The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  He stroked her cheek. “So astute.” Breaking into his most winning smile, he added, his voice sounding overly loud and false to him, “Go dance—don’t worry about your old papa. Everything’s as it should be.” Then he took a step back, bending slightly at the hip. He wanted Vicki to dance with the others, to revel in the freedom of youth and new love, to revel in all the things he felt he had lost.

  “But Papa,” she said, reaching for him. Lev could see she wasn’t willing to forfeit so easily. What had Geza told her?

  He grinned again, trying to suppress the mounting anxiety that everything would soon crack open. “Where’s Geza? You two should be dancing!”

  Vicki shook her head, exasperated.

  Out of the corner of his eye, Lev saw Franz making his way toward Geza. A stern concentration clouded his face. He went swiftly, economizing each movement. Wolf followed Franz closely, as if tracking him. A sharp unpleasantness pricked Lev’s tongue. Both boys were tense, their eyes bright and jumping. Lev wondered if they were leaving because of some heated argument. He recalled how Wolf had once fancied Vicki. Perhaps Wolf had said something nasty to one of the halutzim. Inside his pocket, Lev clenched Leah’s address.

  Franz reached under his jacket into his vest, his elbow jutting out, which accidentally jabbed Zev’s shoulder. Geza was pouring a drink for a man wearing a panama hat. The stream of brown liquid tunneled from the bottle into a long glass. Zev swung around and punched Franz in the neck, missing his face, but Franz kept moving, and the short jerky way Franz’s arm had reached into his vest sent Lev into motion. He pulled Vicki down to the ground and then leapt up, pushing a man in wire-rim glasses aside, reaching for Geza. At the deafening sound of gunfire, Lev embraced him, the two of them hurtling to the floor. The woman in the headscarf screamed. Lev clutched Geza’s chest and saw blood. A smarting pain seared through his shoulder and forearm. His whole body throbbed. Some of the women were crying. Overturned chairs blocked the doorway.

  Zev cursed at the top of his voice, “Where did that bastard run to?”

  Franz and Wolf were gone.

  Zev, Geza, and a pack of men ran out into the night. The front door swung open. Vicki clutched Lev’s good arm and yelled for help. Maya was comforting the woman with the headscarf, who was still screaming. Her baby crawled the perimeter of the room, playing with a wooden spoon. Someone had knocked over the radio and it now lay on its side, emitting static. Whiteness started pressing down around his eyes, and Lev faintly asked someone to call an ambulance. Vicki nodded and said something he didn’t understand.

  “Wait,” Lev whispered, gripping Vicki’s wrist. “Is Geza all right?”

  She nodded, tears streaming down her face. Then she faded out of his field of vision, replaced by the rabbi’s wife, who bent over him and took his face in her cool hands. “It’s mainly your shoulder. The ambulance will be here soon. Can you feel your right arm?”

  “I think,” he said, his mouth as dry as cotton.

  The woman moved his head onto her lap and elevated his arm above his chest. “Hold it up?”

  He nodded, staring at the chandelier, which was missing two lightbulbs.

  She ripped off the arm of her blouse and tightly wrapped the silken sleeve around his wound. “What is your level of pain, on a scale of one to ten?” she demanded.

  “Ridiculous questions,” Lev sputtered. He noticed his mother peering over them. She looked anxious and shook her head. “No matter what the circumstances, he always has to argue.”

  The rabbi’s wife smiled, and again Lev noticed her crowded bottom teeth—he wondered why some people had good teeth and others didn’t.

  Ambulance bells rang down the street, coming closer.

  47

  After two weeks, Lev came home from the hospital, his arm in a sling. He had suffered nerve, muscle, and tissue damage. Shredded tendons. The exit wound, larger than the entry wound, was healing more slowly than expected. After the long hours of surgery during which the bullet was excised, they dressed the wound and then immobilized the limb in a plaster of Paris splint. Lev now carried his plastered limb around in a sling over his chest. The doctor told him he would lose movement in his arm, but how much he couldn’t yet say. Right now, it just felt numb, and it itched. When he returned home, Marthe was the only one who acted normally. She made up his room with flowers from the garden and fresh-smelling sheets. She fed him barley soup and prepared his favorite dish, knishes, or as Marthe called them, dumplings, filled with potato and cheese, slightly browned in the oven so that the edges were crispy.

