The Empire of the Senses (11 page)

The people were herded into groups and led outside into the courtyard, where the photographer and his assistant waited. Each person was photographed individually. “Look at the black box,” the photographer urged, his breath pirouetting in the air. Some glanced away when the flash popped, distracted by the fussing and whispering of the others, who waited impatiently. “Again,” the photographer would yell, drawing up his pants, which were loose. Not having a belt made him less efficient, Lev thought, as he had to pause between each photograph to execute this simple movement. And each time, Lev noticed that his lower back was exposed, beet red from the frigid air.

The translators worked in another room off the courtyard. They recorded on a white card, for the index, the information on each subject, which was gleaned by asking a number of mandatory questions supplied by the army. After this, each person’s inked fingertip was pressed into the blue Ober Ost pass. Holding the finger, still moist with black ink, away from their bodies, they would wipe the rest on their hair or the inner hem of their skirts. If found without the pass, they would have to pay ten marks to replace it at their own expense, Lev explained each time, handing over the newly minted passes. A happy confusion permeated the writing room. Lev was struck by how the natives were like children, easily pleased and made to feel important by their images cemented into this little blue book.

Lev roamed from the writing room to the barn to the courtyard. Vaguely, as he walked from one area to the next, he thought of the woman with the blue-black hair. He wondered, leaves crunching underfoot, if he had missed her as he circulated, if when he was bending over a white card complaining of sloppy penmanship, she’d stood in front of the Brownie camera, adjusting her face to supply an appealing smile, her dark eyes awaiting the flash. She would not flinch or look away, Lev decided, because that day under the trees she’d acted willful, even daring. She had taken a risk to talk to him, to offer him a fallen apple.

He heard voices rising in the middle of the courtyard. The photographer
asked an old man, in Yiddish, to please remove his cap or else the picture would not be valid, and then the pass could not be processed. The rebbe stood in front of the camera, shaking his head. His family surrounded him, urging him to obey. Lev recognized the teenage boy, and then he saw her, speaking in a low voice to the rebbe, trying to convince him to remove his embroidered skullcap.

He caught her saying, “I had to remove my shawl and show my hair. It was only for an instant.”

The rebbe protested, “He will be offended, I am sure of it. How will I explain this to Him?” He jerked his hand forward, motioning to the bewildered photographer poised behind the camera. “God does not care for your black boxes, for your binoculars, for your airplanes, for the variety of your human inventions. Nothing good can come …” His voice trailed off. He tucked his chin into his snow-white beard.

The photographer, uncomfortable, pulled up his pants.

“Father, please.” Her voice shook. She glanced around, fearful that the delay would be noticed, that the old man might get beaten for his resistance. When she scanned the edge of the courtyard, she caught Lev’s eye. For a split second, recognition coursed between them. Lev wished to feel this recognition in his hands, to clasp it between his fingers, to bring the vibrating moment to his mouth. He felt overly grateful to see her, almost embarrassed by how happy it made him. And now he could help her solve her predicament.

Lev walked over, congenial, his hands in his pockets. He smiled but no one would look at him. She appeared stricken, her face as pale as the moon. The old woman fiddled with a handkerchief, her arthritic fingers working the cloth this way and that. The boy, Geza, dug his heel into the dirt, creating a miniature hole. Geza’s mother held him against her, her arms crossed over his narrow chest, her chin buried in his lank hair. And the woman, Leah, with her blue-black hair, stared at the horizon of trees, at the bare branches straining upward into the gray sky. Her hand rested on her father’s shoulder.

Lev broke the uncomfortable silence. “Only have him push the cap back from his forehead. So we can see his face better.”

She nodded, slowly pushing back the velvet cap.

The photographer took the picture.

The rebbe flinched at the sound of the sharp pop, at the brightness of the flash.

The rest of the family sighed.

Geza asked, “Now for my picture?”

Lev cupped his hand behind the boy’s slender neck. It felt warm and clean. “Go ahead. It’s your turn.”

