The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  She sighed, standing back from the mirror, rubbing the rouged lipstick off her lips with the inside of her wrist. She wasn’t allowed to wear makeup during the day. Only streetwalkers did that. But tonight, Elsa would take her to a special club, where she could wear lipstick and her best dress, the one with the golden spangles. Vicki smiled at her reflection again, shaking her head left and right, relishing her new bob. Her auburn hair skimmed just under her earlobes, accentuating the slender flutes of her oblong lapis lazuli earrings. For the first time, the image she carried in her head, of what she wanted to look like, coincided with the image before her.

  Two days ago, she had gone up to the roof of Elsa’s apartment building, where yellowing grass sprouted up in haphazard patches. The two girls often met here on Thursdays to listen to records and study Elite, a fashion magazine, imagining themselves in a zeppelin-printed dress or shimmering evening gown. Vicky had met Elsa in a drawing class where Elsa was the model. Vicki had sketched her long, bracingly white back for more than an hour, impressed by Elsa’s stillness. She’d only moved once, to brush away a lock of hair from her faintly open mouth. By day, Elsa worked as a typist in a large office with other typists. She claimed she could still hear the staccato sound of the keys ringing in her ears, and sometimes, at night in bed, her fingers moved of their own accord, striking at the keys. Which was how she became an insomniac. She went out to clubs and cafés, smoke-filled music halls and cabarets, bars and opium dens, cellars and rented rooms where clandestine entertainment was offered to those who wanted something a little different. She’d been to the Resi and the Josty, which made the best Turkish coffee to treat hangovers, the Femina, the Aleifa, the Eldorado, the Oh La La, and the Mikado Bar, best for transvestites. But bisexuals had the most fun, according to Elsa. She’d said this to shock Vicki, who wasn’t all that shocked, knowing Elsa had an ex-boyfriend who worked at Siemens, building generators for power plants, and that she was still hung up on him. She knew Elsa only ate rice pudding sprinkled with a little sugar and cinnamon for dinner because she worried about her figure, and that she read Die Rote Fahne religiously. Even knowing this, Vicki felt pangs of jealousy whenever Elsa described the little lanterns flickering in the Tiergarten, the cigarette lighters illuminating beautiful young faces for a quick instant before velvety night enveloped them again, the warm air throbbing with a sense of expectancy as they discussed Rilke, Picasso, whether or not marriage was compatible with modern life, whether it was wise or foolish to commit suicide, whether sunbathing produced a greater clarity of mind.

  Vicki waited for Elsa on the roof, wondering if she would be late again, as Elsa was often late and disheveled, but in a sumptuous, alluring way. Rolling her silk stockings down her legs, Vicki looked out at the brick chimneys sprouting from the tops of the buildings, a staggering line of them as far as she could see, and she noticed how on the next rooftop, stray newspapers and gum wrappers littered the dying grass. Down below in the darkened courtyard, a boy yelled. Vicki glanced over the ledge; a group of children hovered behind an ice wagon, and a boy held up a block of ice while the others tried to touch it. “Get back, get back,” he shouted. “It’s mine.” It was awful, Vicki thought, the need in his voice, as if it could all be taken away from him in an instant. The sun warmed her bare legs. She sighed, wondering about the time, and wondering if the Reds were indeed gaining ground as Papa said, and wondering which record Elsa would bring today. Leaning back on her elbows, Vicki absently studied the fluttering red flag hanging from the next apartment window; on it was the hammer and sickle. She didn’t see this flag much in her neighborhood because, as Papa joked, they were the rich capitalists, and it would be quite unwise to advertise their own destruction.

  When Elsa finally arrived, twenty minutes late, she brought a phonograph and planted it between them. Elsa also brought Vicki a handful of blue grapes wrapped in brown paper. “Apologies for my lateness.” She grinned, popping one into her mouth.

  The two girls sprawled on the grass, the blades tickling the backs of their knees. The grapes nested between them, and when Vicki reached for a grape, her hand skimmed Elsa’s slim cool fingers, sending a slight rush through her wrist, up her arm.

  “Something new today.” Elsa balanced a record between her flat palms.

  Vicki turned her head, shielding her eyes from the sun. “What’s that?”

