The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  He almost forgot his stop but was reminded to disembark by the flood of Jews in black kaftans standing up. Lev followed them off the train, thinking of how Rabbi Landauer’s elongated face and hands always reminded him of an El Greco saint; troubled, sad, malnourished. The last time he had seen him—when was it? June, at the start of summer—Vicki had cut off all her hair, and Josephine complained about the sputtering ceiling fan. Yes, such trifling concerns had masqueraded as real ones. After visiting his mother, Lev had found Rabbi Landauer wandering the streets, confused, a glazed look in his eye, rambling on about vegetarianism and his spiritual upheavals. Lev had comforted him, took the rabbi by the arm, tried to talk some sense into him—Lev smiled. Yes, he had felt so very stable and secure with himself in comparison to the wandering rabbi, devoid of his skullcap, devoid of his faith. And now? He was worse off than the rabbi. Worse because the woman he loved had probably vanished forever into the roving masses of New York, worse because he had a son he would never know, worse because two and a half years ago, when Leah wrote him, he might have had the chance to be with her again, to start another kind of life. And worse because Geza, who planned to spirit his daughter away to Palestine, was the only person who could help him find Leah. He cursed Geza for waiting so long, for withholding such precious information. And now it was too late. Too late. Too late. Lev squeezed his eyes shut before pressing his thumb on the doorbell. Perhaps the rabbi would have some advice. There was no one else he could turn to.

  Clothing hung from Rabbi Landauer’s body despite how his wife, an enterprising woman who owned two hairdressing salons near Potsdamer Platz, pushed food onto his plate, complaining how he didn’t eat anything anymore. “No more meat, no more fish, no more game or fowl and yesterday he condemned beets!” she said, bustling around the kitchen while Lev and the rabbi sipped black tea.

  The rabbi shrugged. “I don’t like the bloodred color of that particular kind of root.”

  Lev had just explained his state of affairs, or as he preferred to say, “the unhinging of all order” to the rabbi: Geza Rabinovitch from Mitau had arrived on his doorstep two days ago and announced his plans to marry Vicki and take her away forever. And Lev had recently discovered Franz’s SA membership card, but the name on the card was Franz von Stressing. He didn’t know what was more upsetting: that Franz had joined up with the brown shirts or that he had used his mother’s name to do it. He sighed and thought about saying more, but he couldn’t bring himself to admit what truly troubled him: I love another woman. We have a son whom I’ve never seen. They might have moved to America. The other things—Geza and Vicki’s engagement, Franz’s SA membership—were potentially solvable, open to discussion, whereas Leah inhabited a secret chamber in his dreams. He held back, knowing that once the confession escaped, the secret chamber would be torn open, and keeping the two worlds separate was not only a comfort but a necessity.

  The rabbi pursed his lips and frowned. “And what of Josephine? What does she think of Franz joining the SA?”

  The rabbi’s wife paused a moment in the kitchen, straining to listen. Yes, Lev thought, this will make good gossip to retell on the balcony of the synagogue, surrounded by your womenfolk. He could already see her holding court, fanning herself while doling out various details plucked from this conversation. Lev rubbed his eyes. He didn’t care. Let her hear how much he regretted marrying a gentile. He sighed. “She’s the least of it.”

  The rabbi nodded. “But you were experiencing marital difficulties in the past, were you not?”

  “Our problems have intensified.”

  The rabbi’s wife brought in a refreshed pot of tea and poured more into Lev’s glass. “If the marriage is sound, you can weather any storm,” she said, smiling down at him, her blond curls tucked beneath a headscarf. Before returning to the kitchen, she glanced at the plate of food the rabbi had left untouched.

  The rabbi leaned back into his chair. “My wife’s right.”

  Lev rubbed his eyes again. “What does Geza want there? To start a banana plantation on the Sea of Galilee so that Vicki can battle water snakes all day? We’re Europeans; for us it’s entirely out of the question.” He paused. “Even America would be more civilized.” Even New York, he thought. Where Leah is.

  “Hmmm,” the rabbi said, piercing a pea with one of his fork prongs. “I’ve heard New York in particular is quite barbaric.” He brought the pea to his lips but then, upon further consideration, placed his fork down again. “Perhaps France would be better.”

