The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  Lev stared at him.

  He threw up his hands. “They think the locals are filthy, that they’re carrying disease. And we can’t suffer another typhus endemic. It nearly wiped out the Serbian army.”

  All through the streets soldiers on horseback herded villagers in droves to the bathhouse at the edge of town. They marched them past the horse market and the abandoned church garden, and past the mill and the Belarusian cemetery, past the kerosene shop and the taverns and the iron goods store and the low brick building that housed the shul. The Jewish bars were deserted, empty of their elderly patrons, who enjoyed drinking kvass and playing cards out front for hours at a time. All the houses had been checked for shirkers. Front doors swung open, revealing empty dusty rooms with overturned chairs, a carpet pushed out of the way in case someone had attempted to hide beneath the floorboards, scattered newspapers, a samovar still steaming. A cat yawned, stretched out along a windowsill.

  Lev started running toward Leah’s house, down Tanner Strasse, retracing his steps from the night before. He passed soldiers coercing women into lines. The women begged and cried, offering small misshapen lumps of gold they had sewed into the hems of their skirts. They’d heard the inoculations would cause them to go barren. One woman threw back her head and opened her mouth, pointing to a gold filling. “You can take that, can’t you?” The soldier shook his head disdainfully and used the butt of his rifle to herd her down the street with the rest. Lev kept running. He’d heard that at the bathhouse men and women had to strip off their clothing and stand naked in the cold brick room before going into the showers, where they would be assaulted by huge blocks of ersatz soap and canisters of disinfectant. Soldiers, outfitted in white short-sleeved gowns, administered the cleaning process, armed with scrubbers, hand brushes, loofahs, and rough towels, bombarding the natives with torrents of hot water, after which they brushed them with canvas sacking. And oftentimes, after seeing to it that a woman had been completely disinfected and scrubbed clean of all possible lice, they raped her.

  At Leah’s house, the door stood open. Beyond the house, Yatke bridge stretched over a rapid stream. Across the stream, fields upon fields of dry, flat yellow land. In the distance, the slaughterhouse and a scattering of red barns.

  He spun around at the sound of leaves crunching; someone darted between the trees.

  “Leah?”

  He saw nothing now, only trees and dirt and a fallen bird’s nest with tiny white eggs inside.

  In Yiddish he said, “I’m not taking you to the bathhouse.”

  A few moments passed. Stillness surrounded him. Even the rushes in the trees stopped fluttering.

  She stepped out from behind a birch, squinting.

  “I’m alone,” he said.

  Leah nodded, one hand pressed against the birch, the other hand motionless at her side. Her eyes, animated with fear, appeared brighter and larger than Lev had remembered. He walked to her, and after a brief moment of hesitation, took hold of her hand and marveled at how perfectly it fit into his. “Let’s find someplace to hide you,” he said, leading her over the bridge, in the direction of the fields.

  He hid her in the loft of an empty barn. With handfuls upon handfuls of hay, Lev covered her body. His fingertips lightly touched her heavy clothing, moving over the outline of her chest and her hips and her shoulders and her hair until only her face was visible. She reminded him of a living sarcophagus, immobile, inert, but one that blinked and breathed when the back of his hand accidentally brushed the side of her cheek or his calloused knuckle skimmed the bottom of her soft earlobe. And when this brief point of contact occurred, her liquid eyes would scan his face, searching for clues to who he was when not outfitted in field gray, and where he lived and with whom, for she had not failed to notice his wedding band, just as he had not failed to notice hers. As he covered her, Lev felt the heat radiating off her body, and this womanly heat shortened his breath, made it hard to think.

  Weak afternoon sun shone through the diamond-cut window. Soon it would grow dark. And then she could return home, Lev told her. Leah nodded from under the hay. He dropped another handful over her forehead. She squinted and smiled.

  “Now you look like a mummy,” he whispered.

  “What is a mummy?”

  “At the Kaiser-Frederich-Museum,” Lev began, “which is an enormous domed building, bigger than all the churches here put together.…” He paused, as if a spectral self had taken Franz to see the Münzkabinett, the “coin cabinet museum,” and Franz, an avid collector, had stared at the large odd coins from Asia Minor, from the seventh century B.C. He had pressed his nose to the glass, leaving a smudge.

