The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  A few blackbirds squawked overhead. Carin crinkled up her nose and said she hated blackbirds because they were ugly and made too much noise.

  “Then we shall have them all killed,” Wolf replied.

  The light was starting to fade, and a chill permeated the air. Greta began rolling up the blanket. Carin packed the mugs back into the wicker basket. As they were leaving, a family arrived. Eastern European Jews, judging from their heavy black clothing and guttural speech. The woman wore a headscarf, and the children stared down at the ground. They spread their blanket nearby and took out a thermos. The husband started to eat without offering his wife and children any food, and they watched him eat. Franz tried not to look at them, so the family amounted to a black blurry grouping on the periphery of his vision. He could tell the others were doing the same, turning their heads away and moving quickly in an attempt to block out the distasteful scenery.

  Wolf sped through the park. Greta and Carin clutched the brims of their hats. When they reached the Siegesallee, lined with white marble statues, Wolf slowed. They passed by Albert the Bear, his arm frozen in salutation.

  Carin yawned into the wind and said they’d left in the nick of time. “It’s disagreeable really, to encounter such types.”

  Greta nodded. “They should be barred from public places. It saps the enjoyment of others.”

  Franz saw Frederick the Great, sword at his side, followed by a string of lesser Fredericks. Even though most people mocked the overdone statues, Franz secretly loved them.

  Carin checked her lipstick in a rhinestone-encrusted compact. He remembered when Wolf had bought it for her a few months ago. “And there are always so many of them clumped together like that.”

  Wolf sighed. “They multiply faster than fruit flies.”

  “It’s a real problem,” Franz said, his stomach knotting.

  They exited the park and pulled onto the main boulevard, clogged with slow-moving traffic. Wolf said that after winning the war, gaining control over Russia, England, and Palestine, and then trying to seize Germany as well and meeting their first real defeat, the Jews had gone completely mad and were suffusing the world—especially easy America—with anti-German propaganda. He lit a cigarette, passing it over to Carin who smoked and pouted.

  “All I know is the first apartment we saw—the one I fell in love with on Bellevuestrasse, right next to the Esplanade—is owned by a Jew—Bella Fromm—and she wouldn’t sell it to us because we aren’t Jews. Imagine, Wolf almost said his first name was Samuel or Daniel or something like that to get us an interview, but the moment she took one look at me, she hated me.”

  Carin passed the cigarette to Greta, who took a puff and passed it back. “You wouldn’t have wanted to live there anyway,” Greta said.

  Carin sighed, covering her eyes from the lowering sun. “But the windows, the way they curved around the corner of the building—it was spectacular.”

  “If you like living in a fishbowl,” Wolf said, pressing on his horn. The sound startled Franz, and he jumped in his seat.

  Wolf’s eyes flickered in the rearview mirror. “The thing about Jews is they’re so damn jumpy. Their nerves are shot. They dart and dash from here to there as if the streets are about to open up and swallow them whole.”

  “It’s how you can pick them out of a crowd,” Franz offered, his heart racing.

  Wolf held Franz’s gaze in the rearview mirror. “Unless you’re a quick study.”

  Greta described a friend of hers, Sabina, who was so elegant and refined, you would never guess her father was a Jewish tailor, and Carin added that of course there were exceptions to any race, but overall Jews were physically less attractive than Aryans. She flicked the butt of her cigarette into oncoming traffic.

  Franz reached into his satchel and waved around the pamphlets that Lutz had instructed them to distribute. The moment he started speaking, the words fell flat. “If you read these pamphlets, you’ll never be fooled again!”

  No one said anything. After a few minutes, Greta asked what the pamphlets said, but Franz ignored her, annoyed by her insipid attempt to soften the silence. Carin looked bored and tired, not bothering to cover her mouth when she yawned.

  Franz sat there, his stomach bloated and hard, full of marzipan raspberry tart and coffee and mustard sandwiches. He felt he should say something more, but he couldn’t think of what. Instead, he stared at the passing cars.

  They were dropping off Greta, then Carin. Wolf and Franz planned to drink and play cards at the Josty afterward. He imagined how he would let Wolf win at cards and how after a few beers, Wolf would inevitably soften toward him, and by the end of the night, all this unpleasantness would be forgotten.