  Lev glanced at the mound of peas on the rabbi’s plate. “Have you boycotted peas as well?”

  The rabbi took a small sip of tea, barely opening his mouth to let the liquid enter. “In France, the Jewish problem has almost ceased to exist after the Dreyfus affair, which resulted in quite a favorable outcome for us, no?”

  Lev slung one leg over the other. “And here?”

  Rabbi Landauer stared at him. Lev hadn’t noticed until now how the rabbi’s eyes were too close together, throwing off the entire symmetry of his face. The spacing of the eyes—it was something one could never alter. The rabbi scratched his patchy beard, steel gray at the tapered tip, a burnt auburn around his mouth and nostrils. The rabbi’s beard reminded Lev of the frayed and threadbare blanket Franz had toted around as a child. He’d refused to relinquish it for washing or mending, taking immense pleasure in its worn-down quality, just as the rabbi now stroked his beard, taking comfort, Lev imagined, in its raggedness.

  The rabbi leaned forward, inspecting the grain of the wood running along the table. “We have assimilated with ease, this much is true. But …” He looked over at his wife, who had installed herself in the corner of the room, shuffling through the afternoon edition. She glanced over the top of the paper. He cleared his throat. “We pay a price. We must constantly prove, at any given moment, that we are German before we are Jewish. And in these modern times, what does being Jewish mean beyond this constant arguing, each group convinced they are right and the others wrong—the Zionists, the assimilationists, the Jews from the east clinging to their ghetto ways while trudging down our cosmopolitan boulevards, wearing those faded dark clothes and tall fur hats, gathering frowns from the rest of us?”

  “Many people are anxious,” his wife barked from the corner.

  Lev turned toward her. She continued reading as if she had never spoken.

  The rabbi shook his head. “You exaggerate.”

  She shrugged and turned the page.

  The rabbi continued, “A few of our friends talk continuously about the National Socialist movement, which really is anti-Semitic, but people are overreacting, growing hysterical, when the important thing is to remain calm. We must be the first ones to act in moderation, to model this behavior for our depressed nation so that reason will return here … We must wait for the economy to reestablish its equilibrium, for the republic to regain its footing, for the losses of the Great War to dissipate, for the pain of the reparations, of so many dead, to lessen.” The rabbi slumped back into his chair, as if the stringing together of so many words had greatly tired him.

  His wife snorted and straightened her paper. Muffled laughter could be heard from one of the bedrooms off the hallway. A gray cat scampered into the living room, looked around, and darted back into the hall, the little bell on its collar tinkling. Lev wondered if the rabbi’s laughing daughters would leave their father someday too, for Palestine or some other place.

  “But in the meantime, we must practice discretion.” The rabbi then folded his hands over his chest, as if preparing for eternal rest.

  His wife mumbled, “What he means is discretion to the point of disappearance.”

  The rabbi raised his hands in supplication. “Must you always interject?”

  Lev jerked his chair back from the table. “Geza spoke of the ‘housetrained animality of the German Jew,’ of our feigned civility, our adopted customs, our so-called gentility, how cleanly shaven we skip off to temple—God forbid we call it syn
agogue—sporting our bowties and monocles, wrapping our prayer books in the editorial page of a newspaper so it will attract less notice.” Lev paused, drawing a breath. “Are we only German on the condition that we not appear too Jewish?”

  The rabbi fingered his beard, trying to suppress a small sarcastic smile. “I didn’t realize you attended synagogue, let alone carried a prayer book.”

  Lev paced the room. He couldn’t think clearly. And looking at the gray-faced rabbi didn’t help matters. One of the rabbi’s daughters dashed across the hall, trying to hide. She giggled behind the door. Lev could see her dark eyes glinting through the doorjamb.

  “I argued with Geza for over an hour, during which he tried to convince me that there’s no other way for the Jews short of moving to Palestine. I called him a fool. I forbade him to take Vicki away to that wasteland. I explained how there are so many possibilities here. Berlin is not Russia, I kept saying. Berlin is not Russia.”

  “Forgive me … who is this Geza?” the rabbi asked.

