The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  “When the peasants came crashing through our door, some German soldiers strolled by our house, smoking cigarettes.” She violently scooped up a handful of glass, dumping the remains into her lap. Little red cuts emerged between her fingers. Lev wanted to hold her hands and kiss them. “The soldiers saw how our coats and chairs and tables were carried out, as if it was the natural order of things.”

  Leah started to rise from her squatting position, but Lev cupped her shoulders. He whispered, “I was out in the forest, clearing roads. You know …”

  “And that’s how it’s always been—the natural order of things!” Geza bellowed from the attic, and then he stormed down the stairs, breathless. He kicked aside the broken picture frame. “Can you believe it?” he said, tearing off the dangling arm of the hat stand.

  In the moonlight, Lev saw the gash across Geza’s lower jaw. “I can fix that.”

  Geza automatically touched it.

  The others trailed down the stairs. Leah’s mother emerged first, fisting her woolen skirts up around her knees. She said at least the goyim had not taken the good linens, which she hid behind the oven. Leah’s sister followed, her hair patchy and uneven from typhus. And then Leah’s father, the rabbi, descended without a hint of effort, a frail figure in the darkening room.

  Leah stood up, dropping the glass pieces into a pile on a remaining chair. Leah’s mother went up to Lev, clutching his sleeve. “Do you think you could get our things back? They even took his kapote, the long black frock coat he always wears to Shabbos.” She was tiny, enfolded in dark wool, her little pale face sticking out of the cloth.

  Leah sighed. “Mother, he knows what a kapote is. You don’t have to explain everything to him.”

  “How do I know what he knows?” She eyed Lev, his clean-shaven face, his German uniform, his head uncovered, provoking God. At least this is what Lev thought she saw: an anesthetized Jew, scrubbed of any hint that he shared their history.

  “It’s better not to know what these meaningless things mean,” Geza muttered, touching his cut again, this time out of curiosity. His mother pulled his hand away from his face. He shrugged her off and strode over to the broken window. After contemplating the silent streets, he stuffed a rag through the jagged hole. “And there’s nowhere to sit now.”

  Leah’s father pointed to the wooden benches jammed up against the walls. He spoke softly but with deliberation. “God has provided us with a place to sit and to sleep.”

  Still gazing at the windswept streets, Geza said in a low voice, “But we built those benches into the walls for this precise purpose, when inevitably, every year and sometimes twice, we are robbed of all our belongings and have to sleep and eat on benches until we can afford to buy back our things, for double.” He fingered his wound, which made Lev wince, thinking how it was only getting dirtier and should be cleaned immediately, with soap and water, then dressed. He would return later tonight, after pilfering gauze and soap from the medical ward.

  The rabbi closed his eyes and murmured something indecipherable, holding one arm out while he lowered himself onto a wooden bench.

  “Geza, please,” Leah sighed, motioning to her father. “At least we are still here, together.”

  Geza reluctantly left his post by the window, pulling the rag out of the broken pane as he stepped away. Lev could tell how he thought blocking the wind with a rag was futile given this barren room with no candles or forks, the floors stripped bare of rugs, the trunks overturned and emptied of shawls and shirts.

  Geza slapped the rag against his thigh. “I’m going to fetch water from the river. Then we’ll have tea.”

  His mother protested; the streets were still empty. She told him to wait until more people came out, until it was safe.

  “Safe?” His breath stood in the still air. He charged through the front door, grabbing the bucket as he left.

  They held their breath, watching him stride across the street, kicking at the bluish snow, until his form receded, blending into the black trees. Lev stood behind Leah, inhaling her hair, the scent of a river after it has rained. The rabbi had fallen asleep, and his snoring, akin to the sound of a failing engine, filled the room. Lev quickly squeezed Leah’s hand, and then he turned around, addressing Geza’s mother and grandmother, who hunched despairingly on the one rug the villagers had left behind.

  “I’m going to fetch some supplies to treat that wound of his. Don’t worry—it only needs cleaning, a few stitches.”

