The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  Only one thing was not simple: the envelope sewn into his threadbare jacket. Inside the envelope was a letter from his aunt Leah for Lev Perlmutter. She had asked, just before he left Mitau two years ago, that if he made it to Berlin, he must find Lev Perlmutter and give him the letter. She had not really asked him. She had thrust the letter into his hands and demanded it. She had learned to read and write for this very purpose. It had taken her a year. “If you find him, give it to him,” she had said, her face clouded with urgency. “Promise me,” she insisted. Geza promised.

  He carried this promise around his neck like a stone, even though he knew where Lev lived. He knew Lev’s house in Charlottenburg with the blue door and the brass handle and the white lilies lining the pathway. He had seen the stately brick mailbox, a little house unto itself inside the low garden wall, into which he could easily slip the letter. But he had not done it.

  That day in March, when he went to deliver the letter, he hovered outside the garden wall, watching for the right moment to dispense with it. He wanted to complete the task, as he found romantic entanglements such as these distasteful. Just then, the front door opened. Geza shivered in his white shirt and watched Lev skip down his steps, whistling a popular tune. He looked healthy and rich, smoking a cigarette, wearing an expensive fedora. About to turn away, Geza saw a young woman laughing and calling after Lev. The sound of her voice, as melodious as a little bell, entranced him. She wore a knit cap molded to the shape of her perfect head. Sunlight bounced off the crisp white fabric of her dress. Her long dark hair streamed down her back, and there was something intelligent and daring about her, despite how she still wore her hair long. Perhaps it was the way she teased her father or the way her agile movements gave the impression of lightness, fluttering before him like a skylark.

  He couldn’t stop looking at her.

  She teased Lev, motioning to his bowtie, and they laughed. Then Lev took her arm and they made their way down the stone path.

  Geza darted out of view, hiding behind one of the massive oak trees lining the street. After a few moments, a woman and a young man also emerged from the house. He concluded the woman, also in white, must be Lev’s wife. She held her head high and wore an elaborate hat with feathers and pearls in it. The hat reminded him of an ostrich. The boy sulked and she tried to comfort him. Geza thought it was strange, how this boy, who was nearly a man, acted as if someone had taken away his toys. City life must make men soft, he thought. The mother and son walked behind Lev and his daughter. Clutching the letter, Geza trailed the family down the street for a few blocks. He tried to catch what the girl was saying, to know more about her, but he couldn’t hear the exact words. Only the golden sound of her voice washed over him.

  Leah’s letter was still sewn into his coat pocket, even now, as he walked to the Prussian State Library with a few sheets of loose paper under his arm. He might write to his mother and reassure her all was well. Or he might let his mind wander in the vast octagonal reading room. So quiet and still, the reading room provided relief from the tumult of the boardinghouse, with cigar smoke lingering on the furniture, the running children and their mothers shouting after them.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Geza noticed a woman leap over a puddle, and the lightness in her step reminded him of the girl he had seen that day, when he almost dropped off Leah’s letter. Almost. But when he had his chance, after Lev and his family rounded the corner, he chose not to. Lev had looked comfortable in his life—and his beautiful daughter adored him. Despite his promise to Leah, Geza also thought such a letter, whatever its contents, might ruin this family. And then what? What did Leah want from Lev after all this time? The simple act of dropping her letter in Lev’s mailbox would involve Geza in more tumult, more tears, more separation when the world with its Great War had already had enough of this. No, Geza had decided, I won’t do it. I’ll wait at least and see. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, but it felt like enough to walk away with the letter still in his possession, convinced he had somehow helped the young girl with the ringing voice in her white dress, a sight of beauty he would otherwise never have seen.

