The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  Lise asked, “Haven’t you heard about the incident at Vollmoeller’s flat?”

  Vicki tried to focus on the conversation, but she didn’t care about what had happened at Vollmoeller’s flat.

  Elsa scanned the upper gallery. “Vollmoeller’s mistress only wears men’s clothing.”

  “She’s slim and beautiful,” Emanuel said, examining a chess piece.

  “And Vollmoeller just conducted Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde at the Vienna State Opera.”

  Emanuel sighed. “Yes, I know.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you,” Lise snapped, her cheeks flushed from champagne. “Anyway, at his flat the other night, Josephine Baker was sitting on the couch half-naked, in a pink muslin apron and nothing else, talking about American jazz. Then Vollmoeller’s mistress sauntered over and made herself comfortable on Baker’s lap, and they fed each other chocolates.”

  Emanuel brought the wooden bishop to his lips. “The pink muslin looked divine on her.”

  Lise touched Elsa’s slicked-back hair. “Smooth.”

  She grinned. “Bakerfix.”

  Lise continued to touch her hair, and then she let her hand fall casually onto Elsa’s shoulder until she had her arm around Elsa. Then she gave Vicki a long desirous gaze, at which point Vicki said she had to leave. Elsa nestled her cheek against Lise’s limp arm, as if it were the most natural of things, and told Vicki she shouldn’t leave, because this is what people did all night; they talked and drank and danced and talked some more until dawn. She lurched forward, cupping Vicki’s face with her warm hands. “You can’t go, V. The evening’s barely begun.”

  Vicki gathered up her beaded purse and her hat, trying not to make a fuss of leaving. Emanuel eyed her stoically, and Lise yawned into her drink and then whispered something to Elsa, her sloppy red mouth close to Elsa’s perfect white ear. Despite Elsa’s protestations that she stay for another drink, Vicki said with a smile that she really must go and slipped through the crowded smoke-filled room.

  Vicki signaled for a cab, the wind rushing into her dress, the short hemline floating upward for a brief moment before settling down. Against her skin, the night air felt warm and full of summer. The electric streetlights illuminated her silk stockings and caught the golden appliqué pattern on her T-strap evening shoes. Running a hand through her hair, she still felt surprised by its shortness, how quickly her fingers sifted through the strands. Wondering if she should go home or stop by the Resi, where some of her university friends would be drinking, the image of the gloomy state library rose up before her, and she felt the urge to return there, as if loitering on the steps at night would mysteriously summon Geza.

  A few cabs lingered on the corner across the street. People continued to spill out of Romanisches, replaced by a constant stream of others eager to replace them. The doorman stared impassively at the crowd, his cold gray eyes judging the eligibility of each potential patron. Waiting for the streetlight to change, Vicki sensed a familiar figure in a cream-colored dinner jacket standing nearby. Wolf. He was bragging to an older woman and her daughter about how his father was on familiar terms with von Hindenburg. Both women looked saturated in money, in long beaded crepe dresses with golden sashes. “You mean the president of Germany?” the older woman asked in a heavy French accent. Wolf glowered at her. “Of course. Who else would I mean?” The woman’s daughter, who was younger than Vicki and delicately pretty, emitted an artificial laugh.

  Vicki urged one of the cabs to come her way, so she could avoid Wolf, but he ambled toward her. “What are you doing out so late, little sister?”

  He smelled of strong spirits.

  “It’s not so late.”

  Wolf pinched her cheek. “If you were my sister, I wouldn’t let you hang around a place like this.”

  That old nervousness flooded her again, and it infuriated her, how he could make her feel so small and helpless without warning.

  A cab honked, startling her. The driver shouted over the hood of the car, “Address, please?”

  Wolf opened the cab door and told the driver to take her directly home to Charlottenburg.

  Vicki slid into the backseat and banged the door closed.

