The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  “Well, yes,” Lev said, “in Jewish law, this is true.”

  “Is there any other law?” she asked, a slight smile on her lips because she knew Lev came from a place where Jewish laws appeared antiquated, arbitrary. Perhaps even meaningless.

  But then Lev, feeling a sudden onslaught of guilt, would rejoin, “We were not such a good match. I shouldn’t blame her for everything.”

  And Leah, sensing it more beneficial to appear generous to this phantom of a wife, replied, “Poor matches are poor matches. We shouldn’t blame anyone for it.”

  “No, we shouldn’t,” Lev would repeat, and then, as if they had washed off his guilt together, he would touch her body slowly, starting at the nape of her neck, uncoiling her beautiful black braid, his palms cupping her gently rounded shoulders, her full smooth breasts, and the swell of her abdomen and the curve of her hips all fell under his command, as if he was molding her from clay.

  He marveled at the wet darkness of her sex, how liquid and open she felt, even when he only brushed her there with his fingers. Even when his hand just rested there, dark heat radiated from her coarse hair. When he straddled her, she gazed up at him with an open guileless expression and guided his fingers into her mouth, the same fingers that had only seconds before been inside her, and she sucked on his dirty fingers with an air of contentment he did not think possible. With this small gesture, she made her desire so explicitly understood that he dove into her with such force she emitted a yelp of surprise. To reassure him it was pleasure and not pain she felt, she folded her legs around his waist, her thighs open and yielding. Lev watched in disbelief when her eyelids fluttered closed, her body tense and attuned to his smallest movements as she frantically clutched his chest, his shoulders, sighing and heaving and twisting as if he was tormenting her, but when he asked in a whisper if he should stop, she shook her head violently and pleaded, “Don’t. Stop.”

  Worried and mystified, he obeyed. Suddenly, at what seemed a crucial moment, her back arched and her limbs trembled, as if she hovered over a dark precipice, and some untrammeled force swallowed her whole. After a few suspended moments—Lev watched her intently; her face contorted, her breathing grew shallow, and she made sounds that reminded him of a small wounded animal—she collapsed, turned her head to the side, and smiled. Then she whispered, somewhat ruefully, “Thank you.”

  When Lev asked Leah about this, she shrugged and said the act of orgasm was as necessary for women as it was for men. She added it was healthy and good for the complexion, as if it was just one more feat the body could perform. Then she planted a perfunctory kiss on his amazed forehead and began braiding her lustrous hair back into its tame plait.

  Though it had happened many times since, her body’s extreme reaction still took Lev by surprise because he had never seen a woman behave this way. Before Josephine, he knew a few girls, Jewish girls from his old neighborhood who let him kiss and fondle them, but when he forayed under their stockings and petticoat layers, they merely laughed, throwing back their long necks, because the idea of sexual relations before a marriage promise was unthinkable. “Oh Lev,” he remembered Eva Bauer saying halfheartedly, her young face flushed with excitement, “you don’t really care about painting my portrait after all!” When he called on her again, she gave no reply. So at sixteen, he surrendered to what many other young men did and went to a prostitute. She was old, nearly thirty, with dark hair and startling white skin. Coarse black hairs encircled her nipples, and it disgusted him, but in the end, he managed, despite the way she stared at him blankly, her lips curved into a half smile. He had believed the female orgasm was some mythological state, some exaggerated tale men attributed to certain women who were anatomically gifted or oversexed, but now that he experienced it on a regular basis with Leah, who was just a country woman, who sold maize at the market and lovingly ran her fingers through his hair, who told stories of village gossip, Josephine grew into even more of an oddity. In his mind’s eye, Josephine’s face turned paler, anemic, and withered down to brittle bone whereas Leah’s body grew more and more luxuriant, hot to the touch.