  Elsa raised an eyebrow and then put the record on the phonograph. A deep husky voice began to sing in French, about lovely things.

  “Her voice is as rich as Sarotti chocolate,” Vicki said, admiring the lines of Elsa’s swanlike neck, which was sporadically splashed with a spray of rust-colored freckles. She knew Elsa hated her freckles and often used powder to cover them up, but Vicki thought they were pretty little additions.

  “Josephine Baker,” Elsa replied. “She’s really got it.”

  “It?”

  “Sex appeal.” Elsa said this with a fatal air, as if it were the most essential thing in the world.

  Stories below them, a policeman blew his high-pitched whistle and a woman shouted. Vicki didn’t dare look over the ledge this time. In the working-class district where Elsa lived, there was always commotion and fighting on the streets. And Vicki didn’t want to appear too curious or naive about such a place. Elsa often teased her about her posh upbringing, saying that she was out of touch with the proletariat, that soon there would be a revolution, and didn’t she want to be on the right side of history?

  Vicki tugged on the dry yellow grass. She’d been inside Elsa’s flat a few times. She lived in Mietskaserne, a six-story housing block built around a maze of internal courtyards. Out-of-work men leaned against walls, smoking. The toilet was on the second level, and Vicki didn’t like to use it because it was shared. She didn’t want Elsa to know, so last time she waited until she got home, her bladder almost exploding.

  “Hey V,” Elsa said, interrupting her thoughts, “I’ve got an idea.” She called her V because, as she explained when they first met, it sounded more modern, more androgynous.

  Vicki pulled her knees into her chest. Elsa often had ideas that were not wholly acceptable, ideas that, if her mother knew about them, would cause her to consider Vicki a stranger. Last week, Elsa had convinced her to skinny dip in the murky green waters of the Wannsee, and when they were both underwater, Elsa had twined her legs round Vicki’s waist and the brush of her pubic hair had rubbed up against Vicki’s abdomen. Vicki blushed, thinking about it.

  “I think,” Elsa said, on all fours, crawling toward Vicki, “you need to create a change.”

  With Elsa’s smiling face inches away from hers, Vicki noticed how the blue grapes had slightly stained Elsa’s lips and how she smelled of cotton and sweat and cigarettes.

  “You don’t like my clothes?” Vicki glanced down at her sundress, muslin yellow with a scalloped hem.

  Elsa suppressed a laugh, suddenly brandishing a pair of sewing scissors. “Bubikopf—you must.”

  Vicki gasped. “You know I can’t.”

  Elsa steadied her eyes on Vicki. “Frau von Stressing Perlmutter will understand.”

  Her mother, with an equally long weighty braid, would not understand. The way her mother used to dress, like a historical object! Laced in corsets, covered to the neck in pleated cloth, layered in skirts and petticoats that made her every movement and motion artificial, her mother now seemed baffled without the security of all that clothing. She was sheepishly exposed, surprised by how the new silk shifts merely floated over her figure. Sometimes, Vicki would find her mother before the looking glass in a new dress cut to the knee, the fabric diaphanous and light, with an expression similar to the one Mitzi the dog wore after getting a summer shave: bewildered, mystified, self-conscious.

  Elsa touched the back of her neck, and Vicki instantly felt deliciously calm and pliant.

  She uncoiled Vicki’s braid. As her fingers worked her hair loose, she scolded Vicki. “You’ve been wearing it back like this, pretending it’s short, w
hen all you have to do is cut it.”

  “I know,” Vicki said, breathless, the sun suddenly too hot, sweat trickling down the sides of her torso, under her slip. She inhaled sharply. The cool metal scissor blade pressed against her neck as Elsa cut off a chunk of hair.

  “See?” Elsa said, shaking a fist full of chestnut strands.

  Vicki stared, recalling her mother’s advice about how a woman’s hair was a prized possession.

  “Almost done,” Elsa announced, clipping off the last chunk.

  Vicki’s hair fell around them, scattered on the grass, gleaming in the sunlight.

  She bent back her head, turning her face up to the sun, suppressing the fear of going home. She shook her head left and right. Weightless.

  Elsa whispered, “Don’t you like it?”

  She faced Elsa, fingering the thick edge of her hair, where it ended now. “I think so.”