  Wolf stared at her through the open window. “I’ll be seeing you.” Then he turned away and went back to the women. They all erupted into laughter at something he said in French, which Vicki couldn’t quite grasp. As the cab sped off, her thoughts ran together: she’d probably fail her French exam on Monday—she could barely catch the meaning of a simple conversation on the street—and Wolf was only an overgrown child fiddling with people’s emotions, wearing that satisfied smirk, as if all women should adore him when she knew he used to kill squirrels just for the hell of it

  She told the driver to head toward Charlottenburg Palace, still leaving herself the option of stopping off at the Resi. If Wolf called on her, Vicki imagined the pleasure of saying no. Elsa’s recent tirade echoed through her head—a tirade Elsa had most likely read in Der Querschnitt or some other avant-garde magazine from which she plucked ideas that suited her: Whenever I say no to a man, he always lectures me, for a half hour at least, on my sexual inhibitions—something all women suffer from apparently. When I still don’t yield to his desires, he concludes, so sure of his lopsided logic, that I must either be a cold fish or a stupid cow. The two animals women are equated with if we don’t yield to a man, when in reality it’s the man himself we don’t prefer. He never even considers that perhaps the odd shape of his bulbous nose offends, or that he’s a boorish pigheaded conversationalist. Vicki smiled. Yes, a cold fish or a stupid cow—that’s what all this sexual freedom amounted to. Light and shadow fell across her lap from the passing streetlamps. She leaned her head against the window. In the rearview mirror, the driver peered at her from under his cap. Fearing he might be the chatty type, she glanced away, focusing on the little Opel two-seater passing by with an open top. A young woman nestled her head in the crook of the man’s arm. He stroked her hair and murmured something into her neck, and she laughed, playfully tugging on his cravat. Then they sped off, leaving Vicki to wonder if they were married, if he loved her, if they were happy.

  21

  The last weeks of July carried a wilted, spent quality. The triumph of passing her French exam, the excitement of having free time to swim and read and go to the cinema faded in comparison to the sharp disappointment Vicki felt when she returned to the state library the following Monday now with nothing to study, and after sitting in the same seat for two hours, she left without meeting Geza. She returned a few days later, and a few days after that, only to sit alone in the ghostly room. Vicki restrained herself from going every day, although she feared that Geza might be visiting the library and looking for her on the days she failed to go. At the same time, she was irritated by how much she yearned to see him again. She spent some glorious summer afternoons cooped up in the library leafing through fashion magazines and paging through Tucholsky’s Jazz and Shimmy: Guide to the Latest Dances, waiting for him to appear. Afterward, she went to ballet class at the Laban School of Dance, where the barre exercises felt painfully boring given how the new pianist, a young Polish girl in bifocals, banged away on the piano keys without any finesse or lightness. Leon the Russian, her favorite pianist, was holidaying on the Black Sea. His absence, and the thought of how he would suddenly break into his favorite section of Don Quixote during a monotonous tendu sequence, only reminded her of another person’s absence, the person she most wanted to see, and for some inexplicable reason Leon and Geza became intertwined.

  In August, her family went to Rindbach, their annual holiday spot, a small village in the southern end of the Traunsee in the Austrian Salzkammergut, where her mother had summered as a girl. Tortured by the thought of Geza going to the library to find her, she whittled away the days in this mountain town, days that stretched on endlessly without even the distraction of Franz, who had gone off again with Wolf to some vague summer retreat. Lev joked that Rindbach was delightf
ully boring, and Josephine retorted that this important music colony was home to Franz von Mendelssohn, who hosted the pianist Artur Schnabel, and Carl Flesch, the professor of violin at the Berlin Academy of Music, as well as various singers, such as Schnabel’s wife and Jeanette Grumbacher de Jong. Over the summers, Josephine had cultivated a friendship with Mendelssohn and was an occasional guest at his villa. He had a large music room, and on rainy days, small impromptu concerts were held here. On these days, Josephine wistfully commented that listening to music at Mendelssohn’s villa made her feel as if she’d been transported back to the days prior to the war, when one would sit peacefully listening to live musicians, before the radio and the telephone and the newfangled phonographs vied for everyone’s attention and created an alarming dissonance.