  Vicki floated through the house, her eyes glazed with tears, her feet encased in a pair of burgundy slippers she refused to take off. She always looked as if she had just been crying, her eyes swollen and bloodshot. She had decided to move home until things settled, but the settling of anything seemed quite far off to Lev.

  Franz had disappeared the night of the shooting, along with Wolf. Zev, Geza, and a handful of Zionists scoured the city for them. The Berlin police were also on the search. They paid visits to Josephine, Lev, and Vicki at the house, questioning each one of them about Franz’s whereabouts.

  Vicki assured Lev and Josephine that Geza was not planning to kill Franz. “After all, Franz will be his brother-in-law. But he wants justice. We all do,” she said, adding that Geza still feared for his life, and that Wolf, not Franz, was most likely the true culprit.

  Yesterday, when Geza came to the house to visit Vicki, he took Lev aside and told him there was a warrant out for Franz’s arrest, for attempted murder. The Berlin police were searching for Wolf too, as an accomplice. Geza promised Lev they did not want more blood. “If it wasn’t for you, I would be dead,” he added. “And he could return anytime to kill me. With his SA brothers.”

  Lev shook his head, feeling the burden of standing, as if he could barely support himself. He wanted to lie down, drink something cold. His arm throbbed. He steadied himself against the marble table in the entryway. “You know, when I found out he’d joined the SA, I did nothing.”

  Geza pursed his lips. “Yes, but …”

  Lev clasped Geza’s arm. “And now he’s scared, on the run somewhere—he never would have done it without Wolf. You must understand this.”

  Geza gently removed Lev’s hand. “But he did it.”

  Lev sighed, thinking about this conversation with Geza, padding through the halls in his socks. He hadn’t the strength to ask Geza if he’d said anything to Vicki about Leah—and it seemed Vicki had moved on to more pressing matters anyway. She’d spent many hours alone with Lev, sitting at his bedside, and she could have easily used such an opportunity to ask him again about the secrets she knew he kept from her, but she didn’t. Instead, Vicki fussed over him, fluffing his pillow and worrying that he didn’t eat enough, imploring the nurses for better food, different food. She insisted on shaving his stubble and even used his favorite lemony aftershave so he smelled more like himself, less like starched hospital sheets.

  Lev stopped short, listening to Vicki and Geza whispering in the sitting room. They thought he was sleeping upstairs and had left the door half-open. They disagreed over something, and, no longer whispering, their voices grew sharp. Lev took small quiet breaths, pressing his back against the wall.

  They talked about how their trip to Palestine had been delayed; she and Geza planned to take another ship in a month’s time, but Vicki felt uncertain.

  “I can’t leave now. Papa’s barely healed. And Franz’s disappearance …”

  Geza sighed heavily. “Vicki. Listen to me. That is precisely why we must leave as soon as possible. If there ever was a sign—”

  “A sign, a sign. Yes, I know—more Jews are getting killed, lynched. This is only the beginning.”

  “If your brother had another chance, he would try to kill me again.”

  Lev heard Vicki emit a hoarse sob. He hung his head—of course, some would call his son a murderer. And now it was too late—Franz had slipped out of his grasp into the han
ds of violence. Franz, half-human, half-animal, winged with the head of a lion, groaning in the moonlight, flickered before him. Yes, he had been forewarned. He should have known.

  Vicki stood up from the sofa, and Lev backed away from the door. She paced the room. “The police have been notified of Franz’s disappearance. They’ll find him and throw him in prison, or worse. But I know it was Wolf. Wolf was the one who put him up to it. He’s always acted strangely toward me.”

  “Vicki, I can’t wait here like a sitting duck, wondering when I’ll get a bullet through my back.”

  “Please don’t hate him!”

  Lev watched through the doorjamb. Geza now walked over to the window, where Vicki stood, her arms crossed over her chest. He whispered something into her hair and embraced her. She dissolved into his arms, and he rested his chin on her head, his eyes scanning the street.