  “You didn’t do this for me, did you?” Elsa’s eyes narrowed, as if such obedience was worse than refusal.

  “Oh, no,” Vicki said, her breath catching in her throat. Although in part, she had.

  Elsa smoothed down Vicki’s hair, running her palms along her temples. “Well, you have it now.” When she said it her chin jutted forward, challenging Vicki to accept this new gift.

  Vicki grinned. “Sex appeal.” On a nearby roof, two pigeons cooed.

  Elsa laughed, throwing back her head, a movement Vicki had tried to emulate countless times alone in front of the mirror.

  She languished on the grass, puffing on her cigarette. “It looks good.” Then she added, “Don’t worry about your mother.”

  “I’m not worried,” Vicki said.

  Walking home, Vicki pulled down her straw hat, as if any one of the nameless pedestrians would instinctively know she’d just cut it all off and scold her. But no one noticed. Maybe if she took off her hat? She pulled on the brim, her heart accelerating. What would it feel like to walk these streets with her new hair, her neck bare in the wind, an open invitation to be touched and kissed there? She passed street merchants selling their wares and noticed a woman with so much hair on her head, piled high in twisted coils, it must have survived since the last century. She passed a number of streets under construction. They were digging up the roads again, the steam of hot asphalt offensive. The facade of buildings had been reduced to wooden scaffolding, and she failed to recall what was here before. She walked at a clipped pace, humming with an internal nervousness every time she felt the breeze sweep over her neck. Off the main street, she caught sight of a sign: RUNS REPAIRED. She’d pricked her stockings on the roof with Elsa, the silk catching on her ring. She looked down at her thigh, her white skin gleaming through the run, almost insolently. Why should she fix it? What was the point of this constant fixing and washing and straightening that occupied her mother to no end? No, Vicki thought, she wasn’t going to be like that. Not ever. She pulled off her hat, glancing around, ready to challenge anyone. But no one cared.

  Vicki arrived home earlier than she’d intended, too early to avoid her mother, who was in the sitting room, probably working on her needlepoint or reading over sheet music. Every time she came through the front door, she felt as if she was entering an antiquated domain: the frieze of grapes above the kitchen door, the sculpture of two naked Greek youths in the alcove along the hallway, the stained-glass window above the staircase throwing patterns of red, purple, and green light over the dark wood paneling. Vicki used to delight in the odd objects her mother preserved in the glass cabinet: an English doll dressed in taffeta, a bridal wreath from the eighteenth century spun from the finest silk, a tobacco box carved out of rose quartz, family portraits of women with curled powdered hair and delicate rose-colored lips, those carved and lacquered figurines, mostly little dogs, from Josephine’s mother, Marie. Entering the living room, she caught sight of herself in the glass cabinet, her hair brazenly short, especially when her startled expression overlapped the English doll’s placid face.

  Her mother didn’t bother to look up from her needlepoint. Vicki still had a few suspended seconds to dash out of the room, but something kept her feet planted on the plush carpet.

  “Vicki,” her mother paused, making a tiny loophole and stringing the needle and thread through it. “Are you going out again before dinner?”

  Vicki held her breath.

  Josephine slowly looked up.

  Vicki heard the distinct tick of the grandfather clock. Mitzi stirred at Josephine’s feet, realizing something was amiss.

  Blood rushed to Josephine’s face.

  “I wanted to. I’ve wanted to for a long time, and today Elsa finally helped me cut it.” Her voice sounded more confident, more even and smooth than she’d anticipated, and she felt, instead of fear, a rising triumph.

  “Elsa,” her mother said darkly.

  “Yes, Elsa.”

  “Oh my God,” her mother said, touching her forehead.

  With the blinds drawn in the semidarkness, the room felt oppressive, the heat thick.

  “She’s the stenographer. Do you want to look like a stenographer?”

  “And what do stenographers look like?” Vicki said, crossing the room. She leaned against the window, yanking the curtain aside.

  “Don’t,” Josephine warned. “Letting in the light only heats the room more.”