  But it wasn’t. When Wolf pulled over to drop off Carin, the motor running in front of her family’s town house, complete with turrets and diamond-shaped stained-glass windows, she leaned her head on his shoulder. “Won’t you come in and say hello to Mother?”

  Wolf whispered into her ear.

  Franz stared down the long empty street.

  “She always asks after you.” Carin then motioned to Franz. “But I suppose you have to play cards with him.”

  Wolf twisted around, grinning in the moonlight. “You don’t mind finding your own way home, do you?”

  “That’s all right,” Franz managed, his heart sinking.

  Carin gathered up her things. “Mother will be so pleased.”

  “Take these pamphlets as well?” Wolf slung a satchel of pamphlets into Franz’s chest. “I don’t have time to distribute mine, and I can’t just dump them.”

  Carin watched for his reaction, her eyes glittering like a cat in the night.

  “Yes, of course,” Franz muttered.

  They all got out of the car.

  Franz stood on the sidewalk, watching Wolf’s arm link through Carin’s. They climbed the steep stone steps, Wolf’s head inclined toward hers. The front door opened, flooding them in warm light.

  29

  On his way out to Alfred Flechtheim’s soiree, Lev bumped into his son in the foyer. Franz was just coming home, after having missed dinner for the fifth consecutive night, and Lev was surprised and somewhat startled to see him. He held his hat to his chest. “We were thinking of giving up your seat at the dinner table—you don’t mind, do you?” The joking tone did not make much of an impression.

  Franz stared at Lev and hoisted his duffel bag over his shoulder.

  “What have you got there?” No, I shouldn’t have said that, Lev thought. He hates it when I ask too many questions.

  “Nothing.”

  “I see.”

  Franz pushed past his father, the duffel bag banging into the glass vase perched on the entry table. White roses and water spilled onto the parquet floor.

  Lev called for Marthe.

  Franz made his way up the stairs.

  Lev raised a hand. “Well, good night then.”

  “Good night,” Franz called, disappearing at the top of the stairs.

  He’d gone quiet over these past months, especially since the summer, as if he were conducting clandestine experiments in his room and could not be bothered to even eat dinner with the family. Lev knew he’d probably joined the Reichswehr, but the young men, from what he could gather, were generally polite in their slim-fitting blue uniforms and mainly concerned with keeping the peace, even if it meant breaking up the occasional Communist rally or whatnot. Lev didn’t approve of such militarism, and he failed to see why Franz scurried to and fro as if ferrying a grenade under his overcoat. But then again, they’d all been lost in their own thoughts, coming and going through the house as if it were the Friedrichstrasse train station, doors opening, doors closing, people in and people out. When he was young, he couldn’t just come and go as he pleased—but his children preferred to live their own lives, rejecting any semblance of a schedule, and Lev supposed in this way Vicki and Franz exemplified the new generation.

  Vicki had started leaving the house directly after d
inner, always with an excuse—a lecture, a birthday party, a new jazz club, drinks at Die Tavern, but her fluttery erratic movements, the way she wore a hint of pink lipstick and carefully fixed her hair, suggested she was meeting someone in particular instead of the vague list of acquaintances she rattled off whenever Lev asked precisely whom it was she so rushed to see. The other night, when Vicki checked herself in the foyer mirror one last time, Lev joked, “Is he so important that you must forgo a bit of chocolate pudding and coffee?” She had not heard him cross the living room, immersed as she was with the curl of her hair under her earlobe. Having been caught off guard, she did not have a ready reply.

  “Aha!” Lev said. “The answer is written all over your face.”

  Her cheeks reddened even more, her eyes bright and glowing. It was the look of infatuation, maybe even of love. Lev knew it well. It was not so different from the way Josephine had been staring up at the chandelier in the living room as if expecting the angels themselves to descend, springing out of the crystal. She always assumed this look after dinner when, biscuit in hand, she stared upward, rapture and mystery shrouding her face. And then she would turn to him, her eyes misted over, and ask, very politely, if he wouldn’t mind leaving the room.

