hermann’s face—“merchandise.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “The officers are terrified of disease spreading. They wouldn’t take the chance.”

  Lev imagined himself walking back alone with the rats. He stood up from the table. “All right.”

  Hermann threw down a few damp bills. The women quickly stuffed the money into the front of their dresses, the bills disappearing between their milky white breasts.

  If anything, it was a wonderful sensation, the taking of a woman. She did not stiffen or recoil. To plunge into the formidable darkness and not feel resistance but a lukewarm flow coursing between them. His thumbs pressed against the insides of her soft forearms, which were splayed above her head, her auburn hair radiating outward on the filthy pillow. At first, he heard Hermann grunting and a light muffled laughter in the next room, but then his own breathing overtook him like the rush of ocean inside a shell, and he forgot how close the war raged, and how the floorboards creaked, and how the heavy moon hung low and bloody in the black sky, illuminating her freckled, downy stomach. He forgot everything except his sex churning through her, and her surprising fluid receptiveness was a womanly quality he had not experienced for a long time, for it had been so long since sex was not a conversation where he was always trying to convince, dissolving pleasure and exhausting him.

  Lev now held his palm over this woman’s mouth, and her eyes glittered, apparently wanting to be silenced. He could not believe that she invited such shadows of brutality, that she preferred his improvised force.

  After they finished, her face set hard and stony in the moonlight. She closed her eyes, closing out the image of him, as if the curtains in a theater swiftly met, and with it, shut down the openness of her body. The performance of pleasure was over.

  At four a.m., Lev and Hermann walked back along the muddy road. Lev’s limbs worked loosely and freely, his lungs expanding, opening to the cool dawn. They walked with their backs to the sound of thunder. Or guns? Thunder or guns: that was always the question. The rumble from the front layered with the chorus of birds vibrating through the trees created an odd score for their meditative silence.

  Lev grinned, picking up his pace. “Was Hoffman really there last week?”

  The edges of Hermann’s mouth curled upward. “You had a good time, didn’t you?”

  “Yes.” You and the world have drifted away. “Yes. I did.”

  The red sun was rising. Lev realized they had been here for a month, and he felt comfortable with Hermann, walking along this shared road. If he let his mind settle into the rhythm of his steps, let his face bathe in the red light creeping through the firs, and let himself wander back to that forceful plunging into her body, he felt satisfied, close to whole. He did not especially want to return home just now. He let out a sharp laugh.

  4

  The air was changing. No longer plagued by the torpid heat that had slowed Lev’s days at the field hospital and made it hard to sleep at night with a sheet drenched in sweat, there were now signs of this being replaced by a much fiercer enemy. When he woke, his bed was no longer hot and damp but a cocoon of warmth where he hibernated until the last possible moment, and when they assembled outside at dawn, the crystalline air shimmered with an icy cold, turning noses yellow-white, all the blood retracting from the surface of the skin. They were ordered to watch over one another, to make sure extremities did not freeze. Headgear was introduced, and a demonstration of how to properly cover oneself was conducted on a gray morning in the middle of November. Frost ointment was distributed, as well as instructions for how to identify frostbite. Throughout the days, men constantly told one another in passing, You have a white nose. Lev remembered a man who’d lost his nose from artillery fire. A gaping hole marked the center of his face, and when the bandage came off, a hollowed-out crater dipped from under his eyes to the top of his lips.

  In the mornings, Lev made Hermann rub frost ointment on his ears, which were slightly distended from Lev’s head. Then Hermann bandaged them up, an extra precaution. And Lev rubbed the ointment on Hermann’s cheekbones, sharp and pronounced, jutting out of his gaunt face. His cheekbones had been the reason why Lev had initially mistrusted Hermann. They lent him a womanly air of seduction, leading Lev to anticipate a betrayal of some sort, Hermann’s obsidian eyes flitting from one face to another, procuring rumors about who would be sent to the front. Last night, when Hermann whispered to him that tomorrow Lev would be going to the front, it was a golden nugget of knowledge.

  “For how long?” His chest tightened, the blood stiffening in his veins. War tomorrow. War tomorrow.

  Hermann’s cigarette burned a dulcet o
range in the dark room. “I don’t know.”

  “How do you know I’m going?”

  A man moaned in his sleep. Someone smacked him with a rolled-up newspaper.