  It was after lunch, when a general laziness settled over the house. Lev and Vicki sat at the kitchen table playing rummy. Josephine ran water over a colander filled with cherries before spilling them into a bowl. She placed the bowl in the center of the table and sighed. “Remember when Franz presented flowers to the emperor, in the small square in front of the church?” Vicki nodded, thinking how Rindbach seemed to dip her mother back into the past, an effect she did not think healthy.

  Josephine sat down, plucking a cherry from the bowl. “The emperor would stop there in the early morning to change from his large carriage into a one-horse carriage, which would ferry him up into the mountains to hunt chamois. The pastor chose Franz to present the flowers solely because he appeared cleaner than the peasant children. I can’t recall if the old emperor even said thank you.”

  “Probably not,” Lev snorted, dealing a new hand.

  Josephine shook her head. “Eternally the cynic.”

  Through the open windows, Vicki stared at the chain of mountains lining the sky, above which rose the snow-covered peak of the Dachstein, standing out in blinding whiteness.

  “Your turn,” Lev reminded her.

  Vicki drew a card. She wondered if Geza even liked her that afternoon or if it had all been in her imagination—the glances they’d exchanged, the way he had walked close to her down the street, their shoulders brushing every so often, the certainty she’d felt of meeting him again. Pretty soon it would be fall. Classes would resume, and who knew if she would ever see him? Her mind drifted over which courses she would take. Probably paleography, given by Karl Hampe, a well-known medievalist visiting from the University of Heidelberg, and most definitely Weber’s course “The Crisis of the Modern Idea of the State in Europe.” Maybe in the fall, I’ll run into him again, she mused, since I’ll be visiting the library quite often.

  Lev studied his cards and glanced at her. “Pfennig for your thoughts?”

  She smiled. “You’ll need loads of pfennigs.”

  Josephine stood up abruptly, walking over to the open windows. “Isn’t it strange here, without Franz?”

  Lev snorted again. “He’s busy fashioning himself into a real peasant.”

  “I feel as if he could walk in here any minute.”

  “You miss him,” Lev said.

  As she turned away from the window, her eyes pooled with tears.

  Her mother: so delicate, so breakable. Even though they’d been fighting lately, Vicki realized she must be more careful with her mother. Last night when her mother had dropped a dish and broke it, she erupted into sobs. And this morning, on their walk into town, Vicki had gone ahead, purposefully losing sight of her mother, which seemed to leave an indelible mark on her fragile psyche. Back at the cottage, her mother had cried, “Is my company so distasteful that you must walk ten meters ahead at all times?” Vicki found Rindbach more tedious than ever, but for this, her mother was not to blame. She yearned for Berlin, for the brisk air and coffee at the Jockey, where the tables were so close together you could easily mingle between different groups, changing seats whenever the conversation dulled. And the way her mother wore a Tyrolean dress here, as if she were one of the villagers, and her father played along in his felt green hat with the feather fixed to the side, was utterly absurd.

  Through the kitchen window, she watched her father comforting her mother in the garden. They were arguing about Franz. Her mother tearfully said that if he wanted to train in the Black Reichswehr, she supported him, at which point Lev raised his voice: “You do realize training young men for military service is forbidden by the Treaty of Versailles?”

  Vicki put her head down. Her cheek rested against the cool wood of the table. Their voices floated into the kitchen; they didn’t seem to care anymore if she heard their arguing. The conversation had turned from Franz to the doctor her mother was seeing. Lev said he was useless. Her mother cried, “How else can I cope with your night ramblings?”

  “Cope?”

  “Coming home at two a.m.!”