  With summer ending, Lev noticed how the other soldiers grew restless. They sang songs about unmarked graves awaiting them in the Russian forests, about the Bolsheviks cutting their throats in retaliation for the harsh terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, about being sent off to the Western Front in their already broken state, too weak or too old to fight the French. Lev listened to these songs at night in his cot, contemplating the blue smoke of his cigarette as it traveled up into the air. He did not sing along because the sound of his voice embarrassed him. He was content to listen in the darkness. In this way, he could be in agreement with their despair, while at the same time he inwardly criticized their flair for the dramatic, how they shouted and moaned over imminent death, when this had always been the case. Sometimes at night, when everyone was singing and drinking, Otto would come up to Lev’s bunk and rest his chin on the mattress. He’d whisper that their only option was desertion. “During the train ride through Germany, we jump off”—his two fingers galloped along the edge of Lev’s cot—“and home we’ll be.”

  “We’ll die doing it.”

  Otto grinned. “We’ll die if we don’t do it.” He propped his lit cigarette on Lev’s boot. “Two thousand men due for transport mutinied in Kharkov.”

  Lev rested on his elbows. “The other option is we stay here.” He resisted adding how he had thought of it many times, beginning a new life with Leah. But the impossibility of this had recently been cemented by a piece of recent news: Leah’s husband was not dead. She had long believed he’d died in the Carpathian Mountains, in the winter of 1915, near the Polish town of Tarnów. That had been the story told by Altke’s fiancé, Slotnik, whose brother Misha had served in the infantry division with Leah’s husband against the Austro-Hungarian army. According to Misha, Leah’s husband had slipped and fallen to his death while they advanced across the rocky peaks. But Misha famously exaggerated facts, and the veracity of his letter had been brought into question by a recent sighting. The pharmacist’s wife had a cousin in Novgorod who saw Leah’s husband drinking in a tavern with some officers of the Red Army. Apparently he had defected from the czarist army and was now with the Reds, as most of the peasants were. He looked alive and well, his eyes flashing as they always had, his reddish hair rakish and long, flowing from under his army cap. The cousin wrote that he was drunk and cursing, toasting to the new Russia with his comrades. The cousin believed he would return home soon, to Mitau, because the war was ending and Russia was now a free state.

  After the pharmacist’s wife had read this letter, she ran with unprecedented speed to Leah’s house, the letter clenched in her sweaty hand. No matter it was early evening, and Leah and her family were just settling down for dinner. When she burst through the door, her shrill voice, in a mixture of triumph and panic, announced that Leah’s husband was coming home. This had occurred five days ago, and since then, Leah existed in a state of high agitation. She asked Lev the same questions over and over again: How did the cousin know it was Zalman for sure? Many Russians had red hair—he couldn’t possibly base his evidence on this. And Zalman did not enjoy drinking, another reason why the cousin might be wrong. And what about Misha’s letter? Although Misha did not actually see Zalman die with his own eyes, the timing of Misha’s letter was precisely when Zalman’s letters stopped arriving, indicating Zalman’s death. How could such timing be mere coincidence? But the last question, which continuously haunted her, was this: How could she have felt so sure of his death and now be wrong? She repeated, as if in a trance, “In dreams, I saw the Angel of Death myself, and he told me Zalman died along the mountain range, that snowy November.”

  When Leah consulted her father on this, as he was a Talmudic scholar, he recalled such a passage in the Gemara about the Angel of Death making a mistake. The rebbe drew a labored sigh and explained that in the story heard by Rabbi Bibi bar Abaye, who was often visited by the Angel of
Death, a nurse by the name of Miriam had mistakenly been taken instead of a hairdresser by the same name. So the nurse was brought back and exchanged for the hairdresser. Then the rebbe brought the tips of his slender bluish fingers together and shrugged, indicating this must be the case with Zalman.