  Despite having been here a handful of times, Lev never failed to find Alfred Flechtheim’s apartment disorienting—it was all hard edges, steel and glass and chrome, straight-backed chairs and bright white walls and shiny fixtures everywhere, so that Lev constantly caught his reflection in the silver border of a picture frame, in the mirror made out of glass shards hanging precariously over a doorway, in the domed lampshade made out of chrome. He guessed the white walls were so intensely white to better display the art Alfred and his wife collected and sold—art people mocked because they said it was ugly. But Lev poured over the Braques and Picassos and Modiglianis, taking in one picture after another as if wandering through a maze, some disturbing, some exhilarating, some incomprehensible. The spacious apartment was composed of various interconnected rooms, and Lev often found himself in an empty corridor, alone with one of Picasso’s weeping women, her eyelid snagged into a sharp triangle of color, her nostrils flared like a disgruntled horse. Before the war, he might have felt the needling ache of regret encountering such paintings as he recalled his former artistic aspirations. But now, years later, a tepid admiration washed over him at the sight of others who possessed more talent, more drive, more desire. And so, as expected, the art of others grew into a pastime—he visited galleries and knew the dealers. He befriended Alfred Flechtheim, the photographer Hugo Erfurth, the painter Max Beckmann and his second wife, Quappi, as well as Beckmann’s devoted patron, Käthe von Porada, a Viennese woman with slender, perfectly shaped hands. Everyone knew she was in love with Beckmann, who accepted her devotion with a gruff, superior air.

  Lev wandered through the party, a glass of champagne in hand, weaving in and out of small clusters of people talking and smoking and drinking. The actress Hertha Schroeter played the saxophone in the corner, immersed in her own performance. Baby Goldschmidt-Rothschild was talking to Hermine Feist, the daughter of a coal and steel magnate who’d married into a German champagne dynasty. She had the largest collection of china in Europe, particularly Meissen, and after Baby Rothschild pulled Lev aside, introducing him as “the textile man,” they resumed their conversation about stonechats. Baby Rothschild said her son had found a nest in their garden the other day. “Impossibly beautiful eggs—russet flecked, as if dusted with cinnamon.” Then Hermine explained how stonechats received such a name because their high-pitched calls sounded as if two stones were clicking together. She put a hand on Lev’s arm. “The way their wings constantly flutter—I’d give away half my china for their metabolism.”

  “Where’s your lovely wife, by the way?” Baby Rothschild asked, scanning the room.

  “Migraine,” Lev said dryly, half listening to another conversation, one that Diaghilev, the Russian choreographer, was carrying on with Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy. “I thought he was the next Nijinsky,” Diaghilev cried mournfully, “but this Cobos, the Spaniard, he went mad and disappeared, just like that, not showing up for performances or showing up at the very last minute, unprepared, but then he would dance the most unbelievable dance, and the crowd would roar with applause—everyone made special allowances for Cobos.”

  Paul nodded sympathetically. “And now he’s loose in Berlin?”

  Diaghilev sighed. “He’s the depressive type.”

  Lev’s little cluster dispersed. Rothschild went to refill her drink, and Hermine spotted a banker she knew who’d recently had his ten-room apartment in Charlottenburg done over by Ernst Freud, son of Sigmund, whose views on clutter were as severe as those of Mies. “I must say hello,” she whispered to Lev, before shimmying over to the banker. Lev thought about congratulating Flechtheim on his recent purchase—an El Greco—but Flechtheim was in deep conversation with a willowy woman who looked vaguely familiar. She nodded and jotted down notes on a notepad. A journalist of some sort, Lev thought, his stomach rumbling. Of course there was no food to speak of—only champagne and caviar dotted on endive leaves. He suddenly felt overcome by a wave of exhaustion. He wanted to sit, to recline if possible. Remembering the library with the deep leather couches, he waded through the living room, catching snippets of chatter—two women bickered over Beethoven’s late quartets, a man in formal wear exclaimed how handsome Picasso was, and a young girl carried a Persian cat on her shoulder.

