The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  When they came into the room, Lev arranged it with the two other translators so that he would be asking her the questions. They sat opposite each other across a scarred wooden table. She had since readjusted her shawl, but wisps of blue-black hair still escaped from under her white earlobes. Lev suddenly worried, pen in hand, that she did not remember him from the other day, that the sheltered moment between them had been the workings of his imagination. She might think of all soldiers as the same man in field gray. She might have given fruit to others, carelessly, without a thought. If she had already forgotten him, then—

  “Are you going to ask me the questions?” Her voice sliced through the air, and he realized he had been staring at her earlobes.

  Lev smoothed down the piece of paper. “Of course.”

  “Well?” She raised her eyebrows. Again, her expectant gaze, the way her small red mouth curled upward seemed as if she was laughing at him, that he was somehow ridiculous with his epaulets, heavy boots, the holster on his hip.

  Lev cleared his throat. “Name?” Of course he remembered. Leah: a crescent moon, the whiteness startling and smooth when it appeared in the purple twilight. Those were the hours when we don’t know ourselves as well as we think, Lev thought. When buried thoughts burn to the surface. Leah. A crescent moon.

  “Leah,” she said.

  Lev carefully wrote out her name, pausing before the next column, realizing she had only given her first name.

  Leah smiled, gesturing to the next column. “Mitau.”

  Lev began writing, but stopped. “Perhaps you misunderstood. Not the town—your name.”

  Leah drew her shawl closer around her shoulders. She stared at the piece of paper, her eyes scanning the columns and blank spaces. “We are called by our first name followed by the first name of our father. I am Leah ben Samuel. But the czar commanded everyone to take a last name. So we take Mitau.”

  Lev nodded, writing this down. For a moment, they both listened to the translator interviewing her father at the next desk. The translator asked the rebbe his occupation. The rebbe said he studied the Torah, the words of God, that he did not concern himself with the entanglements of pedestrian pursuits. “In the holy books, every word, every letter even, contains thousands of pages and every page reveals the greatness of God.” He sighed heavily. “Which is never sufficiently understood, nor should it be.”

  She flashed Lev a smile.

  Lev drummed the pen against the table. “Occupation?”

  She played with her wedding ring, a dull gold band. Lev hoped she might be a widow who, out of reverence, still wore it.

  “We have a stall in the marketplace. Maize in the summer and naphtha for fuel in the winter as well as pickled cucumbers and beans. Small trade.”

  “Married?”

  She paused, her eyes sliding over his face. “Yes.” She blinked slowly, a watery film replenishing her green eyes. Lev looked closer. Green with flecks of gold. “He’s in the Russian army.” Her voice turned flat, and she clasped her hands together, her eyes fixed on the tip of his shoulder, as if a bird perched there. “The soldiers here, they don’t speak Yiddish. Except for a few.”

  Lev nodded, pursing his lips.

  “The orders posted in the town square—sometimes the translation from German to Russian is terribly wrong.” She hesitated.

  “Go on.”

  “Well, the order posted about only baking cakes on Wednesdays and Saturdays.” She swallowed, trying to suppress the corners of her mouth, which wanted to curl upward. “Well, instead of reading, The German court judged, it read—” She stopped short, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, but I do not wish to offend.”

  Lev felt the urge to pull her forearms toward him, to bring her near. “Tell me?”

  She glanced at the translator sitting to Lev’s left. Then she leaned over the table, lowering her voice to a half whisper. “Instead, the sign read, The German excrement shitted that cakes will only be baked on Wednesdays and Saturdays.”

  Lev’s chest filled with pressure; the feeling rushed up into his throat and was about to burst forth from his mouth, a release of inane laughter. He looked away, staring down at his fingernails, which he had recently pared with meticulous care.

  She scrutinized the blunt edge of her wool tunic.

  Lev coughed and said he would look into it.

  “And do you think,” Leah said, her voice held at a hush, “you could change the order to say cakes may only be baked on Wednesdays and Sundays?”

