The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  “I’ve told you both to avoid listening to rumors.”

  Marthe turned on the radio, rolling the dial to the opera station. Strauss. Josephine always preferred Strauss. His waltz “Roses from the South” floated above the children’s heads, cascading over the milk-splashed glasses and the plump raisins Franz had not eaten, despite Josephine’s efforts. She restrained herself from waltzing around the kitchen table as she sometimes did when no one was home.

  Josephine put down her coffee cup. “In fact, today I’m going to the church. We’re sending off love packages to the front. And I’m sure Papa would appreciate your drawings in the package, along with the bottle of strawberry soda, his wrist warmers, and the chocolate bars.”

  The children stared at her.

  “Well, go get them.”

  Franz and Vicki returned with their drawings. All children had been instructed to draw a picture for the front. The schoolmasters encouraged the use of bright colors and cheering images, such as an idyllic farm, a tranquil lake, a family reunited.

  Franz proudly unrolled his drawing of the Red Baron’s plane shooting down English soldiers, whose heads lolled off their stick necks. Large teardrops of blood ruptured from their hanging limbs. He had included a ring of fire encircling the picture, and off to the side a large cannonball exploded inside an English family’s farmhouse. Two cows were blown open by bombs, along with the desecration of three pigs, whose spotted pink bodies were blasted into the air, their hoofs nearly touching the wing of the red airplane. “You’ll send it to Papa?”

  Josephine sighed. She would have to burn the picture in the stove after dropping them at school. Lev would be sickened by such images. He had written in the last letter how stupid, senseless, and utterly barbaric it seemed, fighting against soldiers barely old enough to carry a gun, the fear in their eyes as palpable as his own, boys on the brink of adulthood who, at seventeen, had not experienced the pleasures of a woman, who would die virgins with the belief that they’d served God and country. Lev had finished his letter stating, I hope to God, although I fear He has fled in horror—but I hope for us at least that Franz never takes up arms, that he never fights for such a useless murderous cause that has already taken so many lives, that will only take more.

  “Here, take it. Pack it for Papa.” Franz held out his picture, having neatly rolled it up.

  “And mine too?” Vicki asked, spreading her picture out on the now cleared dining table, her fingers sticky with apple. She’d drawn a cemetery, with rows and rows of soldiers’ graves. Angels with crooked halos and sorrowful long faces hovered over the graves, waiting to transport the soldiers’ souls to heaven. “The angels will save the soldiers,” Vicki said.

  Josephine felt her throat thicken, her mouth secreting a metallic taste. Yesterday, Sophie, the next-door neighbor, had received a letter. On the outer envelope, the blue stamp read: Dead—Return to Sender. She’d doubled over, gripping the handrail leading up to her house.

  It was time to walk the children to school. She would come home afterward and lie down on the divan in the sitting room. She would take a long bath and listen to Strauss. She would leaf through fashion magazines and imagine a time when she could buy rich fabrics again, tulle and satin and organza, for her dresses and dine with Lev at the Duke of Pomerania’s summer residence in the Bavarian woods, where they would raise their crystal glasses and toast the Kaiser, the salty taste of ruby-red caviar still on her tongue, washed down by sweet champagne. She even missed the sullen servants who cleared away each course (a total of nine plates, excluding aperitifs), and the howling of the greyhounds when a new carriage arrived, the wheels crackling along the blue-gray gravel encircling the estate, and how the duke always drank too much, his red cheeks swelling with effort as he shamelessly flirted with her, a fact that she and Lev found infinitely amusing. Afterward, they would drift into sleep under velveteen covers, giggling and whispering like schoolchildren over how foolish, how ridiculous the duke had acted. But under the covers in the dark Josephine’s chest swelled, too embarrassed to admit she’d secretly enjoyed the duke’s attentions because he had made it brutally clear how she’d awakened his want—it made her giddy, flush, nearly drunk.

  After she dropped off the children, snow began to fall, and a heavy gray eclipsed the blue brightness of the morning. The linden trees lining the streets were skeletal, their thin wiry branches reaching out to nothing. When she studied the tree branches for too long, it reminded her of the few horrid photographs the newspapers released: boyish bodies caught in a forward outstretched motion among barbed wire, their torsos arched, arms and head hanging.

