The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  A high whistle interrupts Josephine wading through the wheat. A woman with a scarf tied around her head calls to the cats. Lev knows her. She arrives every morning at eight. She pulls a tin barrel full of milk through the wide path of the cemetery until she sets it down and mixes it with water. The cats follow behind her, a roving cloak of fur, waiting for the watery milk.

  The sun rises. Lev takes off his linen jacket and rolls up his shirtsleeves, revealing his weathered skin. Bulbous blue veins run down his forearms. His arms used to be so white, as pale as birch trees, his mother would say, but after eighteen years here, they have browned, like leather left out in the sun. Good enough for skinning, he thinks soberly.

  The cats lap up their breakfast, crowding around the crone’s skinny ankles. Lev’s stomach grumbles. It’s time for medialunes and café con leche. In his first years here, he missed certain things: the flat matches he used to buy in Berlin that fitted his waistcoat pocket, his small cigars, and black tea in a glass, Russian style, with mountains of sugar poured into it. He used to ask for black tea in a glass at his customary café on Avenida de Mayo, and they laughed at him good-naturedly, but brought it out steaming hot, as requested. Still, they cajoled him into trying café con leche. They would serve it on the house. After so many times, he grew used to the milky coffee and now prefers it. Strange, how certain tastes change, even after so many years, even when he used to think, Who can eat dessert for breakfast? But here he is, eating the buttery bread, stuffing it into his bearded mouth, enjoying the rinse of milk and sugar and coffee sliding over his tongue. Little flakes of pastry fall onto his dark trousers. He dusts them off dismissively.

  This is the way things are now: breakfasting at “his” café every morning after a stroll through the cemetery. Because he’s always up before sunrise, he converses with the whores. Sometimes, they tell him their troubles: an errant boyfriend, a cousin who won’t move out, that they’re too busy or not busy enough. He brings them cigarettes. The women are beautifully tired, especially when they have taken off their shoes, their high heels dangling from their fingertips as they make their way home.

  And watching blond Germans, former soldiers of the Reich, and dark Jews eating in the same café amuses him. Their proximity. And now it is the blond German who will be hunted, tracked down, interrogated. At least this is what Lev hopes for, even if it means his own son would be hunted. But Franz died before the war even began.

  Three weeks after Vicki and Geza left on the Mauretania, the Berlin police found Franz working on a farm in Grunewald forest. When they brought him home, his face was dirty and rough, his skin weather-beaten. His blue eyes stared at Lev with incredulity. He cried in his mother’s arms and said Wolf had talked him into it, a terrible mistake. Josephine rocked him and shushed him and said of course, Wolf was to blame. Their tears intermingled. Before Lev’s eyes, they fused into one, mother and son, as Franz burrowed his head into the folds of Josephine’s silk robe.

  They threw Franz in prison for five years. For five years, Lev battled to get him out. The complexities of the case multiplied—the murder weapon had vanished, Wolf had fled the country while Franz stood for the kind of disobedience the government insisted on squashing, although more and more, Berlin flourished with bright violence. Bloody riots. KPD demonstrations. Semitic-looking pedestrians attacked at random on train platforms.

  In the midst of this, Lev wrote Leah a letter. He explained how he had received her address from Geza two years too late. He wrote about what had happened to Franz. At the end, he added: When he’s released, I’ll come for you. Wait for me? Please wait for me, he added, not wanting to sound presumptuous, to demand so much after so long. He didn’t know if she still loved him or if she had found someone else. He didn’t know anything about her life until she wrote back.

  November 11, 1928

  11 Rivington Street

  New York, NY

  Dear Lev,

  I am overjoyed to receive your letter. I think of you every night, when the moon shines brightly down through the window, the way it once did in Mitau, lighting up the birch trees. I wonder if there’s a place for us, if there ever will be. And yet I understand how you must sort out the trouble with Franz—you cannot abandon your son during such a time. You must help him. Get him out of the prison and lead him away from violence.