  Well, Lev thought, they will leave Berlin. Geza will convince her. And he was right—it was dangerous for him to stay here. Vicki would see this when she calmed down, when things settled, as they all kept saying. Lev smiled halfheartedly. At least he still had Leah’s address in New York. When they released him from the hospital, his clothes had been folded into a neat square bundle, wrapped in brown paper, tied with a white string. His shirt was gone, but his trousers and socks, watch, wallet, cufflinks, and bowtie had been preserved. Before Marthe could get to it, Lev unwrapped the package, and as if receiving a present, he found the scrap of paper still inside his front trouser pocket, her address on it. Thank God. He stowed it away in the top drawer of his bedside table. When he went to sleep, he stared at the closed drawer, knowing that when he was better, he would get to New York.

  Since Franz’s disappearance, Josephine had fallen into a veritable depression. She stopped changing out of her silk pajamas. She took all her meals in bed on a tray, leaving most of the food untouched. When Lev suggested she at least rouse herself to see Dr. Dührkoop, she cast him a withering stare, as if the very notion was wildly insulting.

  “What good can the good doctor do me now? Franz is gone, and it’s my fault he’s gone,” she had said.

  When he tried to console her, she burst into hysterics, moaning how she knew something was wrong, could sense it, but she’d been overly involved in her own affairs, too selfish to detect his troubles budding before her. The only thing that comforted her was the idea of hiring a private investigator to find Franz and to inquire into the events of that night. Perhaps he’d been threatened prior to the party? Perhaps it was an act of self-defense? Perhaps Zev, and the rest of those Zionists, had provoked him to violence? When Lev said no, he had been at the party and had seen it happen, and nothing of the sort took place, Josephine sunk back into her soft pillows and covered her face with her hand, and whispered, “I’m tired. Leave me alone.”

  Lev sat on the edge of her bed, his arm in the sling. Even though he was the one who had been shot, Josephine suffered a harder blow. She rambled on about Father Balthazar, how right he had been, how she should return there. But she never left the house. Her migraines multiplied. She couldn’t sleep at night, so she slept fitfully during the day. For once, she and Vicki agreed on something: it was Wolf, not Franz, who held the blame. Wolf became the house villain, the dark force tearing their family apart, the one they must steel themselves against. But Lev knew better—he blamed Franz and he loved him. He wanted to scream at his son and rock him in his arms. The women, though, they had to take sides.

  48

  One month later, Geza, Vicki, and Lev drove from Berlin to Hamburg. Nothing had been settled. Franz was still missing. If the police found him, he would be charged with attempted murder, followed by a prison sentence. How long the imprisonment would last they still didn’t know. Josephine threw herself into daily hysterical fits, even when Lev told her there were ways to appeal this. Lev, when he spoke with his lawyers, took copious notes to understand each eventuality. He had only just begun to familiarize himself with the new language of legal jargon, and he kept turning over various terms in his mind, as if the repetition would provide some clarity. He had even arranged a meeting with Wolf’s mother, who had received him coldly and told him she knew nothing of her son’s whereabouts, although there was a rumor Wolf had fled to Vienna.

  The drive had been long and silent as each one of them contemplated what lay ahead. Because of Lev’s arm, still in a sling, Geza drove, and Vicki sat in the backseat, with suitcases piled up next to her. In three hours, Vicki and Geza would be boarding the RMS Mauretania. The steamship would travel up the Elbe into the mouth of the river, which spilled out into the open, unprotected North Sea. They would then pass through two straits: the Strait of Dover and the Strait of Gibraltar. Once they entered the Mediterranean, Palestine would be waiting for them, blazing with harsh heat. Or maybe not. Maybe they would find refuge in the shaded warmth of olive groves. Maybe they would eat oranges for lunch and swim in the sea. Maybe they would marvel at the fecundity of the summer harvest and feast at a long wooden table, sharing bread and wine and stories. This is what Lev hoped for her, despite his misgivings, despite his fear that she would live a difficult life full of rocky soil and blistering sun, of backbreaking labor and little luxury. He had not prepared Vicki for this. He had not brought her up to work with her hands, to chop onions in a kitchen filled with other women chopping onions. He tried to act happy, but he was not. And she knew it. But what could he say, after Franz had tried to kill Geza?