  Josephine sucked in the wet air and started walking to the bread depository. They needed bread for dinner, and yet the thought of waiting in line for at least two hours seemed intolerable. She had forgotten her gloves, so she shoved her raw hands into her coat pockets. At least the fur collar, made of fox, offered comfort as the hairs felt silky and smooth against her chin, generating an animal kind of warmth. Two winters ago, Lev had bought her this coat with the fur collar, as well as a matching fox stole, which she found a bit excessive, distastefully grandiose. Her mother and tante Agatha had mocked the stole, with the little glass eyes staring out at the world. They joked, between sips of Russian tea and plum cake, that Lev didn’t understand, no matter how many meters of the finest silk his textile mill produced, that he would never achieve a certain status because it was purely a matter of blood.

  It was better before she married Lev. At least then, her whole family said what they thought instead of this subdued stifled hatred they now emitted, like a faint malodorous scent. Back then, her father had slammed doors and thrown his reading glasses across the room and yelled, the color high in his cheeks, about how calamitous it was for her to marry a Jew, especially one from an unknown family, devoid of social and financial status. Her father doubted if Lev would ever make more than three thousand marks a year. “You will have no dowry. See how much the Jew wants you then,” he shrieked, slamming his veiny fist into his desk. A long glass vase rattled. The carnations, pure white, remained untroubled by his outburst. Staring at the perforated petals, Josephine remembered feeling a piercing shame at the mention of money, something her family never discussed, as if having money was as natural as breathing. But now her father barked figures and numbers as if he had been thinking of money all along. Her cheeks burned as he explained the burden of supporting her—did she understand how much those stoles cost him? The silk umbrellas with ivory handles? The kid gloves and linen petticoats and trips to the dressmaker at the start of each social season? “All that expense, to make you appear beautiful, and this is what I get in return?” He had persisted, even after the wedding, in calling Lev by his last name, always handling him with cool formality, the way you would handle a servant. Her mother worried that Lev expected her to convert. No, no, she’d said irritably, he’s hardly a Jew. He despises the religion, she had said, which wasn’t entirely true, but it put her mother at ease. Of course there was the question of Lev’s converting to Catholicism, a question they bandied about as if playing table tennis. A lot of other well-off Jews had done so, particularly Jewish women who married German officers from aristocratic families.

  “What difference does it make,” Lev had said lightheartedly. “I’m not religious, so whichever religion I take up won’t mean much.”

  “It doesn’t mean much,” Josephine had echoed, and the general frivolity in how he brushed away the question made her feel that she too should brush it away. Cruel, yes, it was cruel, the way Father had cut her off, agreeing to the marriage only on the condition that he not provide a dowry, but Lev said it was better not to owe anyone anything, and perhaps her father was short of money, a thought that had never occurred to Josephine before.

  For a few years, she did not see her family. Then her father died of a blood clot in the brain. Franz was born shortly thereafter, and her mother, alone and bewildered, called on her. And so the tentative give-and-take be
gan again, slowly, like a returning disease. Josephine would come to Sunday tea with the children once a week. They stayed for two hours. Agatha, her aunt, had moved in with her mother, and the two women found comfort in having both lost their husbands to swift and unexpected deaths. The unspoken rule was that Lev not attend these afternoons, a rule he didn’t appear to mind. Thank God, he said, to be spared the agony of their company. And she half laughed. One Sunday her mother tried to explain, in her usual fumbling way, now that her father was gone, there were some funds she would like to bestow. Josephine held up a hand and said, “No,” more sharply than she intended. And in that moment, she felt a warm surging pride pour over her because they didn’t need the money. Lev was performing brilliantly at the textile firm, receiving yearly promotions. The number of men working under him multiplied monthly. They planned to replant the garden, with Oriental lilies lining the path so the fragrant sweet scent would bathe visitors as they approached the house—the new house in Charlottenburg with the midnight-blue front door and brass handle, exactly how she wanted it.