  My days are very busy working as a seamstress in a small shop. At least it’s not a factory, but it’s sweltering in the summer and frigid in the winter. We still live with Misha and his family in a small apartment with two rooms—there’s not much space, but we help each other. Sasha and I sleep in a Murphy bed—have you heard of this? It disappears into the wall during the day, and then at night, we pull it from the same wall. Sasha thrives in this metropolis. He plays baseball in the middle of the street with other boys and he draws at the dining table. Intricate sketches. He wants to become an artist, but I want something better for him—a lawyer or a doctor. He delivers newspapers early in the morning before school. I have included a photograph of him with this letter. Certain expressions, the way he shakes his head when he’s displeased, remind me of you.

  We have been lucky enough to meet some distant relatives from the old country. Benjamin and Rose Dubrowensky from Riga, but they now go by Dubrow. They are planning to open a cafeteria in Brooklyn next year, and they have already promised Sasha a job clearing tables. Rose is Misha’s second cousin and she married Benjamin a few years ago. Benjamin is from Belarus and has taken an interest in helping Sasha—they can’t have children, which I suppose is one of the reasons for their generosity.

  I yearn for the day when you will find me. I might be old by then. My black hair has already faded, and living here, I don’t laugh as often. But perhaps there will still be a trace of the girl you knew in Mitau.

  I am waiting.

  Love,

  Leah

  Lev still carries the small black-and-white photograph that tumbled out of her letter. It’s in his wallet, faded and frayed from too much handling. His son balances on a wooden plank over muddy tracks, with a large sack slung over his shoulder. He wears lace-up boots and a short wool coat, and he’s about to throw a rolled-up newspaper over a clipped hedge. He looks suspicious, his hooded eyes staring into the camera from under his cap. The weather seems damp and cold, the trees bare. Lev has always wondered where this picture was taken and who took it. Somewhere beyond the skyscrapers and busy streets, perhaps a neighboring town outside the city. His son’s eyes, rounded and dark, both accept his circumstances and rebel against them.

  In 1933, Hitler took control of the Berlin police and released all prisoners affiliated with the SA and SS. When Franz was freed that spring, Josephine emerged from her long dark depression, and Lev began to plan for New York.

  Franz slept in his old room. He enjoyed the comfort of Marthe’s cooking, and he hesitated to leave the house. Josephine made Lev promise not to mention the night of the shooting. “He’s fragile,” she kept reminding him. But, as Lev predicted, after a few weeks, Franz started leaving the house again and disappearing for long afternoons. His place at the dinner table was once again empty. He had rejoined the SA as part of the Hilfspolizei (Auxiliary Police). He handled his parents with care, explaining how Göring had recently uncovered plans for a Communist uprising. During these conversations, color flooded his cheeks. His blue eyes flashed. Josephine listened, her face frozen in horror. She begged Lev to pull him out of the SA, away from all political activity. “I will talk to him,” Lev had said, knowing such talk would do nothing, turning over in his mind the booking of his berth to New York, the warmth of Leah’s hand in his, the fluttering of her soft eyelashes across his face.

  Two months later, Franz was shot in the chest three times. It happened when he emerged from a tenement building on Bernauer Strasse, a working-class part of town. Early dawn, the rosy sunrise illuminated the ugly apartment blocks. Franz paused in the doorway of the building, lingering above the chipped cement steps. His dress shi
rt billowed open and he started to button it. Fiery hues drenched the sky, the intensity of such colors reflecting the passionate night he’d just spent with Manfred. He had two more buttons left, a tie folded in his back pocket, when the bullets tore through him.

  The night before, Lev and Josephine had sat at the dinner table, wondering if Franz would join them. Lev remembered how Josephine was nervous, pulling on her rings, asking Lev, even though she knew he didn’t know, where Franz was. Franz had not been sleeping at home, and every morning, Josephine swung open the bedroom door, distressed by the sight of Franz’s perfectly made bed. Lev shook his head. His thoughts were far away, focused on one central task: he was leaving tomorrow for New York. It had all been arranged. Josephine thought it was for business, for importing linen.