  “I helped his family during the war,” Lev mumbled, leaning against the wall next to the bay window. He had slept poorly last night due to an argument Josephine started the minute the lights went out. She spoke into the darkness about how it wouldn’t be so bad if Vicki went to Palestine, as opposed to gallivanting around town with Geza, which had already caused a stir. Of course, Lev yelled, she didn’t care if Vicki made matchboxes in the beating sun—as long as their social position remained intact. Josephine fell into a crying fit, behavior Lev had anticipated, and instead of comforting her, he turned onto his side and pretended to sleep until three a.m., when real sleep overtook him. But then he had another dream about Leah—this time, he met her at Grand Central Station in Manhattan. He knew from pictures how it looked, like a golden paradise of travel. She was dressed in a dove-gray fitted suit, stockings, and heels, a real modern woman without a trace of the shtetl on her. She held their son by the hand, and he stared up at Lev. His eyes were green and luminous, brimming with a mixture of accusation and hope. Lev was about to embrace his son when a mechanical voice over the loudspeaker announced the last train to Mitau. In a gust of wind and smoke, Leah and his son were swept away with the rushing crowd. He had awoken feeling as exhausted as he was the night before, the early morning light seeping through the velvet curtains. His ears hurt, filled with the sound of trains.

  The cat rubbed up against Lev’s leg, purring, then jumped onto the windowsill. The rabbi’s three daughters had planted themselves in the middle of the living room sorting through a bag of marbles. They swapped marbles for dolls and dolls for marbles in an endless negotiation. The rabbi had disappeared, leaving behind his skullcap on the white embroidered tablecloth.

  His wife gently touched Lev’s shoulder. He could smell the lacquer she used in her hair.

  “He went to wash.” She handed him his coat and hat. Her daughters did not look up from the game, their heads bent together, creating a natural barrier between their world and the dull worrisome one of adults. The soft clinking of the marbles against the hardwood floor had a soothing effect on Lev. “I’m sorry for your troubles,” she said, walking him to the door.

  Lev tipped his hat. “Don’t let the rabbi starve.”

  She smiled, her bottom teeth crowded. “We all do what we can do.”

  37

  He might leave for a month, and I barely care!” Josephine sat up to emphasize her point, even though she knew Dr. Dührkoop preferred her to remain lying down. She had worn her most fetching outfit: a Vionnet dress in crepe de chine, cut on the bias, which caused the fabric to subtly cling to her body. The way her knees showed when she sat down had at first embarrassed her, but she now thought it was quite daring and seductive, and every time she looked down to see her knees peeking out from the pleated hemline, it brought color to her face, color she hoped made her appear more youthful and appealing. It was an unseasonably warm day for March, after weeks of rain and grayness, and he had opened the window next to the chaise. The humid breeze brought little goose bumps to her arms and collarbone. She rubbed her bare arms. He watched.

  “Lev plans to visit New York on business, you said?”

  She leaned into the pillows, one arm draped over her hip, the other dangling over the back of the chaise. “I don’t know if he’s leaving for certain …” Her voice trailed off. “He said something about brokering an exclusive import/export deal with Rhodes Hart, an American textile firm. The enviable type of linen they produce in New York is apparently not available in Germany. Lev thinks it will sell here.”

  The doctor shuffled through his notebook. An unlit cigarette dangled from his lips. His shirt not perfectly ironed, his eyes bloodshot—she wondered what kinds of troubles he harbored but resisted the urge to ask. He would only deflect her concern, reminding her that she was following the predictable pattern of transference, and if he engaged in it, he would be subjecting the analytic relationship to the dangers of countertransference. He had once explained this many months ago, when she had asked after his mother’s health and he had stiffened, as if the very thought of revealing even the smallest trace of his private life proved utterly repugnant.

  “And I keep thinking back to the last time he left, at the start of the war, and how terribly upsetting it was. Now, I scarcely care where he’s going. Or when he’ll return.” She stared down at her satin pumps and felt a stab of guilt. How could she say this so offhandedly, as if discussing someone else’s husband? And yet in this room with the damask wallpaper, coffered ceiling, and onyx figurines, it felt true.

  Dr. Dührkoop rubbed his eyes. “I see.” He lit his cigarette and stared out the window.