  18

  Berlin, Friday, June 10, 1927

  When Vicki woke up the next morning, the house felt strangely quiet. Her father must have left for work already, her mother sequestered in one of the numerous rooms of the house where less heat could reach her, and Franz had jaunted off to one of those nature hikes in the woods. She couldn’t think of anything less appealing than sleeping in a pitched tent and praising the merits of vegetarianism over an open fire. She dressed, grinning at herself in the mirror. Yes, it was still short. Nothing had changed overnight. Grabbing her watch, she paused, contemplating the time. Late: already nine. She should have been at the library by now, studying for her foreign language exams. Evil exams, forcing her to sit still in a silent room with other silent students, their spines curled into question marks, squinting at dusty fine print, when outside she could hear the activity of summer humming. The humming seeped into her blood, made her heart beat faster, made her arms swing along when she walked, appreciative of her youth at this particular moment in time. At least she would have the walk there before shutting herself away in the somber, gray stone Prussian State Library, sitting for hours in the octagonal reading room, the tables and chairs arranged around a weak circle of sunlight filtering through the dome.

  She ran down the stairs, her hand gliding along the wooden banister. Marthe heard her from the kitchen and called out to ask if she wanted coffee.

  “Can’t. I’m late.”

  “At least take a roll!”

  Fixing her hat at the bottom of the stairs, Vicki hollered, “No time!”

  On Friedrichstrasse, little white flyers fell from the sky. Vicki caught one descending, and glancing over it—some right-wing group pushing their candidate for the elections—she let it fall from her fingers. There were always elections, parties forming and dissolving and forming again. It didn’t matter to her. What mattered was the larger than life Marta Eggerth painted on the side of a building, smiling down on all those little flyers, her ruby lips, her pencil-thin eyebrows, her shorter than short hair. Vicki cut through the crowds of men in their suits and hats, some of them standing still, reading the flyer. Two girls chatted while riding their bicycles, and Vicki recognized them from French class. She admired the crocheted white beret one of the girls wore. Wondering where she’d bought it, maybe at Tietz’s, Vicki leapt over a small puddle and, feeling more sprightly than usual, cleared it by a good meter.

  She approached the library, staring up at the hulking stone structure, the imposing columns, the front blanketed with flowering ivy that would turn reddish brown in a few months. When she entered, the hushed quiet and the sight of other people working away at desks, the lit-up lamps giving off an air of studiousness and concentration, settled her mind. She knew her way around the interlocking rooms without giving it a thought, arriving at her spot, the great reading room with its odd octagonal shape. Sitting down in the third row from the center point of the room, there were two more rows of people in front of her, a necessary distraction, while at the same time, many more rows extended behind her. Shuffling papers, books opening and closing, someone furtively unwrapping a sandwich, an errant whisper—the din of work and study made Vicki feel less alone, as if she wasn’t the only one stuck inside on a Friday, when she knew others were swimming and lounging on blankets and laughing their heads off.

  Don’t think about it, she commanded, reaching into her leather satchel for A Student’s Guide to French Language and Literature. Was it essential she read Flaubert in the original? Did Madame Bovary care one way or another? Her father always said he regretted not learning French, wasting his time on Latin and Greek. Before opening the book, she glanced around at her reading companions. At the next desk, a girl leafed through BIZ (Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung), scrutinizing a German film star smiling in the California sun; the next page showed the Egyptian pyramids from
the air. Two middle-aged men in front of her bent over a medieval calendar of days. Many had staked their claim to a particular desk by leaving a briefcase or a stack of books on top of it while they smoked outside in one of the inner courtyards. Maybe, she thought, a cigarette first would help?

  She reached down again into her satchel, groping for her metal cigarette case, when she felt someone watching her. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a young man sitting a few rows back. He wore dark clothes, a dark hat next to him on the desk, his face long and lean. While he studied her, he fiddled with a toothpick. She detested men who used toothpicks in public. Pretending not to notice him, she glided out of the reading room, walking toward the arched doorways leading to the courtyard. As she pushed open the heavy door, she realized she’d forgotten her cigarette case on the table, but returning to fetch it would reveal more of herself than she wanted, giving him the idea that he’d flustered her. Instead, she waited lamely in the courtyard.

