The Empire of the Senses (10 page)

The very condition of the streets proved how these people needed
them: the footing was unsteady; one had to walk on narrow slick planks where cobblestones had been blown up. Once, Lev thought he saw a femur buried under loose cobblestones. Signs pointed to nowhere. Open gutters flowed with sewage. The officers gave big speeches every few weeks about their purpose here.
Unlike the productive Nordic and German races, these peoples in the east are inherently lazy and parasitic. To make the land over in our own image, we must instill cleanliness and order, and promote a culture of hard work, sweat, and labor
.

The phrases circulated in Lev’s mind while he was performing the most mundane of tasks, such as recording how much firewood had been amassed in one day or knocking on the peasants’ doors, demanding a detailed account of how many chickens they had and cows, and how much grain they’d produced. They could not understand him, their wide foreheads sweating with effort to convey something entirely different. Yesterday, an old woman tried to give him a black pot. It was chipped, the handle broken off, but she pressed it into his chest, nodding when Lev refused to take it, as if his refusal was just a performance and sooner or later he would give in. He finally took it, but a few hours later, he placed the pot in front of her door, an absurd game of give-and-take. Even more absurd was the general’s confident smile when he had said, raising his wineglass, that if one could cultivate the natives to become orderly, clean, and honest, then the land itself would transform into an agricultural surplus of wheat, cattle, and wood of the very highest quality. “This East,” he said conclusively, “is the real utopia.” And the thunder of clapping that followed engulfed the crowded dining hall, which had once belonged to a local farmer who was dead or gone.

Today, Lev stood before a ditch filled with blue-black mares put down because they were maimed, injured in the shin or carrying shrapnel in their chests. His fellow soldier shot each horse at the edge of the ditch, and then Lev recorded it in a ledger. The soldier positioned the revolver on the horse’s downy brow, and in an instant, the horse collapsed, tumbling awkwardly into the ditch. When they finished, the blue-black torsos shimmered in the sun. Lev counted twelve. He wrote it neatly in pencil. They paused, observing the odd beauty of it, before they began
tossing shovels of dirt over the ditch. The eyes of the horses were still open, rolling back, gleaming in the darkness of the hole. Bit by bit, their muscular necks and arched backs were covered until it was only a pile of dirt.

“Nearly done,” Lev said, leaning into his shovel. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes.

The other man shrugged. The silence between them remained ungenerous, as it had been all morning. Lev barely knew him, but the least this man could do was nod or make some gesture of solidarity. But Lev had heard this man’s wife had left him because he hadn’t sent enough money home. She was hungry and without coal. News of unreliable wives traveled fast. It made the other men nervous, unleashing images of their women straddling faceless men, men who were exempt due to bad eyesight or flat-footedness, who were either too old or too young to serve.

The man squinted into the sun, the sides of his eyes crinkling like wrinkled silk. His mouth looked miserable, as if he couldn’t speak.

“Or maybe the horses are the lucky ones. To be put out of their misery,” Lev added, transferring the shovel from one hand to the other.

“I’m not miserable,” the man said, jutting out his chin. The pockmarked sides of his face glinted in the sun.

“You’re better off without her.” Lev did not actually know if this was true, but he stretched out his arm, as if to pat him on the back. His hand, suspended in the humid air, felt heavy and false.

He searched Lev’s face, as if looking for a place to put his grief. “Her mother was the one who wrote to tell me.”

“I can’t imagine.” Lev’s voice trailed off.

The man dug the heel of his boot into the earth. “She’s probably in bed with a Jew.” Then he vehemently spat. The white wet spittle sizzled before dissolving into the dirt. “Shirkers. Bankrolling the war without fighting. Profiting from our dead.” He motioned to the pit they’d just dug. “And who’ll be left when the war’s over?”

Lev’s throat closed up, a tiny knot of nausea developing there.

The man threw up his arms, his face animated and filled with color.
“They’re vultures, circling and circling, and when the time’s right, swooping down to take their share.” His eyes gleamed and then he asked, “Smoke?” and held out a pack of cigarettes.

Lev stepped back. His insides heaved upward. He did not want to be sick in front of this man. Dropping his shovel, he managed to say, “That’s twelve for today.”