  “Instead of Saturdays?”

  “Because of the Sabbath.”

  “The Sabbath,” Lev repeated dumbly.

  She searched his face. “Surely you understand. About these matters.”

  And now she was asking too much of him, drawing him in with her eyes and her intimate whispering so that he could better help her bake her cakes on days that were not holy. He returned to the questionnaire.

  “Number of children?” The freckles splashing her neck reminded him of a distant constellation.

  Her face flushed.

  He repeated, “Do you have any children?”

  “No.” Her gaze moved away from his shoulder, and for a brief instant her green-gold eyes turned opaque. She watched him write down zero.

  Lev took a quick sip of water. He wondered if he had been too harsh. Maybe he had repelled her.

  She stared at him strangely. In a rush of breath, she asked, “Are you from Odessa because Jews from Odessa tend to have light eyes.”

  The next question on the sheet asked for her age. He tapped the edge of the pencil on the blank column, drawing her attention to it.

  Then he looked up at her and felt his eyes become severe, foreboding.

  She leaned back into her chair, folding her arms over her chest. She was retreating into herself, drifting away. He cursed himself and the divide that could rise up between two people without warning.

  He put down the pencil with an air of defeat. “My parents moved to Berlin when I was very young and they don’t talk about the east.” He pursed his lips. Enough of that. A draft blew into the room, the door perpetually open.

  After a pause, she asked him why this was important, these cards.

  “You don’t exist without a pass.”

  “But I am sitting right here in front of you.” Again, the suppression of a smile. She hugged herself to stay warm, retreating farther into the folds of brown wool.

  “We need a record of how many inhabitants are under German control.”

  “But what will the passes do?”

  “Any movement within the territory requires documentation. Passes will soon be required for walking at night after curfew, taking in guests, for the use of one’s own cart, for moving outside of the district. This pass is the basis for all other documentation. Without it”—Lev sighed—“it’s difficult.”

  Her tone turned sharp, incredulous. “I heard even dogs are issued passes.”

  Lev shifted in his chair. “We need the pass to certify a dog tax has been paid.” It sounded absurd, saying it aloud.

  “A dog tax?” she repeated, hard laughter pressing the edges of her voice.

  “The important thing is your pass.” Lev brought the tips of his fingers together, creating a rounded hollowness. “When you are stopped, you must show your pass. It costs ten marks to replace.”

  “Ten marks,” she repeated. He noted the pronouncement of her collarbone, the shallow blue dip beneath her eyes. She probably didn’t remember giving him the apple, that day under the trees with the golden afternoon bathing her hair, turning the black an opalescent blue.

  He stared down at the sheet of paper. He had forgotten her age. When he asked, she traced her finger around the oblong ring in the wooden table, as if she had lived too many rings, too many lives. “Thirty,” she said.

  Same as I am, Lev thought.

  And then, as if remembering something amusing, she asked, “Did you enjoy the apple?” She smiled, revealing a flash of white teeth. “O
r was it already too soft?” She leaned forward, pressing herself into the table’s edge.

  “It was perfect. Thank you.” His chest pounded—over an apple, a stupid apple. “It was very kind of you.”

  She bit her lower lip, chewing on it. He almost reached out and cupped her chin to stop her, to say don’t chew your lip, as he did with Vicki. He always told Vicki it would ruin her lipstick, and she would throw back her head and scream with delight, But I don’t wear lipstick, and Lev would pretend to forget she was still a little girl.

  Leah did not wear lipstick. She had probably never seen lipstick in a tube and would think it a novel and amusing invention, if not wholly trustworthy. Her lips were the color of the red gooseberries the army instructed them against eating. Whether or not the berries were poisonous was debatable.

