The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  Vicki did hope the kibbutz, Beit Alfa, would be different. And she knew, as Geza reminded her, that she should be thankful to Zev. He had arranged a place for them here, at the hachshara training center in Skaby, southeast of Berlin. Hachshara, Vicki learned, the Hebrew word for “training,” was the name for Zionist preparatory and training centers where young people received instruction at no charge prior to immigrating to Palestine. More and more Jews were applying to make aliyah, and the Jewish Agency for Palestine guaranteed a certain immigration quota, which the British mandate authorized. But Geza pointed out the most important thing: if they immigrated through one of these centers, they could make the quota and not pay a thing. Otherwise, it was very expensive.

  At least this training center was located on a sprawling old farming estate. The Hechalutz had dormitories for the Young Pioneers built on the property. Agricultural chores were carried out in the morning. In the afternoons, they attended classes on Jewish subjects including religion and Hebrew. Then the evenings, called “social evenings,” were dedicated to Jewish spiritual life—traditions, customs, rituals, all of which Vicki knew nothing about to the point of embarrassment. Not knowing a word of Hebrew, she didn’t understand the songs and poems, but she noticed most of the others acted the same way, mumbling their way through the words, mashing them together, and then ending with gusto on a certain syllable to convince themselves and others of their dedication. In Skaby alone, eighty chaverim waited to immigrate. You were supposed to serve two years before immigrating, but somehow Zev had gotten Geza and Vicki on the passenger list for the Pacific. They were to set sail in June. Even though Vicki knew she should feel lucky, her heart pounded with the same question pounding through everyone’s heart here: If it works, and we really get a place on the ship, what awaits us?

  In the white moonlight, she lay in her cot, next to Maya, who slept peacefully, asking herself this question—what would it really be like? She pictured sandbars, the lapping of turquoise waters, cerulean skies, stone walls bleached the color of bone, and muscular Jews striding, their tanned arms swinging, singing their Hebrew songs. Or at least this was what she was supposed to imagine. What they wanted her to imagine, the Mayas and Zevs of the movement. And what, in her worst moments, in the small hours of morning, her mind racing, her chest coated in sweat, did she actually imagine? No shade, save for a lone and withered palm. Scorching sun burning her scalp as she picked tomatoes with bloodied fingertips. Communal bathrooms and shared meals. Her skin perpetually coated with a fine layer of dust kicked up by the wind.

  Punching her pillow into a shape that would induce sleep, she drew in a sharp breath at the thought of leaving her father. It wasn’t as easy as they said, leaving family behind to start a new family, a different, better kind of family. Her father—their after-dinner debates, the way he gave her flowers on her birthday and took her to the ballet, his wry smile, always ready to engage her in witty repartee. Even for her mother and Franz, she felt a pang of regret, leaving behind the familial disputes and irritations for new disputes and irritations in an unfamiliar terrain, with those who did not share her blood. And good-bye to Berlin, good-bye to all that? Maya called it a mechanical city, a frigid inferno with its snub-nosed cab drivers and rivers of automobiles honking at nothing, but she didn’t see, or want to see, the wide shaded boulevards of Charlottenburg, window shopping at Wertheim’s, the ladies in their ermine collars and pillbox hats, the placid waters of the Wannsee in the height of summer, the jazz bars and the dancing girls and the sidewalk cafés crammed with people who were endlessly arguing, debating, and contesting the ideas of the age.

  No, she didn’t see it. Vicki watched Maya sleep, her thin arm flung over her face. She snored lightly, joining the chorus of snorers. A milky purple light filtered in through the dusty windows. It was almost six. Soon there’d be a knock on the door, followed by a general rousing: stretching and yawning and disheveled hair. Bleary-eyed and barefoot, they would stumble over to the sinks, splash cold water on their faces, and prepare for another day of physical labor. Vicki savored these last moments before the sound of that knock—it felt luxurious to just lie here in bed, the pillow balled up under the crook of her arm. Thankfully, she only had one more week tending to those calves. And then they would return to Berlin, and she would prepare to leave. Forever.