As he gulped water from his canteen, most of it missed his mouth, sliding down his chin. He coughed into his palm. He would rest in the shade. It was Friday, the October heat oppressive and golden. Leaning against a tree, Lev sank down to the ground and rested his elbows on his knees. He watched the other man walk to camp, back to the smoke and the smell of production that claimed this place.

Behind him he heard a thud. A little yellow apple fell. It had dropped from one of the small thatched huts arranged haphazardly nearby. People were eating inside them. He had seen the locals building these little huts over the last few days in celebration of the Feast of the Tabernacles, or as the Jews here called it, Sukkot. They hung branches and palm leaves and bright acorn squash and apples from the roofs, and when Lev had seen children decorating the huts, he thought of Vicki and Franz hanging ornaments on a Christmas tree, the innate pleasure children took in these things.

Inside the hut nearest him, people argued. Then a woman emerged to restore the fallen apple to its place. She glanced over at him, her head covered in a cream shawl. She arched her dark eyebrows, as if expecting Lev to say something. But he said nothing, struck by her open clear face, how light and free her movements were, unburdened by her body, which he could tell through the clothing was sylphlike and beautifully shaped, like an expensive vase. Standing there, she slowly bent down to the ground, keeping her eyes on Lev.

He glanced away, scrutinizing the discoloration of the tree bark.

She moved cautiously toward him, cupping the yellow apple in her palm.

“Would you like it?” she asked in Yiddish.

“Isn’t it for your little hut?” he answered back, in Yiddish.

She grinned, still holding out her palm, the apple resting perfectly still in it. “It’s only for decoration. Someone should eat it.”

Her whole body urged him to take it, the curve of her back, the slope of her white neck escaping the thin shawl, her wrist straining slightly as she balanced the apple in her palm.

“Thank you,” Lev blurted out, quickly scooping it up. Without touching her skin, he felt her heat. But it would have been offensive to let his fingertips graze the creases in her palm, and she had trusted him, knowing he would not trespass this simple rule. Whose rule was it? They didn’t know. But they both knew it existed for people like them, in these types of situations.

A boy escaped from the hut, probably twisting out of someone’s embrace. Lev imagined old men with beards, young children, and tired mothers stored away in there, dipping pieces of bread in salt water, discussing the harvest, how it never yielded enough.

“Leah?” the boy called out, even though he could see her clearly, a short distance away.

Leah. The name vibrated on his tongue.

She spun around. “Geza, don’t be so blind.”

“I’m not blind.” He stuck his hands on his hips. Lev guessed he was about fourteen, although his bony shoulders and slim hips made him appear younger.

“You are too. Blind as a bat,” she teased.

“Your son?” Lev asked, hoping he was. Then he could tell her about his son, and they would have sons in common.

“My sister’s son,” she said, her eyes slipping away from him. And then she yelled, “Geza, come,” and walked over to him, playfully pinching his elbow. “We gave the polite soldier an apple and now we must finish our meal.”

Lev waited for that moment when she would turn to look at him once more before disappearing into the hut, but she did not. When she lowered her head to enter, her shawl slipped back revealing such dark hair it turned deep blue in the sun.

7

We plunder, Lev thought, as the rich dark forests were razed for firewood, for fortifications at the front, for the building of bridges. They also confiscated local horses, even the old useless ones, making it impossible for the villagers to transport goods, something the army then punished the villagers for. The punishments were frivolous and unregulated: robbing a family of their entire food supply for winter or beating a man in the town square for miscounting his chickens (he had been hiding a fat red hen) or raping someone’s daughter even when she yelled
“Krank”
—sickly, diseased—her hands fluttering in the air like birds let loose. But her performance was not convincing enough. The officer had pulled down her lower lip, inspecting her shiny pink gums. Her teeth were strong, her eyes clear, her color high. “I know health when I see it,” he had said afterward, boastful that he had outwitted her. The officer told Lev this as they oversaw the collection of raw materials. Local Jews had been recruited to collect, working as middlemen, knocking on their neighbors’ doors, requesting candlesticks, meekly transporting organ pipes from the churches for scrap metal, carting Hanukkah menorahs out of their own homes.