  8

  Vast areas of land lay in waste, the memory of trees evident in the stubble of black stumps spreading outward until Lev lost count. In the raw morning mist, the stumps resembled the tops of smooth rocks protruding from a shifting body of water. The trees were needed for their valuable sap, for firewood, for fortifications at the front, for the building of bridges. In the morning when Lev arrived, he sometimes had to catch his breath at the clear, clean landscape. He expected voluminous trees, and the naked land confronted him with its bleakness. The villagers stared blankly at the clear-cut land, and Lev wondered, before he sounded the bugle and signaled the start of the workday, if they mourned the dissolution of the primeval forests, where spirits and rocks were still worshipped despite the efforts of the church to steer the people away from such pagan ways.

  A new crop of workers had arrived this morning, some of them barely twelve or thirteen years old. Their mothers could no longer hide them, and soon, Lev thought, they would contract typhus or cholera or an inflammation of the lung. The conditions were unsanitary as the boys struggled together, working under a wet sky with little food, and at night they slept in a barn under dirty blankets, a draft blowing in through the many cracks and holes. Lev wondered how Geza had avoided getting lumped into this unfortunate crew—he didn’t have any visible disability, and as far as Lev could tell, he hadn’t maimed or blinded himself in an attempt to circumvent service. Perhaps he’d just been lucky. Lev then entertained the wild fantasy of coming to Geza’s aid by putting in a good word so that the German army would not swoop him up for such backbreaking work. He imagined Leah’s gratefulness, her face breaking into a glowing smile, thanking him, her hand on his arm, for how he had saved Geza, his boyhood uninterrupted, as opposed to the sorry sight Lev saw before him now—these poor boys forced to perform the work of men. For a moment, Lev returned to the idea of Leah’s gratitude, how she would revere him, speaking softly, her lips close to his face, the intoxicating scent of her hair escaping from under her scarf.

  But it wasn’t only about saving Geza and basking in Leah’s gratitude. Lev also felt ashamed of how these Russian boys were treated. True, they weren’t German, but nonetheless they were young and able-bodied, until the harsh working conditions took away their youth, hollowing out their eyes, collapsing their lungs, bloodying their palms, turning their healthy skin gray. Given this abuse, it was no surprise to Lev that some locals, along with a handful of Russian soldiers and even a few German deserters, had escaped into the forests, that they were forming resistance groups. They raided villages for bread and supplies. They committed random acts of violence against German soldiers who foolishly stumbled home late at night from the taverns and teahouses. But Lev saw how some of the Germans behaved, drinking naked on top of a horse in the snow, shooting into the dense trees bordering the barracks, aiming at small animals. One soldier had killed a woman in the forest last night. On her way home, a bullet caught her by surprise, ripping through her side. She had worked as a cook in the mess hall. The officers repeated Stay German, a slogan Lev found ironic as all traces of western decorum diminished. And at breakfast this morning, over steaming bowls of semolina, the man next to him boasted about how they had used some village men as draft animals, harnessing them in teams to plows. “And we photographed it,” he said proudly before offering Lev more coffee. This man was barely a man. He looked about eighteen. His sharp blue eyes, set too far apart, reminded him of Franz’s eyes, but then he interrupted Lev’s thoughts with the complaint that there was no cream this morning. “Probably because all the cows have starved,” Lev snapped, irritated that this boy had not noticed the cows standing sickly and skeletal in the fields, cows they’d confiscated from the local farmers and then left to starve and rot.