  Amid her fretting and worrying, Leah revealed a few details about her husband, details Lev greedily collected regarding her former life. Zalman had fiendishly red hair and green eyes as narrow as those of a fox. He was bowlegged and he suffered from indigestion. His feet sported painful bunions, and she often had to massage almond oil into the big red lumps. Days passed, sometimes weeks, when he refused to get out of bed. When Lev asked why, Leah said that melancholia, a black bile, would seize him. She had tried everything to help him, even laying tefillin on his weaker arm as a reminder of God’s holy words, which was said to relieve those in his condition, but the only remedy was time passing. After ten days, he would sunnily jump out of bed as if nothing had happened and resume his work at the tannery. But Leah knew it was only a matter of time until it would happen again. Just before the war, the periods between his bouts of melancholy grew shorter and shorter. She feared that soon the darkness would eclipse him. “It’s because I couldn’t give him a child. At least that’s what he always said. He said he was stuck with a barren woman for a wife, the worst kind of luck. Then he would laugh bitterly about never having a son to call his own.” When she explained this, her eyes welled up, and she appeared weaker, more breakable, as if her bones had instantaneously thinned. “He accused me of withholding this precious thing from him—a child—as if I meant to do so. As if I did not suffer as much as he suffered. As if it was a contest of suffering and he always the victor.” And then she broke into long inconsolable sobs. Lev held her in his arms, felt her quaking body, and so badly wanted to rescue her from this Zalman, this fiendish red-haired demon who was surely riding back to Mitau within the fortnight, licking his lips, anticipating a triumphant return full of carnage and bloody revenge in which he would kill, with the help of his comrades, White Russians, Germans, Austrians, shifty landowners, disloyal peasants, anarchists from the Black Army, and anyone else who stood in his way. Lev couldn’t help imagining Zalman’s face: the green slanted eyes, the unshaven beard, the pointy chin and greasy hairline, the flecks of blood that peppered his cheekbones from some recent pillaging.

  Otto shook the metal bedpost, which momentarily dissipated the image of Zalman’s bloodthirsty smile. “Lev—are you listening? If we stay here, we’ll only get slaughtered by the Reds.” Then he added, “The Bolsheviks have begun their advance, attacking our positions at Narva, northeast of here.”

  “Yes, I heard that,” Lev said, rubbing his eyes.

  “Where did you hear this? I thought it was only a rumor.”

  Lev tensed at the uncharacteristic alarm in Otto’s voice. “Yesterday, in the officers’ mess hall.” He waited for Otto to ask what he’d been doing there—and he would probably tell him the truth. He’d been stealing provisions for Leah and her family because they were slowly starving. All the locals were, whereas the officers let food rot and crops go bad while they drank their coffee and cognac, the surplus evident on their well-fed faces and in their wide girths.

  Otto stubbed out his cigarette against the bottom of Lev’s boot. He came closer to Lev, and Lev noticed the sweat on his brow, the ingrown hairs of his beard, how his eyes narrowed. Again, Lev was reminded of Zalman. He shook his head, as if to shake off the menacing apparition of this imaginary face that he himself had created.

  Otto whispered, “Officers are deserting their troops in the north, fleeing for Germany. And men are burning their uniforms, selling off military horses, selling anything they can get their hands on.”

  Lev inhaled the strong scent of schnapps from Otto’s breath, debating whether or not he should tell him about Reval, the German base on the Gulf of Finland. The soldiers there had sold off nearly all the seaplanes and gasoline they had been guarding.

  Otto palmed Lev a few damp cigarettes, and before departing, he again galloped two fingers along the edge of Lev’s cot.

  Lev tried to sleep to the sound of other men’s breathing and tried to concern himself with what they would do if the treaty was annulled and the Reds returned or if they were transported west, but he only thought of Leah. He wanted to know what she was thinking at every moment, what she was doing now. He imagined she might be washing her feet in the kitchen, in the bucket filled with hot water and mint leaves, or she might be helping her sister with the wedding preparations, taking preserves out of the cellar and choosing the best ones for the feast. Or she might be braiding her wet hair into a thick plait, as she often did after a bath, so it didn’t get in the way, only to wait for Lev to unravel it. The dampness of her hair through his fingers, the smell of bark in the strands, the feel of her cool neck under his palm—it had been five days since they’d met at the barn. Five eternal days! Yesterday he waited for her behind the abandoned farmhouse, but she never came, too upset, he assumed, by the recent news. But because of the red ribbon fluttering in the warm wind, he waited in the dusty heat, smoking, unable to tear himself away from the post lest she arrive at the last minute, out of breath, full of apologies. The agony of the wait would make their reunion even sweeter as he anticipated the run of his tongue through her mouth, the way she clung to him and whispered affectionate nicknames into his neck. He turned onto his side, his face to the wall, moving his hand under his drawers. Another man, a few cots over, sighed and grunted an ejaculatory grunt. Someone else swore in his sleep, banging his leg against the iron cot rail. Lev closed his eyes, seeing the shape and swell of her breasts, tasting the taste of her—a mix of sweat and wheat.