  The line for bread on Friedrichstrasse stretched down the block. She saw its formation up ahead, filled with women and children bundled against the cold, their faces peeking out from under hats and shawls and scarves. The sky had grown darker, and she wanted to forgo the bread. She felt her body turning away from the line, and yet, as she stood there indecisively, two more people took her place. She imagined telling Marthe how silly she’d been to let it slip her mind, and were there still red potatoes left? Three more women shuffled into line, dressed in heavy black wool, their movements stiff from the blue cold. Franz flashed before her; how thin he’d looked undressed this morning, his sharp shoulder blades pointing out of his back like baby sparrow wings. So thin she’d hurriedly slipped his undershirt over his head, his sharp bones disappearing into the soft fabric.

  She forced herself to stand behind a large grandmotherly woman who stared down at her swollen feet stuffed into boots that were coming apart at the soles. They waited in silence as the line grew behind them.

  Suddenly the old woman looked up and said, “They cover the bread in chalk.” Her eyes laughed as if the world had become a ridiculous place.

  “It’s imitation flour,” Josephine countered. “It makes the bread prettier.”

  “In the middle of the night I got up to wait in line, so I could be first for butter. But when the doors opened, they told me all the butter had been sold the day before. Only turnips, they had.”

  Josephine lowered her head, thinking of how two days ago a group of women had marched in protest because a butcher shop ran out of meat. The women had stormed down Unter den Linden shouting Peace! Peace! Josephine had heard the distant racket from where she sat by the bay window in the living room, reading. She never cared for politics.

  “You’re not a widow, I hope,” the woman added, exposing a black tooth toward the back of her mouth when she grinned.

  “No, thank God.”

  The old woman regarded her carefully. “Bless your husband.”

  “Thank you,” Josephine said, not wanting to know how many sons this woman had lost. She could not bear to look at some faded photograph the woman might pull out, another boy about to leave for the front, posed unnaturally in uniform.

  The line shifted forward.

  The woman sighed, picking up her basket, which held a few bruised apples. “How long has he been away?”

  “Since the very start,” Josephine replied, irritated by the question. The woman really wanted to know how eager her husband had been to join up. Not everyone volunteered immediately. But Lev had.

  A light snow began to fall again, and Josephine felt her eyes sting from the cold wet wind. Winter evenings before the war, she used to step out for the shopping at four o’clock in the Old West district, alone among the buildings and monuments bathed in a china-blue gaslight. Even for small things—a new hem for her silk slip, a pair of brass buttons for Franz, a handful of white gardenias for the table—walking with the setting sun as her guide offered a few solitary hours, freeing her from the ordinary household sounds: a running stream of water, a teapot bleating, Marthe scolding Franz for dropping a dollop of marmalade on the floor, the tearful voice of Vicki asking for Lev. On her walks, Josephine stole glances into the lit rooms of apartments. Most of the time, the windows were obscured by heavy curtains or wooden blinds or by a bulbous paraffin lamp emitting a faint glow. But if someone lingered, taking in the last bits of daylight, she would see a woman, like herself, pausing pensively before the window, or a child reading, or a man embracing a woman, their bodies fusing into one opaque shape. A thousand stories spinning just as her own story spun, all occurring at precisely the same moment, comforted her, and she felt less alone when she looked into these brightly lit windows, as if the people inside kept a vigil for her, and she kept one for them. A hushed pact.

  Holding the bread to her chest, she made her way home, thinking of those dreamy winter afternoons, when the light looked as it did now, the crystalline blue of the sky slipping into a faded purple, as faint as a bruise. And the tree branches cut stark outlines into the sky, reminding her that soon, the clear-cut outlines would fade into the general darkness of night. She covered the paper bag with her shawl, wishing the bread was warm for the children when she surprised them with it. But they would still gleefully tear clumps off the loaf, stuffing the pieces into their mouths, laughing.

  When she came home, padding through the silent house, Josephine often paused, examining the objects around her; the glass bookcase and the Oriental rug and the low rounded table and the sloping walnut backs of the chairs and the hanging medieval tapestry of a hunt—the war left no mark here. She wondered if she remained in this room, as still as the walls, if Lev would arrive at six as he used to, readying himself for a cigar, for the day to peel off him. But no. She scolded herself for such frivolous thoughts.