  A few hours later, Lev sat with Leah and her family on cushions borrowed from a neighbor, drinking hot elderflower tea, their faces illuminated by candlelight as they dipped pieces of bread into a pot of honey Leah’s mother had managed to hide. On the wall, the glass paraffin lamp that usually gave light was shattered. Leah pinched a bit of salt onto Lev’s bread, as if she were serving him at a proper table. Leah’s mother had filled empty glass bottles with hot water from the samovar, corked them, and then wrapped them in rags to use as hand and foot warmers. “At least,” her mother said after a long silence in which the only sounds were the ones of eating and drinking, “we are warm and we are eating.”

  Geza chewed his bread awkwardly because of his cut. Lev had cleaned and dressed the wound, but it would scar. When he mentioned this, Geza burst out, “It will look as if I’ve fought in a duel.”

  “Jews don’t fight duels,” Leah retorted, lightly leaning her arm into Lev’s, as if she didn’t notice this small intimacy, an intimacy that brought to mind her naked limbs and bare torso melting into his own nakedness. He chewed on the bread.

  “Jews didn’t fight in duels because they were not thought honorable enough to participate,” Lev said.

  Geza sipped his tea pensively, leaning toward the flickering candle. His eyes fixed on Lev. “In Berlin, I bet Jews fight duels all the time. Did you ever fight in one?”

  Leah cut in to say it was impolite to ask such questions, and her mother muttered, “Who would want to tempt God in that way? There are already too many ways to die.” Leah’s sister, with her brown liquid eyes, sat there silently, watching her son.

  Lev rocked to and fro, as if to reposition himself, but he only wanted to brush against Leah’s arm again. As he did this, he said, “I fought in a duel, at one of the fraternities.”

  Geza ravenously chewed on his bread. “And what happened? Did you win? Do you have a scar somewhere?”

  The rabbi interjected, his voice thin and wary, “Goyim naches. The games goys play. And I am unimpressed with your new muscle-Jew. Is it he who is supposed to rebuild the holy land, in Palestine?”

  Geza kept looking at Lev, as if they were coconspirators. “Scholars hunched over the Talmud, what have they done?”

  “You can’t build a road to the Sabbath.” The old man closed his eyes and nodded to himself. The candle was burning down. Soon they would all be sitting in the dark.

  “After the war, I’m going to Palestine.” Geza took in the surroundings, as if impressing upon his memory the mud-packed floor and the broken lamp, the smashed windowpane and the hard benches, because one day, when picking tomatoes in the dusty heat, he would remember this small, dilapidated place.

  The old man opened his eyes, and within his dark pupils, Lev saw a flare of anger. “I’d sooner see you go to Spain, the land of the curse. But the cherem, the curse, will end. At least in Spain there are God-fearing Christians, and wherever there are religious people, Jews can live too.”

  They went back and forth like this, debating, and the women listened, and Lev took the opportunity to offer Leah his bottle warmer, their fingertips touching.

  “Won’t you be cold?” she asked, nestling his bottle warmer into her armpit, drawing it up against her breast. He stared at where she had put the bottle, wishing it was his own hand pressed there. He didn’t notice Geza asking about Berlin again.

  Leah looked away, suppressing a faint smile.

  Geza persisted, “And what about the streetlamps? Are there no more lamplighters?”

&nbs
p; Lev said the streets were so bright you could read a newspaper while walking to dinner. “Electric lights,” he added, pulling out a cigarette, offering one to Geza. Geza took it and then asked about the motorcar, the subway, the gramophone. Did he own one? What music did it play? In between Geza’s questions, Leah’s mother took the opportunity to ask Lev if he was blessed with any children. When he said their ages, seven and nine, his throat thickened. He answered these questions about his life carefully, feeling Leah’s eyes on him, wondering if he hurt her by talking like this, wondering if the names of his children and the name of his wife uttered in this dark room sounded unnecessarily cruel after how he had touched her wrist, offered her his bottle warmer, been inside her repeatedly.

  While Leah’s mother gleaned information about him, Geza argued with his grandfather. “But in the west, there’s even legal protection against pogroms. Jews can become government ministers. Viceroys!”

  Samuel stroked his beard. “I fail to see the appeal in the housetrained animality of the western Jew—his feigned civility, his adopted customs, his so-called gentility and rich furnishings. A mere mimic of his persecutors.”