  There was nothing left to say. Except farewell, safe journey, write often, at least once a week—I’ll worry otherwise. I’ll become sick with worry. No—he couldn’t say this last part because he was already sick with worry, they all were, after the shooting. Instead of the jubilant car ride and the confetti-filled departure Lev knew Vicki had imagined for herself, they were somber, introspective, each peering out a separate car window.

  He had to appear calm and encouraging. It was his role and they expected him to fulfill it, even on such a morning as this, with the fog clearing and the cargo ships docking in the port, dwarfing Vicki and Geza. They gazed up at the massive steamers that appeared like moving buildings with rows and rows of little windows out of which an occasional person would stare down at them.

  Perched on their suitcases, Geza and Vicki fussed over their belongings, wondering where Zev and Maya were. Lev teased, “Maybe they changed their mind at the last minute, decided Berlin wasn’t all bad.” But then he stopped, noting the anxiety on their faces. Of course. They imagined something much worse: Wolf and his SA friends had resurfaced, taken Zev by surprise.

  Vicki frowned. Geza slid their passports into his vest pocket.

  At least, Lev thought, lighting a cigarette, the Mediterranean was warm and temperate, more hospitable than the Baltic or the North Sea. Taking off his jacket, he winced. The dull pain in his shoulder caught him off guard, but the wound was healing. Slowly. Despite tissue damage, there was minimal infection. His jacket hung off one arm. Vicki was too preoccupied with organizing various documents to notice. Geza chatted with another family about the trip over, what supplies he had packed, and the family nodded at him with trust and approval. They glanced over at Lev, and Geza explained that Lev wasn’t coming. The father and mother, Jews from the east, gave him a sympathetic glance, their faces full of pity.

  The morning turned into a humid, overcast day with the sense that the sky was pressing down on them. They stood together on the dock, eyeing the gleaming white Mauretania, with its woven life rafts dangling from either side of the deck. Up top, the crew arranged sun chairs for the more fortunate passengers, and Lev felt a small shred of comfort that at least, if Vicki wanted, she could lie in one of those chairs and take in the air. Other families were saying good-bye. Other girls Vicki’s age hugged their mothers and fathers. Lev stared at the parents with a sense of shared loss. He almost felt the urge to ask them about their children, why they were leaving, but he stopped himself from making such a sad spectacle, from seeking commiseration with stranger
s.

  “Oh, Papa. Let me help you.” Vicki slid his jacket off his arm.

  “Thank you, liebling.”

  She gave him a halfhearted smile. “You’ll come visit?”

  “And stay in a hut without a proper toilet?”

  “You make it sound so barbaric.”

  “Well,” Lev said dryly, “it is.”

  She swept the hair out of her face and tried to appear as if his comment didn’t bother her.

  Lev gestured to Geza, who was immersed in a discussion with the same family about how best to combat seasickness. “He’s good at taking care of things.”

  She folded Lev’s jacket over her arm. “We take care of each other.”

  Lev murmured, “Of course.”

  She touched his good arm, and he felt her motherly gaze upon him. “You’ll be all right?”

  “Yes,” he repeated automatically, embracing her. He inhaled her clean hair, closing his eyes.

  She looked up at him, touched his face. “You’ll send word—if Franz turns up?”

  “Of course I will, liebling.”

  Already, a queue had formed alongside the docked ship. The passengers eyed the vessel as if it were a living breathing entity that would either destroy or brighten their lives. The crew members lowered the gangplank. And that sound, the distinctive whistle of steam releasing through the smokestacks, flooded Lev with a sharp fear. He hugged Vicki closer. His shoulder throbbed.

  Geza hovered on the outskirts of their embrace before stating rather formally, “We should collect our things.”

  Vicki let go of him, her lips pursed. He could tell she was trying not to cry, and he yearned to hold her a little longer.

  People started boarding. Geza and Vicki stood there restlessly, wondering if they should get on too. “I don’t want to be late,” Vicki said, glancing around at the other families lining up.

  “What difference does it make? The berths are reserved. In a few weeks, you’ll be wishing you could jump off that ship.”