  Early the next morning, Lev’s suitcase was packed, resting open on top of his bed. He rang for a cab and waited for it to come. Marthe knocked softly on his bedroom door, and he thought he was leaving forever. Finally, after years of deliberations, of creating imaginary business deals in New York only to erase them, he had decided to leave Berlin and find Leah. But that morning Marthe didn’t announce the cab. Instead, staring down at the carpet, she told him Franz had died last night. An officer was waiting downstairs in the foyer. Fat tears trickled down her neck. Josephine was still asleep; she didn’t want to disturb her.

  “It’s an awful shock,” Marthe had said, her hand over her heart.

  “An awful shock,” Lev had repeated, sitting down on the bed.

  Perhaps the Communists wanted to make a point. Perhaps the Zionists had been waiting for their opportunity to avenge Franz’s attempted murder of Geza. Perhaps, perhaps. The shooter was never found. The only discovery the police made was where Franz had slept that night, where he had most likely slept for countless nights: the apartment of Manfred Berres, a construction worker and part-time bartender, twenty-four years old. He said Franz was an old friend who needed a place to stay. He didn’t know anything about his political activity. They simply drank together and played cards. Manfred had lurked on the edges of the crowd during the funeral, fists stuffed into his pockets. Staring at the fresh brown soil thrown over the coffin, he wouldn’t meet anyone’s gaze. He didn’t stay for the whole service but walked off into the bright harsh day, his eyes trained on his paint-splashed boots, his shoulders hunched. He reminded Lev of an old man who had lost some vital part of himself as he shuffled off into the trees, zigzagging aimlessly between them.

  Franz could be here, in this café, Lev thought bitterly, motioning for the waiter. The young Argentine came over, bowing slightly. He was handsome, with gleaming dark hair slicked back with gel. His eyes were smiling and he asked Lev if he wanted more coffee. Franz was about the age of this young man when he died. He would be forty-five now. Lev couldn’t stop himself from calculating his son’s imaginary age, comparing him to other young men he spotted in cafés, on the street. Does he really resemble Franz? he would wonder while buying tomatoes at the open-air market. He has his cheekbones, but his eyes are different. And then he would walk away, tomatoes in hand.

  After Franz’s death, Lev delayed his departure for New York. A few months turned into a year. Suddenly, it was 1934 and people were leaving. People were jumping out of windows. People were discussing the merits of Shanghai, the only city in the world that didn’t require an entry visa. People were selling off armoires, silverware, Meissen china. People were asking far-flung relatives to write letters of recommendation so they could move to England, America, or South Africa, where they could work as domestic servants when they had only ever employed domestic servants. Lev tried to get a visa for the United States, but for that year and the following one, the quota was already filled. Lev told Josephine she should leave Berlin too because war was coming. “You’ve always enjoyed Paris, and you have cousins there,” he suggested. But she refused to leave the city where her son’s body lay. She refused to leave her last surviving aunt. She refused to leave her girlhood memories of the Kaiser and the Empress, even though the red-and-white banners, with swastikas fluttering in the wind, blotted out any semblance of another kind of past. And she refused to leave Dr. Dürhkoop, who had turned out to be a much more devoted and enduring lover than either Lev or Josephine had anticipated. He wanted to marry Josephine. And he did not care for children, so the fact that she was over forty was a great relief to him. One of Lev’s most vivid memories—he could not count the number of times he replayed it—was when they came to see him, the good doctor and his wife. In making their love public, they acted as giddy as children. They asked him to consider a divorce. Their tone was both pleading and decisive. Josephine sat across from him with a strange ecstatic light in her eyes, a light he had not seen in so many years that his chest caved, and he threw up his hands and said, “Mazel tov!” All three of them burst into laughter, relieved, elated, slightly embarrassed. And then the doctor said with a tinge of formality, “It’s for the best, with the new race laws.”

  “New race laws?” Lev repeated. He had heard about these new laws, but there were so many proclamations flooding the paper and the radio, he paid little attention to the news back then. The doctor straightened his back and shifted in his chair, and explained how the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriages as well as intercourse between Jews and Germans, and so by releasing Josephine from their marriage, Lev was complying with the law. They were asking him out of politeness. And then Josephine added that the law also forbade the employment of German females under forty-five in Jewish households. “So Marthe’s coming with us.”

  “Marthe’s over fifty, at least!”