  She brought the bread into the kitchen. Marthe had left to fetch the children from school. A cold purple light stretched across the white walls. Preparations for dinner had begun; a stew simmered on the stove, a wooden ladle next to it, and on the table, a chopping board with thinly sliced radishes, which appeared like transparent moons, lined up next to the stainless steel knife blade. She sighed, catching a glimpse of her face distorted in the blade.

  6

  Mitau, 1916–18

  Almost a year had passed since Lev had arrived in Mitau, a town in the heart of Courland, south of Riga, on the bank of the Lielupe River. At high-water level, the plain and sometimes the town flooded. Each month, the front had shifted to the Germans’ advantage as they gained more territory from the Russians, occupying abandoned town after abandoned town. This was where Lev had ended up—in one of these towns.

  When he had first landed here with his regiment, all the people were gone. They had escaped into the forest. But slowly, as the weeks passed and his unit began to reconstruct what was burned and destroyed, the people returned—filthy, feral, lice-ridden, leaving behind family members frozen among the trees. Women and children and the old reappeared, timidly reentering their broken houses. A few lucky men who had circumvented the Russian army also returned. Most startling was how these people tried to kiss the top of Lev’s hand when he walked the town’s streets. At first Lev recoiled. It was old and feudal and he did not want to touch them because the notion that this land and its peoples were inherently diseased had been ingrained in him from the start. But it became tiring to fend them off, especially the begging women, who moaned and badgered him until he would finally outstretch his hand to receive a dry pitiful kiss, a kiss that felt like dust. As a matter of course, the soldiers began holding out their hands whenever they were in the village, but the exhibition of such insistent superiority embarrassed Lev, so he extended his hand as discreetly as possible.

  The very condition of the streets proved how these people needed them: the footing was unsteady; one had to walk on narrow slick planks where cobblestones had b
een blown up. Once, Lev thought he saw a femur buried under loose cobblestones. Signs pointed to nowhere. Open gutters flowed with sewage. The officers gave big speeches every few weeks about their purpose here. Unlike the productive Nordic and German races, these peoples in the east are inherently lazy and parasitic. To make the land over in our own image, we must instill cleanliness and order, and promote a culture of hard work, sweat, and labor.

  The phrases circulated in Lev’s mind while he was performing the most mundane of tasks, such as recording how much firewood had been amassed in one day or knocking on the peasants’ doors, demanding a detailed account of how many chickens they had and cows, and how much grain they’d produced. They could not understand him, their wide foreheads sweating with effort to convey something entirely different. Yesterday, an old woman tried to give him a black pot. It was chipped, the handle broken off, but she pressed it into his chest, nodding when Lev refused to take it, as if his refusal was just a performance and sooner or later he would give in. He finally took it, but a few hours later, he placed the pot in front of her door, an absurd game of give-and-take. Even more absurd was the general’s confident smile when he had said, raising his wineglass, that if one could cultivate the natives to become orderly, clean, and honest, then the land itself would transform into an agricultural surplus of wheat, cattle, and wood of the very highest quality. “This East,” he said conclusively, “is the real utopia.” And the thunder of clapping that followed engulfed the crowded dining hall, which had once belonged to a local farmer who was dead or gone.

  Today, Lev stood before a ditch filled with blue-black mares put down because they were maimed, injured in the shin or carrying shrapnel in their chests. His fellow soldier shot each horse at the edge of the ditch, and then Lev recorded it in a ledger. The soldier positioned the revolver on the horse’s downy brow, and in an instant, the horse collapsed, tumbling awkwardly into the ditch. When they finished, the blue-black torsos shimmered in the sun. Lev counted twelve. He wrote it neatly in pencil. They paused, observing the odd beauty of it, before they began tossing shovels of dirt over the ditch. The eyes of the horses were still open, rolling back, gleaming in the darkness of the hole. Bit by bit, their muscular necks and arched backs were covered until it was only a pile of dirt.