  Geza grinned. “You used to have a picture of Moses Montefiore hanging on the wall, before it was stolen.”

  Leah’s mother poured more tea into their glasses, stirring the elderflower petals first.

  Geza continued, his large hands spread over each knee. “Montefiore dined with the king of England. What of that?”

  Samuel mumbled into his tea, “Montefiore is an exceptional case. And he never forgot his people.”

  Leah began, “When Adi came back …”

  Leah’s mother added, “My brother.”

  Leah fixed her eyes on Geza. “Adi was taken away by the Russian army at fourteen, and twenty years later, when he returned here as a lieutenant general, there wasn’t a trace of his Jewishness left.” She paused, pressing a small piece of bread between her thumb and index finger. “Even though he cried on his mother’s grave and wished he had never been taken from his home, everyone disowned him.”

  Leah’s mother stared into the flickering light and said it was a terrible thing, taking young boys away from their homes and converting them in the army. After this, they fell silent. Geza glared moodily at Leah and his grandmother, as if it were their fault Adi could not come home.

  That night, falling asleep in his cot, Lev thought about the songs Leah and her family sang before the light died out entirely and how his cheeks had burned because he did not know any of the words and he had tried to appear as if he knew some of the songs, but it was all foreign. Leah had started the singing as a way to ease Geza’s dark mood, and soon they were all singing their hearts out. Lev winced at such earnestness, but he also wanted to sing freely, without feeling fraudulent. Every time he had opened his mouth and hummed along, he felt ashamed, but he also felt ashamed remaining silent. It was no use. He wondered if Leah had noticed how stonily he’d sat beside her rolling voice, which sounded as open as the sky. And then he revisited Josephine’s most recent letter, opened this afternoon, and how she had mentioned, in between a story about Vicki’s stubbornness and the decorations needed for the soldiers’ Christmas pageant, how the members of Granny’s sisterhood had decided to boycott Jewish businesses. But Frau Schiller had just sent quite a generous basket of fruit, bread, and cheese for the soldiers at the station. You know Frau Schiller, she lives on Alte Bahnhofstrasse. We do a lot of shopping at Schillers and we will continue to do so. It was a strange way to end the letter; did she want him to feel reassured that at least she was not boycotting Jewish shops? Or was she trying to say how Schillers would be the exception to the rule, because there were good Jews and bad Jews, just as some cuts of meat were better than others? And then he drifted back to his last conservation with Leah, after all the songs had been sung. She had walked him to the door while the rest of the family still sat on cushions, talking about which goyim might be wearing their coats and hats by now.

  Leah’s mother raised her voice. “Tomorrow that dirty peasant Tola will be wearing my woolen shawl. She’ll be smugly selling apples, and when I pass by, she won’t even feel a prick of shame.”

  On the doorstep, Leah took Lev’s hand in hers—he felt the softness in the middle of her palm, the slight roughness of her fingers—and she started talking about how, when spring came, she would take him to see the going of the ice. She drew closer, her voice low, describing how the river would first break in one place and then the cracks would spread over the surface. Huge blocks of blue-green ice then floated down the river, taking along small trees, even once a dog. “And before you know it, it’s summer,” she whispered, pressing his hand into hers, “and the acacia trees bloom sweet flowers, eight blossoms on each leaf. And the chestnut trees, with their creamy white flowers, so soft and fragrant you’ll want to run your cheek against them. And in the heat, the dust from the roads sticks to your skin, making it look brownish gray. But then we’ll swim and wash it all away.” A sharp wind blew through them, and Lev wetly kissed her chapped knuckles and said yes with his eyes, yes, summer would come, and they would swim and sit together under trees, and he would feel her milky white body under his.

  The electric streetlamps, the color of Josephine’s hair, the sound of his children’s voices, and even the war, faded away. She was the only real thing to him.

  12

  By the end of July 1918, Lev and the rest of the men heard the German advance on the Marne River had failed. They cursed Ferdinand Foch, the victorious Allied commander, they cursed the Americans, and they cursed Ludendorff, who had spoken so highly of the spring and summer offensives, promising they would push through the Hindenburg Line and win the war. By March, men under thirty-five were sent west to replace the wounded and the killed there. When collected for the transports to the Western Front, they chalked on the wagons: Cattle for Slaughter in Flanders and Criminals from the East.