  Vicki slowly got up from the table, and, taking a handful of cherries, she went up to her room. Sprawled across her bed, she leafed through the novel she was reading about a modern woman driven to despair by her pursuit of happiness. Not caring that her cherry-stained fingers left faint crimson marks on the pages, Vicki tossed the book aside and cursed the fact that there was no radio, no cinema, no telephone here—only a chorus of crickets. She pointed and flexed her feet and watched the shadows grow long across the wall. Picking up her book again, she read a few sentences, but the words didn’t register. She’d been so foolish to assume they’d shared some sort of tacit understanding. When I return to Berlin, she thought, I will put him clear out of my mind.

  Evening approached, flooding the room with a pink iridescent glow.

  22

  Exams had ended. Franz had done well on medieval German history, less well on French language and literature, and even less well on the forever looping problems of advanced calculus. His father had not been pleased about his barely passing score, but then he admitted to having disliked calculus when he was a student, and for a moment, the two of them shared a mutual dislike of something. But when Franz announced that he and Wolf were going to Hans Surén’s nature colony on Saturday instead of his joining the family at Rindbach, Lev threw up his hands and shouted, “This nacktkultur! As if bathing nude and soldierly conditioning solves everything!” And then he tore off his glasses and stormed out of the room.

  Wolf had failed calculus and had spent the last ten minutes cursing Professor Bilko, that damn Romanian Jew. Early Saturday morning, he and Franz sat side by side on the train, heading for the Krumme Lanke stop. At the end of this line, they would take another train one stop past Onkel Toms Hütte. Between the two small lakes, Krumme Lanke and Schlachtensee, Hans Surén held his nature retreat. Franz took an orange out of his rucksack, peeled it. Biting into a segment, a rush of citrus flooded his tongue.

  He offered Wolf a piece. Wolf popped it into his mouth, continuing his rant. “From the first day, Bilko hated me. It was obvious. When he made that snide remark about Prussian militarism, he was obviously mocking my family.”

  “Hmmm,” Franz said, half listening, disbelieving his luck. Wolf’s friend Peter was also supposed to come along this morning, but at the last minute, Peter had decided to meet them at the campsite, so Franz had Wolf all to himself. The small space they shared on the train, the velvety feel of the westerly winds coming in through the window, the clean air of the North Sea intermingled with the Brandenburg countryside sweeping over the surrounding pines were enough to make him weep. The coal dust, the automobile pollution, the constant traffic and hiss of the city—he was free of it, that city his father cherished. And he was sitting with Wolf, close enough to notice how his bottom lip was dry, the skin coated over with a thin film of white, and how his breath smelled sour from last night’s carousing, and how under his eyes faint shadows appeared, discoloration from lack of sleep, because he had been with Carin again. Carin, whom he’d been courting since spring.

  The train halted for a moment, and they lurched forward, their shoulders brushing.

  “Just forget about Bilko,” Franz said.
r />   Wolf nodded morosely.

  The train started up again. It pained him to ask, but he couldn’t help himself. “You were out late last night?”

  “Carin wanted to see a play, but you know, I don’t go in for that. We went dancing instead.”

  “Oh.” His voice sounded hollow, weak. He hated it.

  “I saw Peter after.” Peter, the insipid Peter, whose face reminded Franz of a weasel.

  “Really?”

  Wolf shook his head. “The bastard was standing in his shorts and robe outside his apartment. Locked out. He had a girl over, but when she left, he walked her out and closed the door behind him without thinking. Utterly stupid. Luckily, there’s a cafeteria next to his building, so we sat and had coffee and rolls until the sun came up. Which is why I’m shattered this morning.” He stretched his arms overhead, lengthening his spine. “My neck.”

  Franz automatically put his hand on the back of Wolf’s neck, and Wolf closed his eyes.

  He bore his thumb and forefinger into the tendons, massaging Wolf there.

  Wolf sighed, his eyes half-closed. “Too bad, no girls where we’re headed.”

  “Mixed retreats are hedonistic. New Sunland with those outdoor ‘fuck huts.’ It’s not very serious there.”