The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  “Nearly done,” Lev said, leaning into his shovel. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes.

  The other man shrugged. The silence between them remained ungenerous, as it had been all morning. Lev barely knew him, but the least this man could do was nod or make some gesture of solidarity. But Lev had heard this man’s wife had left him because he hadn’t sent enough money home. She was hungry and without coal. News of unreliable wives traveled fast. It made the other men nervous, unleashing images of their women straddling faceless men, men who were exempt due to bad eyesight or flat-footedness, who were either too old or too young to serve.

  The man squinted into the sun, the sides of his eyes crinkling like wrinkled silk. His mouth looked miserable, as if he couldn’t speak.

  “Or maybe the horses are the lucky ones. To be put out of their misery,” Lev added, transferring the shovel from one hand to the other.

  “I’m not miserable,” the man said, jutting out his chin. The pockmarked sides of his face glinted in the sun.

  “You’re better off without her.” Lev did not actually know if this was true, but he stretched out his arm, as if to pat him on the back. His hand, suspended in the humid air, felt heavy and false.

  He searched Lev’s face, as if looking for a place to put his grief. “Her mother was the one who wrote to tell me.”

  “I can’t imagine.” Lev’s voice trailed off.

  The man dug the heel of his boot into the earth. “She’s probably in bed with a Jew.” Then he vehemently spat. The white wet spittle sizzled before dissolving into the dirt. “Shirkers. Bankrolling the war without fighting. Profiting from our dead.” He motioned to the pit they’d just dug. “And who’ll be left when the war’s over?”

  Lev’s throat closed up, a tiny knot of nausea developing there.

  The man threw up his arms, his face animated and filled with color. “They’re vultures, circling and circling, and when the time’s right, swooping down to take their share.” His eyes gleamed and then he asked, “Smoke?” and held out a pack of cigarettes.

  Lev stepped back. His insides heaved upward. He did not want to be sick in front of this man. Dropping his shovel, he managed to say, “That’s twelve for today.”

  As he gulped water from his canteen, most of it missed his mouth, sliding down his chin. He coughed into his palm. He would rest in the shade. It was Friday, the October heat oppressive and golden. Leaning against a tree, Lev sank down to the ground and rested his elbows on his knees. He watched the other man walk to camp, back to the smoke and the smell of production that claimed this place.

  Behind him he heard a thud. A little yellow apple fell. It had dropped from one of the small thatched huts arranged haphazardly nearby. People were eating inside them. He had seen the locals building these little huts over the last few days in celebration of the Feast of the Tabernacles, or as the Jews here called it, Sukkot. They hung branches and palm leaves and bright acorn squash and apples from the roofs, and when Lev had seen children decorating the huts, he thought of Vicki and Franz hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree, the innate pleasure children took in these things.

  Inside the hut nearest him, people argued. Then a woman emerged to restore the fallen apple to its place. She glanced over at him, her head covered in a cream shawl. She arched her dark eyebrows, as if expecting Lev to say something. But he said nothing, struck by her open clear face, how light and free her movements were, unburdened by her body, which he could tell through the clothing was sylphlike and beautifully shaped, like an expensive vase. Standing there, she slowly bent down to the ground, keeping her eyes on Lev.

  He glanced away, scrutinizing the discoloration of the tree bark.

  She moved cautiously toward him, cupping the yellow apple in her palm.

  “Would you like it?” she asked in Yiddish.

  “Isn’t it for your little hut?” he answered back, in Yiddish.

  She grinned, still holding out her palm, the apple resting perfectly still in it. “It’s only for decoration. Someone should eat it.”

  Her whole body urged him to take it, the curve of her back, the slope of her white neck escaping the thin shawl, her wrist straining slightly as she balanced the apple in her palm.

  “Thank you,” Lev blurted out, quickly scooping it up. Without touching her skin, he felt her heat. But it would have been offensive to let his fingertips graze the creases in her palm, and she had trusted him, knowing he would not trespass this simple rule. Whose rule was it? They didn’t know. But they both knew it existed for people like them, in these types of situations.