  Enough time had elapsed to return to the reading room without seeming as if it was all a ploy or device to garner his attention. And maybe he wouldn’t even be there. As she pushed the door open again into the hushed gray quiet, one of Elsa’s phrases flashed through her mind: Love grossly exaggerates the microscopic, nearly invisible differences between one bumbling human and another. So typical of Elsa to say while she mooned over Heinz Lienek, who’d dumped her for Klara Manning, head of the KPD chapter in Wedding. Elsa could be annoying, Vicki thought, feeling her heart accelerate as she neared the reading room and saw that lone figure sitting in the same place, his dark hat in front of him. On impulse, she tossed back her hair, only to realize her long braid was gone, and so she must have looked odd, her neck jerking back like that. He watched her return to her seat, his eyes fixed on her neck, her back, her shoulders. Her short hair swung in front of her face, and she mechanically pushed it behind her ear. Before sitting down, she shot him a haughty look, but then without meaning to, she smiled a little and his eyes lit up.

  She sat down. It was impossible to work now. He remained behind her, fidgeting with his hat. He didn’t have any books. Only a few sheets of blank paper. Vicki felt pleased that she’d worn her openwork pumps with the matching red pocketbook, but then she chastised herself for caring. Why should she care what he thought of her? He looked shabby, wearing thick dark clothes in summer, his face wolfish with those slanted eyes and high cheekbones, and the way he just stared without a hint of embarrassment. He hadn’t offered her a cigarette or a coffee. He hadn’t asked where she studied, or if she liked jazz, or if she preferred the Charleston to the fox-trot, or if she followed the horse races, or if she’d seen the latest Hertha Schroeter film at the Capitol Filmpalast. And he wouldn’t because it didn’t seem as if he knew about these things.

  In the distance, she heard the church bells mark the hour. Already one o’clock and she’d barely made progress. Ignoring hunger pains, she pressed on. Once, when he stood up to go, Vicki felt a stab of disappointment. But then she saw he’d left his hat and papers behind, and an unwarranted sense of relief washed over her. Alert to every minute that passed while he was gone, when he returned with a newspaper under his arm, she pretended to be engrossed in adverbial pronouns. Furrowing her brow, she read: The French adverbial pronoun y is so tiny that one might think its role in a sentence is not very important, but in fact quite the opposite is true. It is extremely important in French. She glanced at the pages of his newspaper and saw it was in Russian. His eyes darted from one article to the next until he noticed her looking at him. Vicki immediately glanced down, reading: You cannot replace the noun with an object pronoun. For example: I’m going to think about your proposal. I’m going to think about it. Right: Je vais réfléchir à votre proposition. Je vais y réfléchir. Wrong: Je vais réfléchir, Je vais la réfléchir, Je vais lui réfléchir.

  She slowly lifted her eyes from the page, grateful to find his face obscured by an article about Diaghilev.

  Late afternoon settled in, lending the room a melancholic, trembling light. People began to leave, packing up their belongings, the sounds of which echoed throughout the vast room. With the light dying and people drifting away from their desks, the reading room reminded her of a massive mausoleum, and she shivered at the thought of getting locked in, sleeping among the ghostly stacks, the words of forgotten authors breathing through the spines of dusty books. With that, she snapped her book closed and hastily slid the rest of her things into her leather satchel. The young man remained, leafing through the sports section, fixated by a large photograph of the boxer Max Schmeling shaking hands with the American vice president.

  He didn’t look up when she left. Stepping into the late-afternoon sun, which normally brought great relief, Vicki felt agitated. For all his staring, he didn’t even bother to glance up from his newspaper when she walked by, swinging her satchel, clearly leaving for good this time. Maybe she had daydreamed the whole exchange, creating an imaginary dialogue between them out of nothing. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed her. Maybe he stared that way at every woman. She started to walk down the steps, trying to forget the incident, when she felt a light tap on her shoulder. “Miss? Excuse me?”