  “Go on,” Leah urged, raising her chin.

  Lev balanced on his knees, listening to a shuffling from down below. But it was only a stray dog that had wandered into the barn, peering up at them, and then, after realizing there was no food, it wandered out.

  “I can’t quite explain,” Lev whispered. “It’s too foreign from this.” He motioned to the darkened barn, to the low-hanging beams and the scattered hay and the cracked windowpane. Voices shouted outside. Through the window, Lev saw two German soldiers strolling lazily in the fields. One drew out a flask and drank from it in long lusty gulps. The other soldier threw his cap on the ground. His hair was as red as fire. They argued for a moment before the soldier with the flask handed it over to his comrade.

  Lev turned away from the window. “You should stay here until dark. Completely dark.”

  “Stay with me until then,” she said.

  He made out her eyes and mouth more clearly than the rest of her face. She breathed quickly. Her neck gleamed. He wanted to take her neck in his hands and run his mouth along her collarbone, feel the pulse of her blood under his parted lips. She raised her hand up out of the hay and Lev clasped it, crushing his palm into her palm. Her cheeks flushed in the dimming light, she slowly told him about the wonder-rabbi, the cabalist. “He will bless you,” she said. After a pause, their hands still locked together, she added, “He blessed me. He drove the dybbuks from my house. The dybbuks who were wreaking havoc on my womb.” Her eyes were wet and shining. “I am a childless mother. Everyone knows this. Women will not touch me for fear of catching what I have caught. But the rabbi saw them, the dybbuks, dancing in my womb, rejoicing because they had spirited away my unborn children. And after he saw this, he blessed me. And now, he told me, like Sarah, I will have children. He said it’s not too late.”

  Lev watched her mouth, her warm breath visible when she added, “He blessed ten men when the war started, and they are all still alive.” She studied him. “Come next month, during the festival of lights. His doors are open then.”

  He nodded, moving his thumb in circles along the inside of her wrist, and wondered if this was the closest he would ever get to her skin, her heat. Abruptly, she propped herself up on her elbows, her thick hair falling around her shoulders. “Tell me, what does your wife look like?”

  “I don’t remember,” he joked, brushing the last few strands of hay off her shoulders. A snapshot of Josephine was safely tucked into his shirt pocket, inches from his chest.

  She didn’t laugh. “It doesn’t matter anyway, what you remember or don’t remember.”

  “No?”

  “The way you look at me,” she drew a breath, “tells me it doesn’t.”

  That night, Lev leafed through Josephine’s letters. He tried to shut out the other men’s voices, as well as the fleeting touch of Leah’s hand upon his face when they had parted in the trees behind her house. She had smelled of hay and mint, and beneath that, her innate scent of heather heated in the sun. “My cousin was killed at Maubeuge,” someone said gruffly while unbuttoning his uniform. Another man replied that he thought he had crabs, moaning how he itched all over. “At least you’re not in the trenches,” someone else said, spitting. “The rainwater is half a meter deep there. Those boys in the trenches paddle in the water as they fire, and the constant dampness causes bladder an
d kidney trouble,” after which he punctuated his point by spitting out another wad of tobacco onto the earth-packed floor.

  Lev kept her letters in a stack tied with a string under his wire mattress. She had been writing less frequently because she was busy working for the DRK, the German Red Cross, as a nurse. She described how the troop trains arrived every hour, packed with wounded, hungry men. In between these trains, passenger trains also came, full of Prussian refugees with nowhere to go. She said they looked wild and rabid, wrapped in dirty wool blankets. The women always had too many children, none of whom they could feed. She wrote about how one woman had to be detained because she suspected every person on the train wanted to shoot her. She was shrieking and sobbing, while her three boys looked on in silence. Some of the trains had been converted into stationary makeshift hospital wards. She emphasized how she was always busy, ferrying bread, coffee, and soup to the soldiers. But she did not seem to mind this. On the contrary—her letters were full of the energy and urgency war produces; she felt useful, and Lev imagined how the soldiers admired and complimented her. He thought she must enjoy her new role, playing Florence Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, gliding down the aisles of the infirm, a glowing apparition. It suited her. Lev reread part of a letter from two months ago: I try to keep the children at home, but Franz insists on coming to see the wounded soldiers, and his will often proves stronger than mine. He desperately wishes he could fight and thinks being a child during the war is utterly useless. But I am secretly overjoyed that he is not old enough, for we would have surely lost him by now to one of the battlefields. Don’t you think so?