  That night Lev suffered from dark swirling dreams. Zalman returned to Mitau in the form of a satyr; his red beard flowed down to his groin, and he pranced the cobblestoned streets on hooved feet, the sound of which echoed through each and every house. When Zalman found Leah, he dragged her by the hair through the apple orchards. He dragged her and she screamed and screamed, crying for Lev. When Lev heard her screams, he followed the distant sounds, but he could not find her. Every street abruptly ended in a stone wall littered with garbage. Every forest empty of Leah. He could only hear her cries and follow them, as if Zalman demonically led him into some dark trap. When Lev woke, sweat soaked the front of his shirt. He rubbed his eyes and touched the thin sheet and felt his arms. The reassurance that he was physically here, in his army cot among sleeping comrades, did nothing to smooth out the sharp terror spreading through him, as if someone had injected the remnants of that poisonous dream into his veins.

  The following Thursday, Leah’s sister, Altke, got married—the marriage had to take place on a Thursday because widows always remarried on Thursdays. Her husband had been dead more than seven years, and everyone agreed she was still a young woman, despite her limp. Zlotnik, short, with a patchy beard, and lacking in Talmudic scholarship, had courted her not only because she came from a respected family, but because she had already borne a son, Geza, her fertility proven. Lev’s presence at the wedding went unquestioned. He had become part son, part brother, and in terms of Leah, part husband to the family, and they accepted him without ever saying so. They invited him to Sabbath meals, asked after his health, mended his clothes, and overlooked the fact that Leah had fallen in love with him. Lev had often taken Geza shooting for birds, and on these long walks, Geza told him about leaving Mitau, about the girls he liked, about how he couldn’t care less for his studies because none of it would matter soon, despite what his grandfather thought. When Lev asked him about Leah’s husband, Geza would shrug and politely say he did not remember much. Leah’s mother would even go so far as to criticize Zalman. She complained that he had picked his teeth after meals, having the manners of a farm animal, and that he did not bathe properly, until Leah would interrupt and say, “Do not speak ill of the dead.” To Lev, these were wonderful words, the way she had assumed his death so
easily, as if he had been dead many years when now he might return any day.

  Lev walked behind the groom’s party as they made their way to the bride’s home, trailed by musicians playing a mournful waltz. The sun sat low and heavy in the trees. People had locked up early. A few stragglers hurried out of the public bathhouse, their cheeks rosy from the steam. Candles blazed in the windows overlooking the alleys, lanes, and streets leading to the schulhof, where the wedding canopy stood, draped in white muslin that rose and fell with the breeze. Water carriers and the poor stationed themselves along the road for the wedding procession. Zlotnik, nervous and dazed, sported a smudge of black ash on his forehead, a reminder of the Temple’s destruction. Lev blended into the families that poured out of houses, dressed in their finest clothing, and yet he imagined he was the one getting married, anticipating the sight of Leah veiled in white. The pressing throng irritated him; a man stepped on his heel and a small child clung to his pant leg, peering up at him with a runny nose before realizing Lev was not his father. An old woman said something to him he didn’t understand. She smiled, toothless.

  Last night Otto had told him they would be transported west in two days, but no one knew for sure. Lev tried to imagine telling Leah this, but all the possible combinations of words and sentences sounded callous.

  The melody of the klezmorim swelled to a frenzied pitch as the procession neared Leah’s house, and in front of the house, Altke awkwardly sat on an elaborately decorated chair positioned on top of an upside-down trough covered with a brightly woven rug. Lev heard a woman whisper, “She looks like a horse.” Another woman agreed, and added that her jaw was too big for her face, her hair had the same coarseness as a horse’s tail. Altke gazed out at the crowd, her liquid eyes listless and uncomprehending. “She has a limp,” someone added, his hot breath sweeping over Lev’s neck. “I saw her walking fine,” a man countered. Lev strained to see Leah, who stood with a group of women behind the trough. He only saw her dark hair catching the sun and the green silk scarf fluttering around her face. The man added, “Her sister’s the real beauty.”