  Last night after dinner, after Zev’s whole speech about Labor Zionism, she and Geza had stood out on the porch, watching the hazy sunset disappear. He smoked a pipe, a new affectation he’d taken up. Vicki suspected he thought it made him appear more manly, older and world-weary, when in fact, it looked a bit silly sticking out of his mouth as if he were a sea captain.

  She sighed, leaning against the post. “How does animal husbandry pave the way to my Zionist future?” She was half joking, but at the same time her voice cracked and she felt tears well up in her eyes.

  “Oh, Viv,” he said, coming up behind her. He called her Viv now, short for Aviva. It sounded more palatable to both of them. He wrapped his arms around her waist and perched his chin on her shoulder.

  “Do you miss your tutus and rose petals?” he teased, alluding to a ballet recital where she’d performed, in white tulle, a variation from La Sylphide.

  Her throat tightened. From inside the main house, she heard them singing in Hebrew. Under her blouse, Geza’s hands spread across her stomach. “The thing is, ballet is a—”

  She sighed. “Bourgeois fantasy. I know.”

  “Viv, I sympathize.”

  She turned around to face him.

  The singers stopped, and then someone began to recite a poem.

  “Do you really?”

  He tucked a loose strand of hair back into her floral scarf. “Yes, really.”

  She wanted to shake him. He always relied on this light teasing tone, on his lopsided grin, even when things felt serious. Especially when things felt serious. Feeling the heat rise in her chest, she was about to tell him that maybe she couldn’t do it—she barely had any skills and learning Hebrew was impossible. A backward language, writing from right to left. It made no sense. None of it did.

  The strange intonation of words drifted through the screened-in windows. They listened for a moment. Then Geza admitted that of course it would be very hard for her, at first, to leave behind such a comfortable Europeanized existence. She noticed how he avoided saying bourgeois existence, as that phrase had been so overused it ceased to mean anything.

  She leaned her head against Geza’s chest, feeling herself forfeit to him even though the fight she wanted to start still simmered within her. The voices picked up again, and this time singing was accompanied by the slapping of a tambourine. Geza started rocking her back and forth, humming under his breath. She resisted, but he twirled her out and then rolled her back into him. He plucked off her scarf and started waving it in the air as he crossed one foot over the other, dancing a circle around her.

  “Geza, stop!”

  He danced more wildly, his arms curving over an imaginary ball, and then, flexing his palms, he shot his arms upward. Having donned her scarf, he stomped his feet, his hips sashaying from side to side as he repeated this wavelike arm movement.

  Vicki leaned against the post.

  “C’mon.”

  Suppressing a smile, she shrugged.

  “You should try.”

  She made a disparaging gesture. “This?”

  “Folk dancing, yes.” He pulled off the scarf.

  Everything was wrong with it—the pronouncement of the heel crashing down first, the lack of turnout, the clapping and the stomping. Peasant dancing. With scarves and tambourines. The dancers actually sunk closer to the ground whereas the whole point of ballet—what she loved—was the elevation, the ethereal, otherworldly quality of floating through space, the boxed tips of her pointe shoes skimming the floor as she bourréed across the stage.

  The sun dipped behind the blue hills. She no longer had to squint at him. Shadows filled the porch with what felt like
a mire of gloom. Geza walked over to the far corner of the porch, gazing out at the wooded forest.

  She went toward him but then stopped. “I’m sorry—it’s just—that type of dancing seems coarse.”

  “A lot of things are going to seem coarse to you.”

  She fiddled with the clasp of her watch—the gold watch her father had given her when she’d turned seventeen. It had an alligator band, bright green, the color of emerald.

  He breathed in deeply, his back expanding under his thin white shirt. “But the taste of freedom is, at first, the same as the taste of bitterness.”

  “Did Zev say that?”