  “Ludendorff’s third in command knows things. I bring him the raspberry soda my sister sends me. He says it’s the best raspberry soda he’s ever tasted. Addicted to it.” Hermann leaned back into his pillow. “The war’s far from over.”

  Lev put his head in his hands. “I’m not finished. Polina will be devastated.”

  “The dollhouse?” Hermann asked sleepily.

  Lev fought the urge to cry out, thinking about how he had constructed the frame and some of the furniture pieces, but all the details—those sumptuous details—had not been added. Right now it just looked skeletal, a bombed-out house, and she’d had enough of that, he thought. “Who will finish it for her?”

  Hermann slapped him on the back. “She’ll forget about the whole thing in a few weeks. That’s how children are.”

  Sunday morning, before dawn, they started marching. They would march until reaching the transport station. No one knew how long the march would last. Some said a day. Others guessed a week. They were headed for Lodz, which was closer to Germany and farther south. The movement felt retrograde, as if they were retreating as opposed to pressing forward into the hinterlands of the Russian empire. But the officer of Lev’s unit explained that by securing Lodz, the Russian advance toward Breslau in Germany would prove untenable. “We are defending Berlin.” His voice grandly rolled over the words with an enticing richness. At the mention of Berlin, the officer’s eyes misted over, as if he too kept a wife there who, at this very moment, was attending Mass, making the sign of the cross.

  Lev had forgotten the heaviness of extra gear. Even his head felt heavier wearing the pointed metal helmet rather than the soft field cap. Across his chest, he’d strapped a rifle, as instructed to do when on the march. On top of his knapsack, a M1914 shelter quarter and mess tin. Connected to the lower half of his knapsack, he carried a bayonet, M1915 water bottle, and M1914 bread bag. His greatcoat, made of coarse gray cloth, sported dull brass buttons. He sweated under these layers of material and weaponry. Each man carried the exact same items in the exact same manner. No one spoke. They were too cold and the burden of equipment forced everyone to concentrate on maintaining a steady clipped pace. Lev couldn’t tell one man from another, and he knew this was the point—to unite them into one moving body for more efficient killing.

  Lev instinctually looked around for Hermann, Hermann who would always drop him a wink or a grin, a secret glance acknowledging that they were not strangers in a room full of strangers. But Hermann had stayed behind at base, joking how his job in the press office reassuring Germans back home that they were achieving stunning victory after stunning victory was quite important. He pantomimed an artist bent over his work. “Coloring in the facts—that’s why they keep me here. Only yesterday did they announce our defeat at the Marne, which happened two months ago. But they call it”—Hermann had paused, lowering his voice—“the strategic release of information.”

  When they’d parted, Hermann’s metallic eyes blinked as he explained strategies for survival. “Forget the Russians,” he’d said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The real terror is nature. The snow. We’re not as used to it as they are. Frostbite’s more likely than a bullet.”

  They marched for two days and then took a train to Lodz. Halfway there, the train derailed because the tracks had been blown up. The Russians had done it during their retreat. Lev and the other men crawled out of windows and smashed doors into the blinding whiteness of snow. Sharp hail drummed their helmets. The first two cars had crumpled up against the trees, leaving a pile of smoking machinery and men with entangled limbs cocked at unusual angles. There was no time to drag them out of the cars, to bury them with proper wooden crosses, to recite any kind of benediction, because the Austrians were losing to the Russians. The officer reminded them again of Berlin, of the mothers and wives they must save from the Tatar hordes. “Imagine what they could do, those eastern barbarians,” he said, his breath white and full before him. He left Lev to imagine the possibilities as they marched the rest of the way to the front, passing through abandoned town after abandoned town, the houses and shops and churches and markets closed up and cleared out, the streets echoing with the sound of their synchronized lockstep. Lev wondered if Poles huddled inside the silent buildings, afraid of their own breath, afraid to shuffle an inch lest they be discovered by their executioners or their liberators: there wasn’t much difference between the two.