Geza straightened his back, squared his shoulders. He flashed a toothy grin. His front teeth were too far apart. Lev thought one could probably fit the width of two pencils between those teeth. Geza’s mother and grandmother clucked their tongues in approval. The rebbe rocked from side to side. He could barely stand this picture taking, the fuss of it all.

“Ready?” the photographer barked.

Geza drew in a breath, puffing out his spindly chest.

In the suspended interval before the picture was taken, Lev felt as if a muslin sheet billowed over his head and hers and enclosed them under its rippling shadow. He rested his eyes on her face, on her neck, on the graceful folds of her shawl covering her hair and its midnight color. She stared back, her eyes wide and glassy and brimming with unknowable questions. Holding each other’s gaze, they recognized the mystery of this instantaneous closeness, as well as the instinctual knowledge of when to look away and not know each other again, because the world on the periphery of their vision encroached, ripping off the safety of the caparisoned muslin sheet, marked by the camera’s exclamatory pop.

Geza laughed. His mother clapped. His grandmother clucked her tongue.

The moment was broken, and she looked away from him, her face reddening.

He waited for her in the writing room and watched through the small window the rest of the family get their pictures taken. When it was her turn, she stared directly into the camera, her dark eyes revealing the slightest hint of laughter. Afterward, they moved single file across the
courtyard. The rebbe walked as if in sleep, as if this was all a dream life and his real life occurred, with all its machinations and irritations, somewhere else.

When they came into the room, Lev arranged it with the two other translators so that he would be asking her the questions. They sat opposite each other across a scarred wooden table. She had since readjusted her shawl, but wisps of blue-black hair still escaped from under her white earlobes. Lev suddenly worried, pen in hand, that she did not remember him from the other day, that the sheltered moment between them had been the workings of his imagination. She might think of all soldiers as the same man in field gray. She might have given fruit to others, carelessly, without a thought. If she had already forgotten him, then—

“Are you going to ask me the questions?” Her voice sliced through the air, and he realized he had been staring at her earlobes.

Lev smoothed down the piece of paper. “Of course.”

“Well?” She raised her eyebrows. Again, her expectant gaze, the way her small red mouth curled upward seemed as if she was laughing at him, that he was somehow ridiculous with his epaulets, heavy boots, the holster on his hip.

Lev cleared his throat. “Name?” Of course he remembered. Leah: a crescent moon, the whiteness startling and smooth when it appeared in the purple twilight. Those were the hours when we don’t know ourselves as well as we think, Lev thought. When buried thoughts burn to the surface. Leah. A crescent moon.

“Leah,” she said.

Lev carefully wrote out her name, pausing before the next column, realizing she had only given her first name.

Leah smiled, gesturing to the next column. “Mitau.”

Lev began writing, but stopped. “Perhaps you misunderstood. Not the town—your name.”

Leah drew her shawl closer around her shoulders. She stared at the piece of paper, her eyes scanning the columns and blank spaces. “We are called by our first name followed by the first name of our father. I am Leah ben Samuel. But the czar commanded everyone to take a last name. So we take Mitau.”

Lev nodded, writing this down. For a moment, they both listened to the translator interviewing her father at the next desk. The translator asked the rebbe his occupation. The rebbe said he studied the Torah, the words of God, that he did not concern himself with the entanglements of pedestrian pursuits. “In the holy books, every word, every letter even, contains thousands of pages and every page reveals the greatness of God.” He sighed heavily. “Which is never sufficiently understood, nor should it be.”

She flashed Lev a smile.

Lev drummed the pen against the table. “Occupation?”

She played with her wedding ring, a dull gold band. Lev hoped she might be a widow who, out of reverence, still wore it.

“We have a stall in the marketplace. Maize in the summer and naphtha for fuel in the winter as well as pickled cucumbers and beans. Small trade.”

“Married?”

She paused, her eyes sliding over his face. “Yes.” She blinked slowly, a watery film replenishing her green eyes. Lev looked closer. Green with flecks of gold. “He’s in the Russian army.” Her voice turned flat, and she clasped her hands together, her eyes fixed on the tip of his shoulder, as if a bird perched there. “The soldiers here, they don’t speak Yiddish. Except for a few.”

Lev nodded, pursing his lips.

