The Empire of the Senses (26 page)

Vicki grinned. “
Sex appeal
.” On a nearby roof, two pigeons cooed.

Elsa laughed, throwing back her head, a movement Vicki had tried to emulate countless times alone in front of the mirror.

She languished on the grass, puffing on her cigarette. “It looks good.” Then she added, “Don’t worry about your mother.”

“I’m not worried,” Vicki said.

Walking home, Vicki pulled down her straw hat, as if any one of the nameless pedestrians would instinctively know she’d just cut it all off and scold her. But no one noticed. Maybe if she took off her hat? She pulled on the brim, her heart accelerating. What would it feel like to walk these streets with her new hair, her neck bare in the wind, an open invitation to be touched and kissed there? She passed street merchants selling their wares and noticed a woman with so much hair on her head, piled high in twisted coils, it must have survived since the last century. She passed a number of streets under construction. They were digging up the roads again, the steam of hot asphalt offensive. The facade of buildings had been reduced to wooden scaffolding, and she failed to recall what was here before. She walked at a clipped pace, humming with an internal nervousness every time she felt the breeze sweep over her neck. Off the main street, she caught sight of a sign:
RUNS REPAIRED
. She’d pricked her stockings on the roof with Elsa, the silk catching on her ring. She looked down at her thigh, her white skin gleaming through
the run, almost insolently. Why should she fix it? What was the point of this constant fixing and washing and straightening that occupied her mother to no end? No, Vicki thought, she wasn’t going to be like that. Not ever. She pulled off her hat, glancing around, ready to challenge anyone. But no one cared.

Vicki arrived home earlier than she’d intended, too early to avoid her mother, who was in the sitting room, probably working on her needlepoint or reading over sheet music. Every time she came through the front door, she felt as if she was entering an antiquated domain: the frieze of grapes above the kitchen door, the sculpture of two naked Greek youths in the alcove along the hallway, the stained-glass window above the staircase throwing patterns of red, purple, and green light over the dark wood paneling. Vicki used to delight in the odd objects her mother preserved in the glass cabinet: an English doll dressed in taffeta, a bridal wreath from the eighteenth century spun from the finest silk, a tobacco box carved out of rose quartz, family portraits of women with curled powdered hair and delicate rose-colored lips, those carved and lacquered figurines, mostly little dogs, from Josephine’s mother, Marie. Entering the living room, she caught sight of herself in the glass cabinet, her hair brazenly short, especially when her startled expression overlapped the English doll’s placid face.

Her mother didn’t bother to look up from her needlepoint. Vicki still had a few suspended seconds to dash out of the room, but something kept her feet planted on the plush carpet.

“Vicki,” her mother paused, making a tiny loophole and stringing the needle and thread through it. “Are you going out again before dinner?”

Vicki held her breath.

Josephine slowly looked up.

Vicki heard the distinct tick of the grandfather clock. Mitzi stirred at Josephine’s feet, realizing something was amiss.

Blood rushed to Josephine’s face.

“I wanted to. I’ve wanted to for a long time, and today Elsa finally helped me cut it.” Her voice sounded more confident, more even and
smooth than she’d anticipated, and she felt, instead of fear, a rising triumph.

“Elsa,” her mother said darkly.

“Yes, Elsa.”

“Oh my God,” her mother said, touching her forehead.

With the blinds drawn in the semidarkness, the room felt oppressive, the heat thick.

“She’s the stenographer. Do you want to look like a stenographer?”

“And what do stenographers look like?” Vicki said, crossing the room. She leaned against the window, yanking the curtain aside.

“Don’t,” Josephine warned. “Letting in the light only heats the room more.”

Vicki shook the curtain. Dust particles rose up. She thought about how her mother still slept in an old four-poster bed
a la duchesse
. How she probably still wore a nightcap and night gloves. How she’d found a copy of
An Ideal Marriage
under a pillow in the sitting room—a sex and marriage manual claiming to cure “sexual misery,” a state her mother had surely brought upon herself. You couldn’t solve sexual problems with a book! Just uttering the word
sex
would drive her mother screaming from the house.

Josephine snapped shut her needle case. “You’re only fashioning yourself into a
Ypsi
.”
Ypsi
was shorthand for the type of girl whose greatest fear was to appear unmodern even if the new styles didn’t suit her. Especially to Josephine, such a woman, in addition to the bobbed hair, had that ridiculous fringe hanging just above the eyebrows, constantly tempting someone to part it, as if it was a curtain that, once swept aside, would only reveal a pale sweaty forehead.
Ypsi
meant fastidious dieting in an attempt to appear as slim as Louise Brooks when sadly, she never would be, while smoking too many cigarettes and saying she never wanted children when she’d really love to have them. Vicki often heard her mother bemoan the new fashions to Marthe, complaining how the other day she saw a stocky girl parading around in the shortest shift with such bulging calves that it was tragic.

Josephine edged off the sofa, lowering her voice. “You are a pretty girl, Vicki. But since the war—”

“I know,” Vicki interrupted. “Since the war, women look artificially thin. And romance is nowhere to be found, with men propositioning women on the streets, and such short dresses interrupt the line of the leg, and so many girls with pitiful stocky legs tramp around in their short dresses and short haircuts—it’s a real shame!”

“It is a shame,” Josephine said, observing her coldly.