Lev and the officer stood, arms crossed, in the middle of a drafty farmhouse. Most of the windows had been broken, glass shards lying on the ground. A blue bird flew in and out of the room until the officer raised his rifle and shot it.

“Who else would do this?” the officer joked, motioning to the crowd as they lugged tin and copper and brass onto the growing pile of metal. He shook his head in disgust.

Lev noticed a middle-aged woman reluctantly parting with a bronze
samovar. When she put it down, her whole body went with it, her arms embracing the baroque curves.

Lev contemplated knocking the officer’s pipe out of his mouth. “They don’t have a choice.”

“These Jews are doing what they’re naturally good at. Stealing.”

Lev clenched his jaw. The target of malevolence. For centuries, it has made us afraid, Lev thought.

The officer took another puff from his pipe. He smiled sardonically. His eyes flickered over Lev’s face. “You speak Yiddish, yes?”

“Yes.” Saliva flooded his mouth.

“Good.”

How did everyone seem to know? Lev thought, his head pounding. Even the Jewish soldiers with talliths wrapped around their knapsacks glanced at him furtively in the mess hall when the sun lowered on Friday evenings and Lev acted as jocular and ordinary as the others. Was it his name, Perlmutter? Should he have changed it into something more German? Were his almond-shaped eyes huddled too close? Did his ears protrude too far from his skull? In Berlin, his difference had never been quite as striking. It had been ameliorated by well-cut clothing, elaborate dinner parties, a wife with golden hair.

“Sir, I don’t follow. What is good about speaking Yiddish?”

Another question kept rising, like a piano key hit over and over:
Where is the man I was in Berlin?

“Because you speak Yiddish,” the officer said, “tomorrow you’ll arrange the procedure for the identity cards: name, age, occupation, residence, number of children. Religion.” He paused, putting away his pipe. “You see, you’ll explain to the Jews what we need. And then the Jews will translate for the locals. Otherwise, it’s the tower of babble all over again.” He laughed, fingering his front pocket where he’d put his pipe.

The Tower of Babel
, Lev thought the next day when in the cold blue morning he unlocked the barn where the natives had been waiting since daybreak. All the nationalities were mixed together, a big mess. They sat on the benches in their finest clothes and yet they smelled from being
locked up in here with the horses. They had been given numbers by the soldiers earlier this morning, but when Lev walked into the damp, dimly lit barn, he saw that many of them had dropped their numbers on the floor, the pieces of paper scattered in the hay, smeared with refuse.

Lev clapped his hands. “Pick up your numbers. You must present your number to process your identity card.” The sound of his harsh German vibrated in the stale air. He inhaled cow dung mixed with onions and body odor. A photographer stood behind him. Two local Jews stepped forward and said they were the translators. They were young, no older than twenty. Lev wondered how they had escaped the Russian army. He imagined them hiding in the trees, their hands blistered and frozen.

They asked him to please repeat what he had said, but in Yiddish.

Lev motioned for them to come closer, and he could tell by their tentative steps, their hands clasped behind their backs, that they feared him.

“I need everyone to retrieve their number. Look—all the numbers are strewn this way and that. Without the numbers, we can’t get them into groups of five. No one will know who comes first.”

“Groups of five,” the translator repeated absently. His wire-rimmed glasses caught the light coming through the dirty windows.

Lev glared at him, feeling a rising distaste for such backwardness. Didn’t they see the need for organization, for categorization? Otherwise, you have a mass, a herd, no better than a flock of senseless sheep.

“Go and explain to them.” Lev thrust him in front of the crowded benches where the people waited.

When the translator spoke, the Russian sounded as indecipherable as a wall of stones. Lev could not detect where one word began and another ended. When the translator had finished explaining, the crowd drew a long suspended breath, and then a cacophony of sound exploded. Mothers scolded their children, wiping their faces with saliva-licked thumbs, and the children cried, wielding their balled-up fists. Men foraged the ground for missing numbers, holding up crumpled pieces of paper, which were then snatched away by someone else. Women used one another as mirrors, asking if their collars were straight, their hair parted down the center, their brows smooth. And in the midst of the
tumult, the rebbes sat stoically on the benches, their eyes turned inward, conversing with invisible forces.