  Did he see? He was distracted; that was for sure. She felt cast out, jealous of the thoughts clouding his mind. She almost raised the problem with Franz again, but that was a tiresome subject. After the first séance with Father Balthazar, she had rushed here in a panic, racked with anxiety over his incantation about the bloom coming off the rose and Franz getting into some trouble he refused to discuss further because he had a headache. Dr. Dührkoop had patiently explained how some individuals, such as mediums, have a particularly strong connection to the collective unconscious allowing them to channel feelings and intuit certain events, but he impressed upon her that it was not always accurate; it was merely a helpful tool in the process of her own unearthing of past traumas, dreams, and memories. Worse still, after that, Father Balthazar stopped contacting her grandfather. She still returned every week for the séance in hopes that her grandfather would reappear. She now understood the urgency, the desperation, of the other participants whom she had initially mocked. For the past weeks, she had described all of this to Dr. Dührkoop in great detail—but she could tell it bored him. Suddenly, he stood up and shut the window with a sharp bang.

  She jumped a little.

  He leaned against the window and stared at her.

  “Oh—that reminds me of my mother. A buried memory. It just came to me in a flash.”

  He nodded for her to continue.

  “She was always closing all the windows because she said one would catch cold that way. Even on stifling hot trains in the middle of summer, she would slam down the windows, as if the air carried an infectious disease. I remember sweating in the train compartment, wanting to take off my stockings, the sweat dripping between my thighs.”

  Dr. Dürhkoop’s eyes gleamed with renewed interest. “That’s very interesting.” He paced the room, stopping every few steps as if a revolutionary thought had just occurred to him. “And how did you feel on that train?”

  Josephine shifted on the couch. Sweat gathered under her arms and between her legs. She felt the urge to rub herself against the bunched-up couch cushion. She moved slightly back and forth. “Trapped,” she said, her voice hoarse. Her pearl-gray stockings stuck to her thighs—she wanted to peel them off. All at once, she was fifteen, trapped on the train with her mother, full of unnatural urges, as well as being a woman of thirty-eight.

/>   He now stood behind his desk. He had rolled up his shirtsleeves, the blond hairs soft and fine along his forearms.

  “Trapped?”

  “I couldn’t do what I wanted.”

  Planting both hands down on his desk, he leaned forward.

  She couldn’t stand up—a wetness had amassed in her underwear, and she was certain it would show through her crepe de chine dress. She didn’t even have a light coat to wear over it, for the way home.

  “What, then, did you want on that train?”

  His face was kind—she could tell him. And if she couldn’t tell him, then there was no point to analysis. No point to any of it. He always said she must be honest with him. Entirely honest. “I wanted to—” She paused. She could still say something else, anything else: I wanted to open the window, feel the wind on my face, slap my mother, run away.

  He sat down on the couch and took her hand. His proximity made her head light. She gripped his hand. “I wanted to masturbate.”

  “Josephine.” He rarely said her name but it sounded much more beautiful coming from his mouth. She buried her face into his shoulder, inhaling his scent of cigarettes and tea and lavender. He must put dried lavender in his dresser, she thought. Or perhaps his mother places it there. As if such movements had already been choreographed, she hoisted herself onto his lap, straddling him. She pressed her face into his neck and rubbed against him. He slipped his hand into her underwear, inhaling sharply at the wetness he discovered. With the other hand, he caressed her back, fingering the brassiere under the thin fabric. “God knows the damage of those early repressive years. But we are returning to a primal state of freedom, before judgment, before shame, before mothers and fathers,” he said.

  She nodded and bit his neck, tight pleasure spreading and flowing from the epicenter of clitoral nerves he so nimbly manipulated.

  Afterward, she sat upright on the chaise. He sat opposite, in his usual chair. The session had run over; it was nearly two o’clock. The next patient had arrived, but after repeated knocks on the door, he left. Quietly exhilarated, Josephine buttoned up her blouse. After a pause, he tapped the long column of ash from his cigarette into a nearby ashtray and leaned farther back into his chair. It squeaked. “Well,” he said, raising his eyebrows, “what just occurred would have been unthinkable two months ago. But the floodgates have opened.” He smiled sympathetically.