  Vicki shook the curtain. Dust particles rose up. She thought about how her mother still slept in an old four-poster bed a la duchesse. How she probably still wore a nightcap and night gloves. How she’d found a copy of An Ideal Marriage under a pillow in the sitting room—a sex and marriage manual claiming to cure “sexual misery,” a state her mother had surely brought upon herself. You couldn’t solve sexual problems with a book! Just uttering the word sex would drive her mother screaming from the house.

  Josephine snapped shut her needle case. “You’re only fashioning yourself into a Ypsi.” Ypsi was shorthand for the type of girl whose greatest fear was to appear unmodern even if the new styles didn’t suit her. Especially to Josephine, such a woman, in addition to the bobbed hair, had that ridiculous fringe hanging just above the eyebrows, constantly tempting someone to part it, as if it was a curtain that, once swept aside, would only reveal a pale sweaty forehead. Ypsi meant fastidious dieting in an attempt to appear as slim as Louise Brooks when sadly, she never would be, while smoking too many cigarettes and saying she never wanted children when she’d really love to have them. Vicki often heard her mother bemoan the new fashions to Marthe, complaining how the other day she saw a stocky girl parading around in the shortest shift with such bulging calves that it was tragic.

  Josephine edged off the sofa, lowering her voice. “You are a pretty girl, Vicki. But since the war—”

  “I know,” Vicki interrupted. “Since the war, women look artificially thin. And romance is nowhere to be found, with men propositioning women on the streets, and such short dresses interrupt the line of the leg, and so many girls with pitiful stocky legs tramp around in their short dresses and short haircuts—it’s a real shame!”

  “It is a shame,” Josephine said, observing her coldly.

  “What’s a shame?” Lev called out in his jovial tone, the front door slamming behind him. His whistle echoed in the foyer. He took a moment to hang his hat, and in this interval, Josephine flashed Vicki a stern look. Lev walked into the living room, his hands in his pockets, curious about the latest domestic drama. His eyes, light and joyful, rested on Vicki’s face. He’d caught some sun, his cheeks rosy against his olive complexion. They exchanged a secret smile, and then Lev turned to Josephine. “Well? What’s the problem?”

  Josephine smoothed down her dress. “Just look at your daughter’s hair.”

  Lev turned around, studied Vicki for a moment, his hand on his chin, trying to suppress another smile, and then he turned back to Josephine. “Yes, I see what you mean. It does appear a bit shorter than it was this morning.”

  Josephine kneaded her palm into her forehead. “You don’
t understand the implications.”

  “Let’s have some lemonade. Vicki, open a window!”

  Vicki yanked back the curtains and unlatched the window latch. Sticking her head all the way out, she enjoyed a brief reprieve. At least her father understood.

  Her parents started to argue. Vicki observed the linden trees, thinking it was always a shame after they’d just been pruned. They looked so Spartan. But pruning helped them grow. She heard her mother’s voice, rising and tightening: “It’s not at all womanly. She looks like a prepubescent boy. And they’ve started slicking back their hair, cutting it shorter, without even a curl or a wave to it.”

  Her father, soothing her mother, probably with his hand on her shoulder, said, “On Leipziger Strasse, I saw some very elegant women with short haircuts.”

  Josephine sighed. “Next, she won’t want to get married because it’s not modern enough.”

  Vicki left the window and came up behind her father, removing a piece of lint from his jacket. “I never said I didn’t want to get married. You understand, don’t you, Papa?”

  Lev took her hand. “You should have consulted Mutti first.”

  They both looked at Josephine, who now lay on the sofa, her hand over her eyes.

  He motioned for Vicki to follow him out of the room. Once in the foyer, he pulled her aside, speaking softly. “At Wertheim’s, I noticed some dangling earrings that would go nicely with your short hair.”

  “Could I really get them?”

  He nodded.

  She flung her arms around his neck, and the familiar scent of coffee mixed with nicotine along with his citrus aftershave comforted her. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she chanted.

  15

  Berlin, Friday, June 10, 1927

  It was stifling hot. Lev skipped out of the office for the rest of the afternoon. Summer in Berlin was his favorite season to wander the streets without any particular aim, especially on a Friday, the city exhaling relief. He smiled to himself as he watched people sweat in their three-piece suits and summer hats, all of them intent on arriving at the next appointment, but to him they looked as if they marched in place, their resolute strides futile and comic.