  She caught her breath, unprepared to find him standing right in front of her. The first thing she noticed was the long white scar running down his cheek, as if someone had slashed him there. At least he was freshly shaven, but he’d nicked his jaw, the cut covered over with a bit of gray paper.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you.” He had a thick Russian accent.

  Vicki forced a smile.

  Pausing, he formulated the next sentence in his head before speaking—it was the same look of intent concentration Vicki often saw on the faces of her fellow students in French class, working out the subjunctive and the conditional, the formal or the informal, in hopes of not fumbling up the whole sentence.

  “I believe you forgot this in the reading room?”

  Her red pocketbook. “That was very kind of you,” she said, taking it from him.

  He shrugged, shoving his hands deep into his pockets. “You are welcome.”

  For a prolonged moment, they stood on the library steps. He studied his worn-down boots, which had been recently polished. Vicki fiddled with her bracelet, a thin gold chain with a pendant of a ballet slipper hanging from it, before saying, “Thank you again. I should be getting home.” The sky had clouded over into a warm blanket of gray, trapping the heat.

  He took his hands out of his pockets, gesturing to the busy street. “Would you prefer me to accompany you to your home?”

  “Oh, no, that’s all right.”

  “All right,” he said, gently taking her by the elbow.

  When she hesitated, he asked, “Shall we go now?”

  “Oh, well, actually—” Vicki faltered.

  His dark eyes scanned her face. His hair, so black it shone with a bluish tint, momentarily fell into his eyes before he brushed it back.

  “Yes, all right,” she said.

  He strode beside her now, a slight smile curling on his lips. Whenever she paused, at a corner or a stop sign or a light, he joked that she knew the way to her own house; he did not. She said she was only figuring out the best way. What is the best way? he asked.

  “The best way is the fastest way.” Talking to him, she noticed how she used simple words and phrases, how she spoke more slowly because she couldn’t tell how much he understood. He asked her what she was reading in the library.

  “French,” she said.

  “Voltaire?”

  She looked at him, surprised. “We did read him. Now we’re reading Flaubert.”

  He grinned. “The materialistic impulse killed her.”

  “Who?”

  “Madame Bovary,” he said somewhat defensively.

  She meant to turn right, toward the Tiergarten, but they kept walking down Kanonier Strasse. She wanted to walk with him through the heavy foliage of the park, where she would feel less distracted by the co
nstant barrage of traffic and the oncoming waves of pedestrians, which sporadically separated them. She wanted to ask him why he went to the reading room and how long he’d been in Berlin, and what his name was, but then she’d spoil the mystery of the encounter.

  They exchanged shy glances every now and then, as if they were still sitting a few rows apart in the library. Intermittently, he would make a comment about something they’d both witnessed, such as how the woman carrying her Pomeranian around in her purse, its little black nose sniffing the air, clearly had an unhealthy obsession with the animal, or could Vicki see in the second-story window that man getting ready for a party, putting on his waistcoat and tying his white tie?

  Despite these comments, long stretches passed when he didn’t talk much, and she couldn’t tell if he was just shy or if his German was still too elementary. She didn’t know his name or where he came from, and yet here they were, walking in silence as if they’d grown so comfortable with each other that they didn’t feel compelled to converse. Luckily, the sounds of the city filled these fallow silences with passing sirens, news vendors repeating the latest headlines, the gust of a double-decker bus turning the corner, a policeman emitting a sharp whistle. A few times, his hand brushed against her gloved one, but he made no indication that he had intended to touch her hand or if it pleased him. As they walked, he occasionally asked her questions about things they passed, and to her surprise, she didn’t always know the answer. He wanted to know what the white weeks meant when they walked by the KaDeWe department store windows advertising White Weeks. Everything in the display was white—white handkerchiefs, white linens, white lace collars, white gloves, white undergarments. Vicki replied that everything white must be on sale. But he wanted to know what was so special about white. “Is it highly demanded, here in Berlin?”