The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  Filled up with coffee and bread, he leaves a few coins on the table and ambles out into the street. The strong sun hits his face; another bright day, the same enduring blue. Rain will not come until April. Until then, the days will be bone dry, his sitting room filled with sunlight, the windowpanes dusty. He lives in Palermo Viejo, in one of those old ornate family homes, which has been subdivided into apartments. The neighborhood is full of small quiet streets opening into shaded courtyards, cobblestones strewn with the lavender petals of jacaranda trees. Irrepressible bougainvillea sprouts over whitewashed walls. When he looks up, he sees balconies lined with caryatids, private terraces housing potted plants amid chaise lounges for taking a coffee in the sun. He passes front doors made of oak set behind impressive ironwork, doors to protect marble entrance halls and salons with painted ceilings, even if the paint is peeling. There is no tango on the street corners, as all the tourists expect. But there is a horse-drawn cart operated by an old man selling soda water. The cart rattles by Lev’s window every morning to deliver wooden crates stacked with green siphons. Up ahead, Lev spots the knife sharpener, dragging along his whetstone on an odd wheeled contraption. He blows his harmonica to announce his passing. The chemist is opening his doors, and the scent of eucalyptus wafts into the street.

  Lev pauses at the corner, the eucalyptus tingling his nostrils, and debates whether to turn or keep walking. The thought of his apartment, his narrow bed, a late morning nap, followed by a cool shower is appealing, but so is his favorite stationery store, which sells the most expensive and beautiful pens, heavy paper, and leather-bound notebooks that he likes to buy and leave empty. Once, for a lady friend, he purchased one of these notebooks, crimson leather with a little strap that kept it closed. She complained that if he wanted to buy her a book, why did he buy her an empty one? It is a reason, among many others, that this lady friend is no longer a friend. But women, at his age, are a hassle. It takes too much energy, and he has too many memories, to charm a woman into thinking he is the sort of man who enjoys polo and picnicking, who will buy her baubles and insist she looks beautiful in a newly acquired pair of earrings, when she does not.

  He chooses to go home, taking Avenida de Mayo, where in sidewalk cafés Spanish anarchists debate politics. But it’s still early and the chairs stand empty. Waiters are setting tables, opening up umbrellas, and washing the sidewalks with mops and buckets. Lev carefully steps over the soapy rivulets. A man in a white suit is already sipping a glass of sherry. He starts early, Lev thinks. The moment he wakes, the memories must begin again, like a vengeful lover returning each day with more bad news. Lev doesn’t drink until dusk. If he allowed himself to start earlier, he fears it would be as early as this man, maybe earlier. The man senses Lev looking at him. Lev tips his hat and keeps walking. He probably wants company, someone to talk to over a bowl of salted marconas. There’s too much to say, so it’s better to say nothing. Lev’s story, how he got here, where he came from, tires him. He can’t stand to recite it another time, to another stranger.

  Turning the corner, he catches sight of himself in the window of a leather-goods shop for wealthy gauchos. Riding boots and polo belts are on display. An expensive saddle is featured on a wooden horse. A man once tried to sell him an estancia down south, in Las Pampas. This is the land of Jewish cowboys, he kept saying, grinning widely, his mouth full of fillings. What would Josephine say, to find him atop a steed, arrayed in the Western style? A Jew on a horse? That’s what she would say.

  Lev shakes his head, snorting at the memory. He studies himself in the glass. His girth has widened. His nose is more bulbous, and his ears have elongated, as if someone hung weights on the bottom of his earlobes to stretch them. He doesn’t remember when he started to look old, but it has happened. And Leah, what does she look like now? Has she retained her youthfulness, as some women do despite old age, or did youth fall away from her, peel off of her, as it did with Josephine, who, in the end, reminded him of an empty cornhusk. He’ll never know.