  A boy escaped from the hut, probably twisting out of someone’s embrace. Lev imagined old men with beards, young children, and tired mothers stored away in there, dipping pieces of bread in salt water, discussing the harvest, how it never yielded enough.

  “Leah?” the boy called out, even though he could see her clearly, a short distance away.

  Leah. The name vibrated on his tongue.

  She spun around. “Geza, don’t be so blind.”

  “I’m not blind.” He stuck his hands on his hips. Lev guessed he was about fourteen, although his bony shoulders and slim hips made him appear younger.

  “You are too. Blind as a bat,” she teased.

  “Your son?” Lev asked, hoping he was. Then he could tell her about his son, and they would have sons in common.

  “My sister’s son,” she said, her eyes slipping away from him. And then she yelled, “Geza, come,” and walked over to him, playfully pinching his elbow. “We gave the polite soldier an apple and now we must finish our meal.”

  Lev waited for that moment when she would turn to look at him once more before disappearing into the hut, but she did not. When she lowered her head to enter, her shawl slipped back revealing such dark hair it turned deep blue in the sun.

  7

  We plunder, Lev thought, as the rich dark forests were razed for firewood, for fortifications at the front, for the building of bridges. They also confiscated local horses, even the old useless ones, making it impossible for the villagers to transport goods, something the army then punished the villagers for. The punishments were frivolous and unregulated: robbing a family of their entire food supply for winter or beating a man in the town square for miscounting his chickens (he had been hiding a fat red hen) or raping someone’s daughter even when she yelled “Krank”—sickly, diseased—her hands fluttering in the air like birds let loose. But her performance was not convincing enough. The officer had pulled down her lower lip, inspecting her shiny pink gums. Her teeth were strong, her eyes clear, her color high. “I know health when I see it,” he had said afterward, boastful that he had outwitted her. The officer told Lev this as they oversaw the collection of raw materials. Local Jews had been recruited to collect, working as middlemen, knocking on their neighbors’ doors, requesting candlesticks, meekly transporting organ pipes from the churches for scrap metal, carting Hanukkah menorahs out of their own homes.

  Lev and the officer stood, arms crossed, in the middle of a drafty farmhouse. Most of the windows had been broken, glass shards lying on the ground. A blue bird flew in and out of the room until the officer raised his rifle and shot it.

  “Who else would do this?” the officer joked, motioning to the crowd as they lugged tin and copper and brass onto the growing pile of metal. He shook his head in disgust.

  Lev noticed a middle-aged woman reluctantly parting with a bronze samovar. When she put it down, her whole body went with it, her arms embracing the baroque curves.

  Lev contemplated knocking the officer’s pipe out of his mouth. “They don’t have a choice.”

  “These Jews are doing what they’re naturally good at. Stealing.”

  Lev clenched his jaw. The target of malevolence. For centuries, it has made us afraid, Lev thought.

  The officer took another puff from his pipe. He smiled sardonically. His eyes flickered over Lev’s face. “You speak Yiddish, yes?”

  “Yes.” Saliva flooded
his mouth.

  “Good.”

  How did everyone seem to know? Lev thought, his head pounding. Even the Jewish soldiers with talliths wrapped around their knapsacks glanced at him furtively in the mess hall when the sun lowered on Friday evenings and Lev acted as jocular and ordinary as the others. Was it his name, Perlmutter? Should he have changed it into something more German? Were his almond-shaped eyes huddled too close? Did his ears protrude too far from his skull? In Berlin, his difference had never been quite as striking. It had been ameliorated by well-cut clothing, elaborate dinner parties, a wife with golden hair.

  “Sir, I don’t follow. What is good about speaking Yiddish?”

  Another question kept rising, like a piano key hit over and over: Where is the man I was in Berlin?