  Lev drew up his knees, his back pressed into the iron grilling of the headboard. Below him, in the bottom bunk, a soldier was describing the pink and newly scrubbed bodies of the peasants after today’s delousing. “They still seemed dirty. It’s in their blood. You can’t wash out that kind of filth.”

  Another man commented, “There’s no such thing as dirty blood. Blood is blood.”

  Lev picked up her last letter, the one at the bottom of the stack. She wrote: Yesterday, the children and I went to the cinema for a Henny Porten film—one of your favorites, I know. A Red Cross nurse was passing out candy and cigarettes to the wounded beforehand. One man’s leg had not entirely healed; he was dripping a little blood on the velour seats. When Vicki and her friend Isabella saw his blood dripping, they burst into tears and ran out of the theater. I had to run after them for two whole blocks. When I caught up to them, they were still whimpering like puppies, and I slapped Vicki. Afterward, I felt badly, but she must learn the value of empathy. I think Isabella is too dreamy, and Vicki is always with her now. She claims her mother is an Italian countess. And when her father came home from the east (he was discharged—his left foot was blown to bits), she asked her mother, “Who is that strange man from Russia with the tall fur hat?” Which makes me wonder, how do you look? Please let me know in advance if you look terribly different, or if you are missing any parts. For the children’s sake, so I can prepare them. But it seems, thank God, that you have been quite lucky thus far.

  Lev put away this last letter. She had written it on October 1, 1917, more than a month ago. She wished he had been wounded just enough so she could tell others about it, but not so much that he’d be a pitiful case, like the man in the theater. He wondered if she resented his “luck,” as she put it, and resented how relatively safe he was, stationed far from real battles, in the backwoods of the east, where soldiers fought typhus and lice instead of men, and staged fronttheater, such as Schiller’s Wallensteins Lager, reenacting the Thirty Years’ War, as if this war were not enough.

  9

  The first snowfall left the town glittering and white. In the early dawn, Lev walked outside with the other soldiers, their eyes blinking and watering from the new brightness. The air shimmered with cold. Lev thought his eyelashes might have frozen and stuck together in the short walk from the barracks to the mess hall. In the mess hall, everyone grumbled over another Christmas in Mitau. They drank weak coffee and smoked cigarettes and reminisced about marzipan and gifts wrapped in gold foil under the tree and the excitement of their children—children they wouldn’t recognize by now. “They grow too quickly,” a man grunted, sitting next to Lev. “My wife wrote how my boy is taller than I am.” He took a violent bite out of his ham and butter roll.

  Lev felt a cold despondency creep into his bones. How old was Franz again? Nine. Which would make Vicki seven. Maybe she had long hair in plaits and maybe she had outgrown her thumb-sucking. Maybe she slept better now, through the night without waking. But he could only guess at these things. The snatches of information he gleaned from Josephine’s letters about the children often left him feeling bereft. They ate fairly well, they knew their multiplication tables, they missed him—this was about all she wrote. On occasion she tucked in a detail about Vicki’s rebelliousness, which made Lev happy, or about how Franz had played one of the three wise men in the Christmas pageant, but otherwise she relied on stock phrases to fill the pages of her letters: take care; write often; we’re humming along just fine over here; it won’t be long now; miss you. Even her closing—Love, Josephine—at the bottom of the page felt rehearsed, mechanical, as if her hand automatically wrote the word love without the accompanying emotion. But perhaps he was only imagining this so he could think of Leah, freely and with abandon. He wanted to feel her skin again, kiss her—he almost had done it in the hayloft but had felt too afraid of spoiling the moment. He wanted to do all this and more without those pinpricks of guilt.