  When Lev squeezed past Flechtheim and the journalist, he overheard her saying how a person never just feels one emotion at a time—one always experiences a layered response to the world, and art captures this best, especially portraits. She raised her voice, sensing Flechtheim’s boredom. “At least the new art does this, what you collect, as opposed to the simple happiness of the Impressionists.” Flechtheim laughed sardonically at the phrase “simple happiness.” Lev was always struck by his full lips, which had an unnatural purple hue to them and made him seem preternaturally decadent.

  Finally, the library, with its half-open door, appeared before him. A dim glow emanated from the room, and before entering, Lev heard a booming, familiar voice.

  “Ugliness, the grotesque, this is part of reality—no, what I mean to say is, that is reality. We must capture reality, stop it in its tracks, study it, analyze it, and confront the truth, a truth that encompasses all of life—its cruelty, ugliness, and its dark beauty too.”

  Lev pushed open the door to find a man, his broad back facing him, and two young women in semitransparent shifts who leaned into each other on the leather sofa. The man sat on a fringed ottoman, his feet planted on either side of it, his massive knees jutting outward. Everything about him appeared oversized, bombastic, charged with energy.

  “Have you read Henry Miller?” the man demanded.

  The girls smiled and fanned themselves.

  “I greatly admire his books.” He paused and took a long gulp of his drink.

  “He’s only written a few books,” Lev offered, speaking to the back of the man’s head.

  The man shrugged. “Miller doesn’t shy away from extremity. What I do with images, he does with words.”

  One of the girls kicked off her high heels and wiggled her toes. “The way you paint, the New Objectivity?”

  The man studied his nails. “Hmmm.”

  She yawned into her drink. “Is it German?”

  The man shook his head. “What does it matter if it’s German or not? It’s human.” He turned his head. His strong jaw and heavy-lidded eyes, his short neck and sharp profile sent a tremor of recognition through Lev.

  “Excuse me?” Lev said, his voice buried in his chest. He coughed a few times. “Otto? Otto Schad?”

  The man faced him. “Of course I’m Otto Schad.”

  Lev shook his head and laughed.

  Otto jumped up and bellowed, “Lev Perlmutter! What in the hell are you doing here of all places?”

  “What do you me
an ‘of all places’?”

  Otto ran a hand through his hair. “I knew I would see you again, but I always pictured running into you at Berlin central station or the lobby of a hotel or some little bar. Flechtheim’s my dealer. We met in Düsseldorf a few years back.”

  “You seem to be doing quite well for yourself.”

  “Well?” Otto roared. Then he embraced Lev and pounded a fist into his back. “I’m doing well, yes, you could say that.”

  One of the girls drowsed on the couch. The other one stretched her arms overhead, managing to show off her perfectly pointed breasts, which poked through the chiffon fabric. “Are you going to paint me tonight or not?”

  “Lev Perlmutter. Lev Perlmutter.” Otto looked at him with astonishment. “Incredible.”

  They spoke for a while in the library, unaware of time, of the night growing later, of the girls leaving and the party dispersing. It was as if, just by looking at Otto, Lev simultaneously inhabited two different existences: in the barracks of Mitau, smoking on their beds and listening for gunfire, walking along the icy streets, talking about women—Lev’s incessant yearning for Leah, and Otto’s Lithuanian, who fed him milk and cherries to heal his gout. These images collided with the present, or what had been mutually agreed upon as the present: Otto in a smoking jacket with a Brazilian cigar between his lips, explaining how he lived in the fashionable part of town and that his paintings had been selling extremely well. He looked comfortable, flush with money, the color high in his cheeks, his gold cufflinks glinting in the dim light of the library. The rough-and-tumble character Lev had known in the army was all but hidden until Otto opened his mouth. Then every obscenity flowed from it, accompanied by the same wild unhinged gestures, which so attracted women and gained the admiration of men. But how did he appear to Otto? Was he much changed? Had he grown complacent with the level of success he’d achieved as a “textile man”? No—it was simpler than all that. He was the same but older. Which was how people appeared in middle age, carrying on the same quirks, the same irritating habits, the same unattractive physical qualities, magnified by age, as if you were examining someone under a microscope, the microscope being time passing, and saw that it revealed what had been there all along: that same inherent, damning lack.