“The orders posted in the town square—sometimes the translation from German to Russian is terribly wrong.” She hesitated.

“Go on.”

“Well, the order posted about only baking cakes on Wednesdays and Saturdays.” She swallowed, trying to suppress the corners of her mouth, which wanted to curl upward. “Well, instead of reading,
The German court judged
, it read—” She stopped short, shaking her head. “I’m sorry, but I do not wish to offend.”

Lev felt the urge to pull her forearms toward him, to bring her near. “Tell me?”

She glanced at the translator sitting to Lev’s left. Then she leaned
over the table, lowering her voice to a half whisper. “Instead, the sign read,
The German excrement shitted that cakes will only be baked on Wednesdays and Saturdays
.”

Lev’s chest filled with pressure; the feeling rushed up into his throat and was about to burst forth from his mouth, a release of inane laughter. He looked away, staring down at his fingernails, which he had recently pared with meticulous care.

She scrutinized the blunt edge of her wool tunic.

Lev coughed and said he would look into it.

“And do you think,” Leah said, her voice held at a hush, “you could change the order to say cakes may only be baked on Wednesdays and Sundays?”

“Instead of Saturdays?”

“Because of the Sabbath.”

“The Sabbath,” Lev repeated dumbly.

She searched his face. “Surely you understand. About these matters.”

And now she was asking too much of him, drawing him in with her eyes and her intimate whispering so that he could better help her bake her cakes on days that were not holy. He returned to the questionnaire.

“Number of children?” The freckles splashing her neck reminded him of a distant constellation.

Her face flushed.

He repeated, “Do you have any children?”

“No.” Her gaze moved away from his shoulder, and for a brief instant her green-gold eyes turned opaque. She watched him write down zero.

Lev took a quick sip of water. He wondered if he had been too harsh. Maybe he had repelled her.

She stared at him strangely. In a rush of breath, she asked, “Are you from Odessa because Jews from Odessa tend to have light eyes.”

The next question on the sheet asked for her age. He tapped the edge of the pencil on the blank column, drawing her attention to it.

Then he looked up at her and felt his eyes become severe, foreboding.

She leaned back into her chair, folding her arms over her chest. She was retreating into herself, drifting away. He cursed himself and the divide that could rise up between two people without warning.

He put down the pencil with an air of defeat. “My parents moved to Berlin when I was very young and they don’t talk about the east.” He pursed his lips. Enough of that. A draft blew into the room, the door perpetually open.

After a pause, she asked him why this was important, these cards.

“You don’t exist without a pass.”

“But I am sitting right here in front of you.” Again, the suppression of a smile. She hugged herself to stay warm, retreating farther into the folds of brown wool.

“We need a record of how many inhabitants are under German control.”

“But what will the passes do?”

“Any movement within the territory requires documentation. Passes will soon be required for walking at night after curfew, taking in guests, for the use of one’s own cart, for moving outside of the district. This pass is the basis for all other documentation. Without it”—Lev sighed—“it’s difficult.”

Her tone turned sharp, incredulous. “I heard even dogs are issued passes.”

Lev shifted in his chair. “We need the pass to certify a dog tax has been paid.” It sounded absurd, saying it aloud.

“A dog tax?” she repeated, hard laughter pressing the edges of her voice.

“The important thing is your pass.” Lev brought the tips of his fingers together, creating a rounded hollowness. “When you are stopped, you must show your pass. It costs ten marks to replace.”

“Ten marks,” she repeated. He noted the pronouncement of her collarbone, the shallow blue dip beneath her eyes. She probably didn’t remember giving him the apple, that day under the trees with the golden afternoon bathing her hair, turning the black an opalescent blue.

He stared down at the sheet of paper. He had forgotten her age. When he asked, she traced her finger around the oblong ring in the
wooden table, as if she had lived too many rings, too many lives. “Thirty,” she said.

Same as I am, Lev thought.

And then, as if remembering something amusing, she asked, “Did you enjoy the apple?” She smiled, revealing a flash of white teeth. “Or was it already too soft?” She leaned forward, pressing herself into the table’s edge.