  The man next to him finished off his sandwich and stood up abruptly. “It started again,” he said, motioning to the heavy snow falling through the steamed-up windows. Then he walked off. Lev stared into his watery coffee and made a mental note to request that Josephine please include Franz and Vicki’s birthdates in her next letter. She would think he was losing track of time, of home, of his footing in the world, and maybe he was.

  Lev sighed, lingering a moment longer. There was nowhere to go anyway. It was impossible to work the roads and clear the fields because everything was frozen. Beneath the snow ran a layer of impenetrable ice. A sense of hiatus had overtaken the camp. The soldiers played cards indoors and started drinking before noon. The gramophone perpetually played folk songs. Lev sometimes watched with amusement as the men solemnly waltzed together. They dressed some of the youngest soldiers in wigs and aprons and pretended they were German farm girls from the high clear mountains. With their smooth beardless faces, the young men giggled and trounced from soldier to soldier, sitting on laps and blowing kisses. Lev found the whole scene drenched with despair, but he also laughed from time to time. What else was there to do? The officers, smoking their cigars, enjoyed the gaiety, believing everyone needed a reprieve, that the endless days of snow and fog and ice, with intermittent bursts of blinding sun, were damaging morale.

  After breakfast, Lev went to Otto’s lodgings. Exiting the mess hall, he already heard the garish vibrations of those folk songs echoing behind him. It seemed that each day they started earlier with the drinking and the meaningless frivolity. He sighed. His shoulders felt heavy, his legs lethargic. He missed home and he missed Leah, and the bleak gray sky promised nothing. Trudging through the empty snow-swept streets, he thought about the last time he’d seen Leah. A few days ago, but it felt like years. It had been unsatisfying because she was with her sister and they were headed to market. So bundled, he could barely see her face and she was in a hurry. For only a few moments, she stopped on the street and introduced him to Altke, her sister. Leah’s breath was white in the freezing air. Her eyes laughed from under her wool hat. Then she gave him a quick nod, and they continued on their route, chattering away about the price of turnips. He had stood there for a long time, just watching her walk away, even though cold seeped into his boots and he swore his nose would freeze, turn blue, and fall off.

  He hoped, in the middle of these silent streets, he would suddenly see her—
highly unlikely, but still he glanced around. Every other house was marked with the red warning sign of infection, the windows boarded up for fear the virus would seep into the open air. Lev thought he saw, from behind a lace curtain, a furtive glance through the elaborate patterning. The only imperfections in the new snow were ashes, scraped from the ovens and scattered in front of each doorstep to keep people from slipping. He passed the cemetery and remembered how Aaron had told him about the secret business deals done here among the graves. He stopped a moment, musing at the graves, how the stones were run-down and crooked and jammed together, and in the process of lighting a match for his first cigarette of the day, the blue flame flickered and a dream resurfaced from the night before, a dream he would rather forget. He stood at the end of a long snaking line in the middle of a forest—ahead of him he recognized Aaron and some other Jewish soldiers from his division. An officer made his way down the line, counting off the Jews. He motioned for the first soldier to speak, who said he was a Vaterlandsverteidiger, defender of the Fatherland. The officer nodded in approval, moving on. The next soldier stepped forward and stated Mosaischer Konfession, of the Mosaic faith. A third soldier proclaimed Israelit, an Israelite, and then the fourth soldier in line proudly announced Deutscher jüdischen Glaubens, a German of the Jewish faith, as if he should win an honorary medal for this. When the German officer paused before the fifth soldier, a soldier who vaguely resembled Lev, the man could not speak. The officer swiftly shouted, “Auf jeden Fall ein Jude.” Definitely a Jew.

  Lev walked faster. The biting cold snaked through his open collar. The image of the German officer’s laughing face when he shouted Auf jeden Fall ein Jude danced before him. Such triumph in identifying a Jew, as if the officer had a particular knack for catching difference—a glee akin to a banker’s wife spotting that the diamonds hanging from her rival’s neck were not real stones but cheap glittering imitations. Despite Lev’s dream, the actual count had been orchestrated discreetly. He and the other Jewish soldiers filled out a form with their names, occupations, the date they joined the army, their duties, if they had fought on the front line, if they had been wounded, and if so, what type of wound. They handed back the papers to the officers with the obedience of schoolchildren.