  “Because you speak Yiddish,” the officer said, “tomorrow you’ll arrange the procedure for the identity cards: name, age, occupation, residence, number of children. Religion.” He paused, putting away his pipe. “You see, you’ll explain to the Jews what we need. And then the Jews will translate for the locals. Otherwise, it’s the tower of babble all over again.” He laughed, fingering his front pocket where he’d put his pipe.

  The Tower of Babel, Lev thought the next day when in the cold blue morning he unlocked the barn where the natives had been waiting since daybreak. All the nationalities were mixed together, a big mess. They sat on the benches in their finest clothes and yet they smelled from being locked up in here with the horses. They had been given numbers by the soldiers earlier this morning, but when Lev walked into the damp, dimly lit barn, he saw that many of them had dropped their numbers on the floor, the pieces of paper scattered in the hay, smeared with refuse.

  Lev clapped his hands. “Pick up your numbers. You must present your number to process your identity card.” The sound of his harsh German vibrated in the stale air. He inhaled cow dung mixed with onions and body odor. A photographer stood behind him. Two local Jews stepped forward and said they were the translators. They were young, no older than twenty. Lev wondered how they had escaped the Russian army. He imagined them hiding in the trees, their hands blistered and frozen.

  They asked him to please repeat what he had said, but in Yiddish.

  Lev motioned for them to come closer, and he could tell by their tentative steps, their hands clasped behind their backs, that they feared him.

  “I need everyone to retrieve their number. Look—all the numbers are strewn this way and that. Without the numbers, we can’t get them into groups of five. No one will know who comes first.”

  “Groups of five,” the translator repeated absently. His wire-rimmed glasses caught the light coming through the dirty windows.

  Lev glared at him, feeling a rising distaste for such backwardness. Didn’t they see the need for organization, for categorization? Otherwise, you have a mass, a herd, no better than a flock of senseless sheep.

  “Go and explain to them.” Lev thrust him in front of the crowded benches where the people waited.

  When the translator spoke, the Russian sounded as indecipherable as a wall of stones. Lev could not detect where one word began and another ended. When the translator had finished explaining, the crowd drew a long suspended breath, and then a cacophony of sound exploded. Mothers scolded their children, wiping their faces with saliva-licked thumbs, and the children cried, wielding their balled-up fists. Men foraged the ground for missing numbers, holding up crumpled pieces of paper, which were then snatched away by someone else. Women used one another as mirrors, asking if their collars were straight, their hair parted down the center, their brows smooth. And in the midst of the tumult, the rebbes sat stoically on the benches, their eyes turned inward, conversing with invisible forces.

  The people were herded into groups and led outside into the courtyard, where the photographer and his assistant waited. Each person was photographed individually. “Look at the black box,” the photographer urged, his breath pirouetting in the air. Some glanced away when the flash popped, distracted by the fussing and whispering of the others, who waited impatiently. “Again,” the photographer would yell, drawing up his pants, which were loose. Not having a belt made him less efficient, Lev thought, as he had to pause between each photograph to execute this simple movement. And each time, Lev noticed that his lower back was exposed, beet red from the frigid air.

  The translators worked in another room off the courtyard. They recorded on a white card, for the index, the information on each subject, which was gleaned by asking a number of mandatory questions supplied by the army. After this, each person’s inked fingertip was pressed into the blue Ober Ost pass. Holding the finger, still moist with black ink, away from their bodies, they would wipe the rest on their hair or the inner hem of their skirts. If found without the pass, they would have to pay ten marks to replace it at their own expense, Lev explained each time, handing over the newly minted passes. A happy confusion permeated the writing room. Lev was struck by how the natives were like children, easily pleased and made to feel important by their images cemented into this little blue book.

  Lev roamed from the writing room to the barn to the courtyard. Vaguely, as he walked from one area to the next, he thought of the woman with the blue-black hair. He wondered, leaves crunching underfoot, if he had missed her as he circulated, if when he was bending over a white card complaining of sloppy penmanship, she’d stood in front of the Brownie camera, adjusting her face to supply an appealing smile, her dark eyes awaiting the flash. She would not flinch or look away, Lev decided, because that day under the trees she’d acted willful, even daring. She had taken a risk to talk to him, to offer him a fallen apple.