  They first entered through the reserve trenches, a mile behind the front line. At the edge of the forest, they passed a pile of wounded oxen baring their teeth in malicious grins, dusted with snow, frozen into uselessness. The distinct sound of cannons drummed from the front coupled with machine-gun fire. All around them, the snowy earth had been plowed by exploding shells. Broken wagons and dead horses had been moved to the side of the road. Dead soldiers had been arranged to the side as well; their eyes stared up at Lev. Sometimes, an arm or leg was missing. Beyond this, at the edge of a clearing, about fifty canvas packs were scattered on the ground, waiting to be searched for letters and the odd treasured item such as a wedding ring, a handed-down pipe, a piece of ribbon, an engraved lighter that would then be sent to the next of kin. The packs belonged to dead Germans. In his own pack, Lev carried Josephine’s silky lock of hair, Franz’s crayon drawing of the Red Baron shooting through the sky, and a diary. He wrote on the cover: Do not send home. What would she think of the woman in the green velvet vest who had writhed beneath him? And if she read his doubts: Were they suited for each other? Would her intermittent coldness in the bedroom eventually stretch into one long period of retreat? And how her family belittled him with their subtle insidious comments, comments that when repeated afterward to Josephine made him sound paranoid and cynical, as if he only saw the worst in people. But they treated him as if he’d grown up entirely in Galicia, in small-town Brody, whereas his family had moved to Berlin when Lev was two. They had servants when money permitted. There were violin lessons on Saturdays and box seats at the opera and occasional trips to the galleries to see the new paintings. Josephine would read all this and deny the truth in it. He imagined how she might resent him, even in death.

  After sleeping poorly that night on an uneven dirt floor inside a pitched tent, Lev woke to the smell of burnt potatoes. He peeked through the canvas opening. A few men fried potatoes and leeks, ignoring a man who lay a few meters away, clutching his stomach. He complained of an ulcer. Lev joined the men sitting around the bonfire. They passed him some frozen chocolate someone had sent from home. All supplies had to be melted first. Even the bread arrived in rock-hard bundles, delivered by ski. A soldier repeatedly banged a loaf against the ground, trying to break through the layer of ice. The men complained bitterly of the cold and how the officers were lounging inside the mess hall smoking and drinking hot coffee. Someone said that at the front, the officer’s trenches were like salons, with wallpaper and mirrors and Oriental rugs. Another soldier, who didn’t look older than nineteen, read out a news item: “Everything has gone splendidly. Our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counterattacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners taken.” He laughed hysterically afterward. Two other men smiled grimly. Lev felt the blood leaving his fingertips and made a fist, punching it into his other hand. He remembered something a soldier said to him on the march. “We wait in the dirt, tormented by lice and hunger, praying that the endless boredom won’t kill us before the Russians do.” The man had kept his eyes trained forward and said nothing else. Lev thought about how more black nights filled with hunger would follow. They would be fed enough not to starve but little enough to feel as if they were starving, occasionally placated by a cigarette, a thimble of whiskey, a trifle that would remind them of their former appetites, their former selves. How silly I’ve been, Lev thought, rememberi
ng his first letters home, exclaiming how he was experiencing life instead of being shut away in the rarified office of the textile plant, believing army life was real life. He’d rejoiced in the physicality of it, in the use of his hands that were now calloused. And he wondered why Josephine did not match his excitement in her replies, why her tone was measured and restrained, chilly even. Perhaps she’d foreseen how he could become addicted to this life or killed by it or, at the very least, utterly changed.

  “Hey.” Someone punched Lev in the shoulder. “Look.”

  A few meters away three soldiers posed behind a crude wooden cross, grinning at their bounty. Dead rats hung by their tails from the arms of the cross, strung up in a row. Another soldier took a photograph.

  “They do this every morning, to show off the rats they killed in the trench overnight.”

  Lev kept noticing their paws outstretched, clawing air, and their ash-colored fur.

  The man speaking to him smelled of whiskey. “The rats become hysterical. They run into our flimsy shelters seeking refuge from artillery fire, from the fantastic noise. And then they get killed anyway.”

  “Like us,” Lev said.

  The man smiled, some of his teeth black.

  The next morning Lev was sent to the front as a medic. Of course, this was what he’d done before at the base—it was what they’d trained him for—but still he felt a mixture of relief and shame. The soldier pictured on the poster back home only fought with his bayonet and hand grenade, charging into no-man’s-land, his eyes wide open to meet death. This soldier had inhaled the fumes of combat so that his face was blackened from dirt and grime and sweat. There was little room in the public imagination for the mail carriers and sorters, the military policeman, the press officers, the heavy combat vehicle detachment unit, for the reserve infantry and the doctors and medical orderlies who dressed the wounds and recorded how many had fallen.