  A line of lemons balanced along the porch railing. He took one and inspected it. “I thought of it. Just now.” He flipped open a pocketknife and cut the lemon in half.

  Vicki stared at the glistening white fibers, the seeds embedded in the flesh. The sharp sour scent spiked her tongue with saliva.

  Without much thought, he threw the halved lemon over the porch railing.

  “That’s a waste.”

  Geza shrugged.

  She came up behind him. “Think of the labor that went into growing that lemon.”

  He swung around, smiling. “My good little pioneer.”

  “Maybe I am,” Vicki said, nestling back into his embrace, listening to the pulse of his heart, to the swish of his blood traveling through his veins.

  He smoothed down her hair, his hand lingering on her earlobe. “You don’t wear earrings anymore.”

  Vicki laughed. “What good would earrings do me here?” Her voice carried an unexpected sharpness.

  “I like the lapis ones, the way they swing around your face.”

  “Papa gave them to me, after I cut my hair.”

  Geza continued smoothing down her hair. Mosquitoes buzzed around them, one landing on Geza’s white shirt, searching for flesh. She flicked it off with her forefinger and sighed. “Do you think he’s devastated, about my leaving Berlin?”

  “Well …” He paused.

  She pressed her ear into his chest, to hear his beating heart again. If only he really understood how much she was giving up. Of course she believed in the cause and standing on the “right side of history,” but the reason she had agreed to give up her studies, her papa, her city of light and shade, had nothing to do with Labor Zionism or the Promised Land. He was her promise—I want to be where you are, she thought. So simple. She pulled him closer. “Why are you quiet?”

  Geza fingered the line of her bra though her shirt. “I had a coffee with your father. A few weeks ago. He’s coming around to the idea of us leaving. You shouldn’t worry so much.”

  She glanced up at him, her eyes filling with tears. “But he seems so sad lately, so troubled. After I leave, who will he joke with? Who will he talk to? God knows how he gets along with Mutti. And Franz barely speaks to him. And why didn’t you mention the coffee until now?”

  Geza scratched his patchy beard and avoided Vicki’s questioning stare. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “We’ll get eaten alive out here.”

  “Wait.” She pressed her body into his. “I don’t want to go back in there yet.”

  In her embrace, his body felt restless and tense. She could tell he was thinking something, something he wouldn’t tell her.

  They stared at each other in the darkness.

  “What is it?” she finally asked.

  “When your father first heard the news, he was upset about our departure. But he’s searching for something too, something he cares about deeply. His life is not only as it appears to you, or to me. What can we really know of another man’s life?”

  “He’s my father,” she said, her voice breaking.

  He cupped her face in his hands. “Even I have secrets,” he said, his tone light and playful again.

  “What secrets?” she asked, wondering why Geza had waited until now to mention the coffee with her father, and what the two of them had spoken about for so long the first time she brought Geza home to meet her family. But he avoided the subject of these discussions with Lev as elegantly as a skilled acrobat, gliding in and out of her questions by posing other questions, until she forgot her initial question or gave up.

  He curled an arm around her waist, guiding her back to the house. “Oh, you know. Once we passed a man who spat out chewing tobacco on the sidewalk, and you said it was a vile habit, so I vowed never to let you know I chewed tobacco. I know you prefer white shirts on men, and so I went out and bought five white shirts. And I don’t even like white shirts! They get soiled so easily. I started listening to jazz, because you love Josephine Baker and Sam Wooding. I borrow the records from Herr Zakrevsky at the boardinghouse and play them in the afternoon, trying to feel what you must feel when you hear the music.” Geza shook his head, laughing to himself. “I can hardly stand it. Gives me a headache.”

  Vicki giggled. “Sam Wooding? Did I really say I liked him?” She poked him in the side. “And I never said I prefer men in white shirts—how ridiculous!”

  Geza buried his face in her hair. “You did. You did,” he murmured, guiding her back into the house filled with singing and light.