  He heard voices rising in the middle of the courtyard. The photographer asked an old man, in Yiddish, to please remove his cap or else the picture would not be valid, and then the pass could not be processed. The rebbe stood in front of the camera, shaking his head. His family surrounded him, urging him to obey. Lev recognized the teenage boy, and then he saw her, speaking in a low voice to the rebbe, trying to convince him to remove his embroidered skullcap.

  He caught her saying, “I had to remove my shawl and show my hair. It was only for an instant.”

  The rebbe protested, “He will be offended, I am sure of it. How will I explain this to Him?” He jerked his hand forward, motioning to the bewildered photographer poised behind the camera. “God does not care for your black boxes, for your binoculars, for your airplanes, for the variety of your human inventions. Nothing good can come …” His voice trailed off. He tucked his chin into his snow-white beard.

  The photographer, uncomfortable, pulled up his pants.

  “Father, please.” Her voice shook. She glanced around, fearful that the delay would be noticed, that the old man might get beaten for his resistance. When she scanned the edge of the courtyard, she caught Lev’s eye. For a split second, recognition coursed between them. Lev wished to feel this recognition in his hands, to clasp it between his fingers, to bring the vibrating moment to his mouth. He felt overly grateful to see her, almost embarrassed by how happy it made him. And now he could help her solve her predicament.

  Lev walked over, congenial, his hands in his pockets. He smiled but no one would look at him. She appeared stricken, her face as pale as the moon. The old woman fiddled with a handkerchief, her arthritic fingers working the cloth this way and that. The boy, Geza, dug his heel into the dirt, creating a miniature hole. Geza’s mother held him against her, her arms crossed over his narrow chest, her chin buried in his lank hair. And the woman, Leah, with her blue-black hair, stared at the horizon of trees, at the bare branches straining upward into the gray sky. Her hand rested on her father’s shoulder.

  Lev broke the uncomfortable silence. “Only have him push the cap back from his forehead. So we can see his face better.”

  She nodded, slowly pushing back the velvet cap.

  The photographer took the picture.

  The rebbe flinched at the sound of the sharp pop, at the bright
ness of the flash.

  The rest of the family sighed.

  Geza asked, “Now for my picture?”

  Lev cupped his hand behind the boy’s slender neck. It felt warm and clean. “Go ahead. It’s your turn.”

  Geza straightened his back, squared his shoulders. He flashed a toothy grin. His front teeth were too far apart. Lev thought one could probably fit the width of two pencils between those teeth. Geza’s mother and grandmother clucked their tongues in approval. The rebbe rocked from side to side. He could barely stand this picture taking, the fuss of it all.

  “Ready?” the photographer barked.

  Geza drew in a breath, puffing out his spindly chest.

  In the suspended interval before the picture was taken, Lev felt as if a muslin sheet billowed over his head and hers and enclosed them under its rippling shadow. He rested his eyes on her face, on her neck, on the graceful folds of her shawl covering her hair and its midnight color. She stared back, her eyes wide and glassy and brimming with unknowable questions. Holding each other’s gaze, they recognized the mystery of this instantaneous closeness, as well as the instinctual knowledge of when to look away and not know each other again, because the world on the periphery of their vision encroached, ripping off the safety of the caparisoned muslin sheet, marked by the camera’s exclamatory pop.

  Geza laughed. His mother clapped. His grandmother clucked her tongue.

  The moment was broken, and she looked away from him, her face reddening.

  He waited for her in the writing room and watched through the small window the rest of the family get their pictures taken. When it was her turn, she stared directly into the camera, her dark eyes revealing the slightest hint of laughter. Afterward, they moved single file across the courtyard. The rebbe walked as if in sleep, as if this was all a dream life and his real life occurred, with all its machinations and irritations, somewhere else.