  Josephine sniffed and said something about how Marthe most likely would prefer it.

  “I see,” Lev had said, although he did not see. He felt as if he was newly blind, especially after losing Marthe, which stung sharply. She had always been on his side. Next, Josephine would demand the monarch butterfly paperweight or the ivory hare with the amber eyes he so lovingly would hold in the palm of his hand.

  A year later, after failing to procure a visa for the United States, Lev was lucky just to get out of the country, let alone choose where he wanted to go. Quotas to immigrate to England or America were filled, which was explained in a labyrinth of bureaucratic jargon from the American and English embassies and consulates, where queues wrapped and curled around blocks. It was risky to queue for too long. The SS randomly plucked people from the line and bundled them into police trucks; they ended up in a detention camp, a work camp, or some other unidentified place.

  He could go to Palestine, but judging from Vicki’s letters, it was a rough and hard country, no place for old men. The other choices were Australia or Argentina. He had heard that criminals shipped from England had founded Australia, and he pictured their troublemaking descendants hungrily roaming the outback. So he picked Argentina. Overnight, punitive taxes for leaving the country were magically invented. Lev had to declare all properties, savings, pensions, and valuables before he was granted, by the Office of the Security Service for Jewish Emigration, a stamp in his passport that read Einmalige Ausreise nach CSR: good for a single journey.

  He arrived at the port of Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, in December 1935. The air was warm and balmy. First thing, he took off his jacket and unbuttoned the first two buttons of his oxford shirt. Summer in December, he thought, surveying the long stretch of white, hot sand. A few people ran into the water and then sallied back out again, taunting the lapping shoreline.

  Lev stirs his coffee with a little spoon, which emits a tingling sound as the metal hits the porcelain. Later he had learned, in a somewhat desperate letter from Josephine, that the doctor had left her. Apparently, because she had been married to a Jew the doctor felt this tainted him professionally. He had also stopped receiving dinner invitations from certain social circles because they now found him to be an unsuitable guest at their table. Lev couldn’t help the small cruel smile that played on his lips when h
e read her tiny scrawl, the franticness of having been left pulsating through the intricate cursive. Of course she didn’t dare ask outright if she could join him in Argentina, but there was a searching, hopeful quality to the letter that suggested she would come if he asked her to. He wrote back: I’m so sorry to hear of your troubles. I wish you well in these turbulent times. Fondly, Lev. Maybe, when the bombs started falling, Josephine had escaped to a friend’s bunker in Grunewald forest. Maybe she was trapped under a pile of rubble in the middle of Berlin. Maybe the Russians rolled over her body with their tanks. Maybe she took a holiday to Switzerland or Sweden and never came back. He didn’t know. He only knew Josephine’s polite and somewhat apologetic letters stopped arriving by the spring of 1943. After that, there was no trace of her, as if she had never been his wife. He takes a sip. The milk has made the black coffee cloudy and beige.

  The door of the café jangles and in walks a girl who reminds him of Vicki, when Vicki was young. The short, dark hair revealing delicate white earlobes. The curious, quick eyes. The easy grace with which she surveys the pastries behind the glass and gestures to the swirled Danish. She takes it and pays in one smooth sinuous movement. They live in Tel Aviv now, having only survived the kibbutz one year. After the birth of their child, a sickly boy named Theodore, they felt different about their national obligations. Lev knew this would happen, but of course he had to sit back and watch it, witnessing through her turbulent letters all the strife and worry they put themselves through when he could have simply told them kibbutz life was unsustainable, except for the most ardent. Reluctantly at first, Geza became a shop owner. Now they have five shops scattered throughout Tel Aviv that sell household goods, and they are quite profitable. Who knew dishcloths and peppermills and sieves would be so popular? Vicki teaches French at a high school. She is a good teacher; engaging, encouraging, the students love her. Lev remembers with a half smile how much she hated French. He tells anyone who will listen about Vicki, his daughter the French teacher who lives in Tel Aviv. Theodore has grown strong and healthy, and they say he looks like Lev, the same mistrustful eyes, the same olive skin and wavy chestnut hair. In the fall, he will start at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He wants to be an archaeologist. Good, Lev murmurs, good.