  So Lev didn’t write Josephine about these things. He wrote about clearing the land and making it more useful, about modernizing the agricultural systems, which were truly backward here. He wrote about the hard black bread that nearly broke his teeth, the beauty of the white birches, how it was getting colder and colder. Much colder than Berlin. This will be my third Russian winter, he wrote last time, worried that if he didn’t write this, he would lose count of the weeks and the months that passed through him. When he’d folded the letter, pressing the creases down with his thumb, another stab of guilt attacked him. He’d spent nearly a paragraph describing the slender white birches, how their trunks tilted gently toward the light, the crimson and gold leaves whispering in the wind. How birch sap contained various healing properties and the locals believed that if birches surrounded your home, the devil stayed away. But he was really describing Leah, who reminded him of the white birches and of the white crescent moon peeking through the thin delicate branches. Leah: his tonic, his refreshment, the one spot of beauty he’d found. He’d not seen her since the day he processed her identity card. This he could keep count of; precisely two weeks had passed since then. He’d even loitered around the patch of forest where the Sukkot hut had stood, but it had been taken down. He went out of his way to go into town, hoping perhaps he would find her selling her wares at the stalls on market day. But last time, the square was so crowded he could barely move. Hawkers came up to him, pushing caps and apples and woven baskets into his face, barking out prices and then clasping Lev’s hand as if he had agreed. Lev kept repeating, No, no, I don’t want this, I don’t want it, and then the men looked offended and shuffled off. In the midst of all the confusion, the Yiddish and broken German and the stream of Russian words he still didn’t recognize, he couldn’t find her. The raven hair, the woolen shawl, the way he imagined her smiling at him, half-impish, half-serious, when he caught her eye. He walked back to base empty-handed, without even a glimpse.

  For weeks now, Lev had overseen the native workers and a small army of POWs, mainly Russians and Belarusians hacking away for kilometers on either side of the rivers and burnt fields. Lev watched them, his feet cold from lack of movement, smoking cigarette after cigarette as these men cleared wide swaths of land for the building of roads. The men sweated and swore and hated him as he contemplated the blue smoke of his cigarette poised between two gloved fingers.

  And then Otto showed up. He had a compact body, a square jaw, and a glorious nose, a nose that inspired confidence in its blunt bold shape. He smoked fiendishly and never ceased to express his love of women. A few minutes after meeting Lev, bored and fidgety, he launched into one of his favorite monologues. “The force that drives life forward is Eros. It is a force that creates, destroys, and then re-creates.” He lit a new cigarette directly after disposing of the previous one. “A man experiences Eros most powerfully from women; they are the conduits between us and the life force.” He grinned, lighting a match. The blue flame flickered before catching on the tightly packed tobacco leaves. “That is why sex, as much as possible, with as many women as possible, is imperative.”

  Lev grinned. “And I take it you’ve had plenty here?”

  Otto threw back his head, as if the memory of it was too much. “You have no idea.” He spoke as if he could not keep up with the speed of his own thoughts when he described the barbarity of the whorehouse at the edge of town. “Local women carried
us on their backs, whinnying like mares, and we clutched their hair, and pulled it sharply so that their necks snapped back. Afterward, they threw us out on the snow—drunk, we rolled around on the ground, no—we writhed on the ground.” He shook his head, his smile echoing debauchery, inexplicable deviance. “The snow at night is wonderfully refreshing.”

  Lev imagined what it would feel like to twine Leah’s midnight hair through his fingers, to feel her slim torso bucking under his groin.

  “To be dominated like that,” Otto continued, “thrown into the snow.” His dark eyes watered, stinging from the sharp wind. They watched the leaves rise up from the icy ground, circling and swirling along the half-built road in a fitful temper.

  “In Königsberg, there was also a good teahouse.” Lev recalled how Hermann had convinced him to go that night. The whore with the reddish hair, the shabby room upstairs on top of the bar, the thumping tambourines down below as he plunged into her. “But VD. You have to watch out for that,” Lev added.

  “If you worry about something like this, pleasure flies away like a little bird.” Otto fashioned his hands into two bird wings that flapped through the air.

  “Yes, but,” Lev said, not entirely ready to forfeit, “I’m married, you see. I simply can’t bring home some vile disease and pass it on to her.” But this wasn’t the only reason why Lev did not go to the taverns. He couldn’t fully explain, but such places struck him as decidedly vulgar. The proprietors masked such taverns as cozy little cottages in the woods, but the women looked meek and anxious. Despite their rouge and scented bodies, these women pretended at pleasure, until afterward, when the truth collapsed around their faces.