  Late into the night, with his usual audience in attendance at the barracks, Otto opined on the power of the February Revolution worming its way into the hearts of German soldiers. He’d heard that along the quieter stretches of the Eastern Front, Russians and Germans fraternized, and German units began to imitate Russian revolutionaries by organizing a soviet, forming councils to criticize the officers, thinking they had the upper hand, or should have it. Otto cleared his throat. “Mother Russia will overtake us.”

  Someone snickered.

  Lev said, his legs dangling from the cot, “But we don’t notice, too busy leaning over our maps, calculating the distance from here to Germany.”

  A few men sipped their beer.

  Otto kicked a chair out of the way, his hands gesticulating.

  Lev drew in a breath, preparing himself for one of Otto’s monologues, which never failed to entertain and embolden.

  Otto’s voice thundered, “Here we sit, susceptible to various dangers, both known and unknown, as this eastern wilderness encroaches, gaining strength and power over us, many of whom are rear-guard troops, too old, weak, or injured to put up a real fight. The best we can offer is watch duty, or office work. And the moment we’re shipped west, we’ll die at the hands of the French or the English, I promise you.” The men nodded, heavy with liquor, their breath sour.

  “Remember Melsbach,” someone called out. A general chorus of agreement rose up. Melsbach had proclaimed himself a Lithuanian. He fell in love with Domizella, a village girl, and he said returning to Germany meant spiritual death. Two days earlier, he had packed his bags and shot himself in the woods. And then there was the translator, Seidel, the only one able to write in White Ruthenian, who’d slowly, over time, fashioned himself into a White Ruthenian, conversing with local pastors, delving into their native history and songs, which he published in Ober Ost’s bulletin. “His Germanness disintegrated,” Otto said, his tone both severe and mocking, “and he’s been singled out as a traitor with double loyalties. His activity has become”—Otto paused for dramatic effect—“di
fficult to manage.”

  Lev sighed, thinking how poor Seidel had lost his grip on the world. As if I have any sense, Lev thought, a twinge of cold irony washing over him. He was actually worse off than Seidel—at least Seidel knew what he wanted, whereas Lev suffered as if living under a death sentence, the days dwindling down, one by one, to when he would abandon this place. He dreaded it, passively waiting yet tormented by the thought of leaving Leah. To return to what? An unknown wife and unknown children. His wife would pretend to love him again, and he would go along with the pretending because what else could he do? But he felt sure they would be strangers. And as he grew more and more entangled with Leah and her family, he traced and retraced Josephine’s negative qualities, as if this justified his desire for Leah and their fantasies of marrying and moving away … to Palestine, or some other eternally warm place. Leah often joked about how he could sell textiles there just as he’d done in Berlin. Sometimes, he went along with the fantasy, adding that he would grow a beard. She would run her hand along his clean-shaven cheek and say, “A beard would suit you.”

  But then he held Leah’s hands, squeezing them. “My children.”

  And Leah would suddenly stop talking, her whole face flushed with embarrassment. “Of course not. I was only dreaming.” Then she would touch her abdomen because she knew how it felt, to lose children.

  But when Lev sat with Leah and her family at their dinner table, they discussed the preparations for Altke’s wedding, whether the rabbi would lose his voice again—his vocal chords were quite fragile, due to mysterious lesions; and remember, Leah’s mother said worriedly, the raspy way he read the Torah portion last Saturday? Amid all this, Lev revisited Josephine’s frigidity, her superficial letters that told nothing of her feelings for him, her obsessive cleanliness and banal dinner chatter, and her family, who had always hated him.

  Yes, Josephine really was a cold unfeeling wife, or rather, Lev chose only to remember the times when she had acted as such. Fashioning Josephine into this kind of woman made it easier to meet Leah in the deserted hayloft, his heart singing when he saw the red string on the birch branch, readying himself to touch her soft unfolding body. Because Josephine was a supercilious gentile who refused his advances with countless excuses: migraines, stomach cramps, seasonal allergies. “Which is grounds for divorce,” Leah often reminded him.