  Once, he had a chance to know … if Franz hadn’t been shot, if the quotas weren’t full, if another war hadn’t broken out, if Rose Dubrow hadn’t died of shingles, if …

  By 1939, Benjamin Dubrow owned five cafeterias in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and he was soon opening one in Miami. Murals on the walls. Trays laden with delicacies from the old country. Sunlight streaming through tall glass windows looking out onto busy streets. One long mirrored wall where you could eat and watch who came in and out. A place to nosh, kibitz, and argue the fate of the world was how Leah had described it in her letters without the slightest hint of irony, as if she was trying to convince Lev to eat there too. Sasha enjoys the work because famous writers and intellectuals gather here on Saturday afternoons, discussing the catastrophes happening across Europe. Thank God we are here and not there.

  Soon after this letter, another followed about Rose’s death. And then a long stretch of silence in which no letters arrived from New York. But a war was on, and Lev thought perhaps the mail had been delayed or circumvented. Never, Lev thought, his stomach turning, did he imagine Leah’s next letter, brimming with apology as well as an alarming frankness. Benjamin Dubrow wanted to marry her. It was 1942, and her fate, as well as the world’s, was held in the balance, a swinging pendulum of uncertainty. Didn’t she see fate was always uncertain, always swinging? No, not like this, not like now, she replied, which was why she had accepted Dubrow’s proposal, along with his promise to pay for Sasha’s education followed by the offer that Sasha could manage the Eastern Parkway location of Dubrow’s after he finished his studies. Please understand, she wrote. I’m only trying to make a life for Sasha. And Dubrow is a kind man. He doesn’t expect much besides companionship, understanding, the things everyone wants.

  Lev wrote back that of course he understood, even though he had smashed things afterward. The monarch butterfly paperweight in shards across the room. The hare, one of its amber eyes missing from crashing into the windowpane. Lev pictured Dubrow as a well-satiated man in a fur coat, which he wore with a dash of vulgarity that was accepted, even celebrated, in America.

  In the same letter, Lev wrote that it was true; he didn’t know when he could get to New York, and with the war, who knew the future? Of course he wanted the best for Sasha and the best for her. Dubrow, it seemed, would provide generously. Wincing at the banality of such lines, he told her to be happy and think of him only once in a while. Perhaps it’s best if we don’t write much after this—you’ll soon be a married woman, and I don’t wish to hamper your happiness with memories of our past, a past that is barely alive without much promise of a future. It sounded hard, callous, written when he still simmered with anger. After he sent the letter, he only felt regret.

  Frantically, he sent her other letters, gentler ones explaining how he had wrongly expected her to wait for him, as if she was encased in a glass tomb where time didn’t move, and he understood how the necessities of life must have pressed down on her—Misha’s cramped apartment, how such a savage city demanded she take their son’s future into account, the need for reassurance where he could provide none, but he still loved her, longed for her, and promised that the moment the war ended and he could get on a ship, any ship, he would come for her, take care of her.

  She never wrote back. The war ended. A yawning absence followed, vibrating with this one truth: he had lost her.

  Turning away from the shop window—Lev can’t look at himself anymore—he sees that across the street, on a green bench, a young couple embraces. Their bodies awkwardly intertwined, they kiss, and the kiss creates a world between them. Sitting on the same bench, a man lounges with his arms crossed over his chest. He sits so close, but they don’t see him. They will never see him.

  On his street, the sidewalk juts upward, breaking open, and Lev stumbles over the uneven ground. Steadying himself, he pauses. The young couple from the bench strolls behind him, taking their time. They laugh and caress each other, trading endearments. To him, Span
ish still sounds like a release of butterflies, fluttering, erratic, punctuated with movement. Lev smiles when the girl raises her voice, mocking indignation.

  Thoughts flit through him as he gropes for his keys, his fingers rummaging through spare change, receipts: Did they spend the night together? Where is the girl’s mother? Finding his keys, he switches from being the father to the enamored son: Does the boy love this girl? Will he ask her to marry? Again, he is the father and hopes, for the girl’s sake, this is what the boy feels.