  40

  These days, whenever Lev thought of his marriage he saw the ruins of a beautiful Greek temple. Doric columns erected against a sharp blue sky. The pediments still intact with friezes of the Trojan War: fallen heroes, serene goddesses, bucking horses, the overall structure in place despite countless attacks from barbarian tribes. People still visited and placed their hands on the cool stone, channeling what was lost. They said to themselves, taking a snapshot, What a pity. In those days, it must have been spectacular.

  Yes, spectacular, Lev sighed, thinking back to the Ice Palace, where he had first spied her twirling slender figure, and the chance afterward to share a coffee with such a remarkable creature didn’t seem possible back then, especially with sand in his pockets and those stiff new shoes. But it became possible. The opportunity to know her unfolded before him like a runner of the finest silk rippling down a flight of stairs. Boldly, before her governess lumbered over, he had turned down the edge of her glove and kissed the inside of her wrist. Right there in the café. An unthinkable thing to do then. In return, she gave him a breathless glance, conspiratorial in nature, as if they were in it together. He had not seen that look for so long. Not since the war. Not since he returned from it and she pretended to be happy he’d come home, and he pretended to be happy because she acted happy, but she wasn’t and neither was he. Because he returned not more German but less. Without medals, honors, or distinction, without even a wound to show for his bravery. Less German, more Jew. Lev knew what she thought of him behind her silent eyes: shirker.

  After the war, he had started visiting his mother again. He walked the dog when Josephine went to Mass on Sundays. He no longer felt the charm of her Christian ways, no longer admired that little golden cross she wore around her neck. And what did Josephine detect behind his eyes? Leah: the gleaming white birch trees, their bodies moving beneath them. He had left his lifeblood in that small dark corner of the world, scanning the papers for news of Mitau, for any trace, any clue, of Leah.

  With only his memories and dreams, he muddled through the years, convincing himself he was lucky—they hadn’t lost everything in ’23; their healthy children had gone to the best schools. Lev kept getting promoted until he became director of Bremer Woll-Kammerei textiles. Josephine threw dinner parties, entertaining guests with her effortless sparkle, but afterward, alone in their bedroom, she was worn out. The rosy flush of her cheeks evaporated as quickly as all that champagne they drank. People complimented him on his wife’s charms, perhaps imagining how after the party, she was sexually ravenous, fulfilling the promise of her coy smiles and touches on the elbow. If only they knew about the invention of Herr K, how she turned her back to Lev in bed, how the next morning she acted as if everything was fine, pouring coffee from a gleaming chrome pot.

  And Dr. Dürhkoop—what good was he? It had b
een nearly a year of treatment. Lev had seen him strolling through the Tiergarten. He wore his hat tipped at a jaunty angle. When Lev told Josephine how he’d seen the doctor in the park, she’d turned positively red. Maybe, Lev sighed again, he should be the one seeing the doctor. What would the good doctor say about his vivid dreams of Leah, how he’d been going back to that opium den without Otto, because she existed only there, in the ether and the smoke.

  Until now. He could board a steamer next week and find her in New York. Find his son. He had even fabricated an impressive lie to Josephine about visiting a textile firm in lower Manhattan to procure a certain type of linen. Keeping the dates vague, he had created a flexible window of time during which he could leave. Josephine had seemed surprised, making a sarcastic comment about how special the linen must be to travel all that way, but then she didn’t ask about it again. His comings and goings no longer concerned her. But Lev still didn’t know if Leah was in New York for certain, and if she was, he needed an address. He knew the city was geographically small, a long thin stretch of land, but filled with tens of thousands. She might have moved to another city by now. She might never have left Riga at all.

  When Lev met Geza for coffee a few weeks ago, Geza had acted subdued and dismissive. He said he didn’t know where Leah was. She might be living in New York, or she might not. He had seen her two years ago, when she gave him the letter in Riga, and she had not said anything about America. When Lev begged him to find out, at the very least, if she had left for America, Geza nodded reluctantly.