  When did I last feel love like that? But he doesn’t have to ask. Leah. The name has become mythic, ghostly, a lost artifact in a lost world. Where are you? he wonders, unlocking the door to the great crumbling house. Where are you?

  Acknowledgments

  I must thank the brilliant, beautiful, and wise Lexy Bloom for urging me to write this book and for telling me to keep going, my fabulous agent, Alice Tasman, for believing in me, the wonderful and sensitive editorial guidance of Deborah Garrison at Pantheon, and the astute editorial assistance of Anne Eggers. My mentor and hero Professor Aimee Bender, for her invaluable notes and moral support throughout this process, helped make this book what it is. I am forever grateful for the foresight of Jennifer Pooley, for getting this book into the right hands. I am also so appreciative of the encouragement of Professor Tony Kemp and Professor Emily Anderson at the University of Southern California, as well as the support of the Creative Writing and English Department at USC. Thank you to Professor Wolf Gruner at USC for his historical insight and assistance with the German language. My gratitude also extends to Micheala Wolf for her help in checking all things German. I must also thank Evan James, Rachel Artenian, and Richelle Persampieri for their generous hospitality in providing me with a quiet space to write. My gratitude also, always, for the meaningful friendship and never-ending encouragement of Deborah Netburn. And thank you to John Haule, for his sage advice and expert listening.

  I am hugely indebted to my father, Joel Landau, and my mother, Arlene Landau, for their unending support, and to the rest of my family: my beloved children Lucia and Levi, Susan Landau and Brad TePaske (particularly for his ornithological expertise), Lauren Cadish and Patrick Griffin, Betty and Anders Westgren and the entire Westgren clan in Sweden and beyond. For her longstanding support and friendship, thank you to Ania Vichniakova, and thank you to Paula Kaufman for her enthusiasm through the years. Thank you to my esteemed colleagues for generously reading my work: Josh Bernstein, Emily Fridlund, Bryan Hurt, Lisa Locascio, Bonnie Nazdam, and Jessica Piazza.

  And last but most certainly not the least, my talented and incredibly supportive husband, Philip Westgren, who never stops believing in me and has helped me every step of the way.

  I would also like to acknowledge the following writers and sources that helped in the research, writing, and inspiration of this book:

  Max Beckmann, Self-Portrait in Words: Collected Writings and Statements, 1903–1950

  Walter Benjamin, Berlin Childhood Around 1900

  Elena Ferrante

  Stolen Voices: Young People’s War Diaries, from World War I to Iraq, ed. Zlata Filipović and Melanie Challenger

  Felix Gilbert, A European Past: Memoirs, 1905–1945

  Anton Gill, A Dance Between Flames: Berlin Between the Wars

  Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin

  Eva Hoffman, Shtetl: The Life and Death of a Small Town and the World of Polish Jews

  The Weimar Republic Sourcebook, ed. Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg

  Count Harry Kessler, The Diaries of a Cosmopolitan, 1918–1937

  Erik Larson, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin

  Vejas Gabriel Liulevicius, War Land on the Eastern Front: Culture, National Identity, and German Occupation in World War I

  Irène Némirovsky, Suite Française

  Sabine Rewald, Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s

  Joseph Roth, What I Saw: Reports from Berlin, 1920–1933, and The Wandering Jews: The Classic Portrait of a Vanished People

  Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate

  Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

  Eric D. Weitz, Weimar Germany: Promise and Tragedy

  Robert Weldon Whalen, Bitter Wounds: German Victims of the Great War, 1914–1939

  Arnold Zweig, The Face of East European Jewry

  Stefan Zweig, The World of Yesterday

  About the Author

  Alexis Landau studied at Vassar College and received an MFA from Emerson College and a PhD in English Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California. The Empire of the Senses is her first novel. She lives with her husband and her two children in Los Angeles.