“What’s a shame?” Lev called out in his jovial tone, the front door slamming behind him. His whistle echoed in the foyer. He took a moment to hang his hat, and in this interval, Josephine flashed Vicki a stern look. Lev walked into the living room, his hands in his pockets, curious about the latest domestic drama. His eyes, light and joyful, rested on Vicki’s face. He’d caught some sun, his cheeks rosy against his olive complexion. They exchanged a secret smile, and then Lev turned to Josephine. “Well? What’s the problem?”

Josephine smoothed down her dress. “Just look at your daughter’s hair.”

Lev turned around, studied Vicki for a moment, his hand on his chin, trying to suppress another smile, and then he turned back to Josephine. “Yes, I see what you mean. It does appear a bit shorter than it was this morning.”

Josephine kneaded her palm into her forehead. “You don’t understand the implications.”

“Let’s have some lemonade. Vicki, open a window!”

Vicki yanked back the curtains and unlatched the window latch. Sticking her head all the way out, she enjoyed a brief reprieve. At least her father understood.

Her parents started to argue. Vicki observed the linden trees, thinking it was always a shame after they’d just been pruned. They looked so Spartan. But pruning helped them grow. She heard her mother’s voice, rising and tightening: “It’s not at all womanly. She looks like a prepubescent boy. And they’ve started slicking back their hair, cutting it shorter, without even a curl or a wave to it.”

Her father, soothing her mother, probably with his hand on her shoulder, said, “On Leipziger Strasse, I saw some very elegant women with short haircuts.”

Josephine sighed. “Next, she won’t want to get married because it’s not modern enough.”

Vicki left the window and came up behind her father, removing a piece of lint from his jacket. “I never said I didn’t want to get married. You understand, don’t you, Papa?”

Lev took her hand. “You should have consulted Mutti first.”

They both looked at Josephine, who now lay on the sofa, her hand over her eyes.

He motioned for Vicki to follow him out of the room. Once in the foyer, he pulled her aside, speaking softly. “At Wertheim’s, I noticed some dangling earrings that would go nicely with your short hair.”

“Could I really get them?”

He nodded.

She flung her arms around his neck, and the familiar scent of coffee mixed with nicotine along with his citrus aftershave comforted her. “Thank you, thank you, thank you,” she chanted.

15

Berlin, Friday, June 10, 1927

It was stifling hot. Lev skipped out of the office for the rest of the afternoon. Summer in Berlin was his favorite season to wander the streets without any particular aim, especially on a Friday, the city exhaling relief. He smiled to himself as he watched people sweat in their three-piece suits and summer hats, all of them intent on arriving at the next appointment, but to him they looked as if they marched in place, their resolute strides futile and comic.

His secretary was confounded after she asked where he was going.

“Nowhere,” Lev had said, floating a piece of paper in front of her.

“When should I have this dictation done?”

“Monday’s as good as any day.”

Before he left, she leaned over her desk, craning her neck. “What shall I do if—”

He waved her comment away as if swatting a fly. He knew what she would ask—What shall I do if Frau Perlmutter calls? Nothing, Lev thought. Nothing. Josephine was probably lying down in their bedroom, the curtains drawn, a cool compress on her forehead, unable to take the heat. The newly bought electric fan whirling above her, pushing hot air around, a ridiculous purchase.

Once outside, he breathed in the congested air. Buses trundled past. On the rooftop of Nichols, the silk manufacturer across from Lev’s office building, he caught a glimpse of female employees practicing calisthenics. He smiled at their lightweight cotton jumpsuits. They went barefoot, their mats spread out before them, arching and stretching in the midafternoon sun. An old family friend of Josephine’s, Count Kessler,
had commented in his high-pitched nervous voice about the new vitality of youth. A few nights ago at a dinner party, he’d explained how people now want to bask in the light, the sun, the health of their bodies. The longer he spoke, the higher his voice climbed: “It’s no longer restricted to an exclusive circle, as you might think—it’s a mass movement spreading all over Germany. The new architecture, which creates a much more modern domestic setting, is how the young people wish to live these days.” And he charged ahead with this argument through coffee and dessert, the specifics of his examples ballooned into generalities as he consumed more and more port wine from a crystal glass, his pinky finger raised in the air. From here, Lev could only see the sharp motion of the women’s white legs slicing through blue sky. Even though the count loved the sound of his own voice, he had a point about this new passion for physical training, irrepressible for certain teenagers, such as his son, Franz, who had to fill every waking moment with cycling, hiking, javelin throwing, gymnastics, fencing, and so on.

A chorus of horns sounded at a stalled truck. A balloon seller stood on the corner, and the bobbing red, orange, and blue helium orbs entranced a child who ignored her mother’s command to keep walking. A horse harnessed to a cab glanced around, lowering its head into its nose bag. White-jacketed waiters wove in and out of the small tables on café terraces. In front of the expensive hotels, porters dressed in navy blue waited. On the corner, a huge advertisement for Manoli cigarettes loomed above the intersection
—Enjoy it while it lasts!
A young woman stepped out of a cab, slender and light, her silk stockings shimmering in the afternoon sun. She glanced around to see if anyone noticed her, and catching Lev’s eye, she smiled coyly. Lev grinned at the confidence of youth, at how clearly no catastrophe had touched her yet by the way she strode into the café terrace, not bothering to give any notice to the young men exiting at the same time. Of course she could feel them looking at her, but she only smiled inwardly, imperviously scanning the terrace for her friends. The way she cut through the crowd reminded him of Vicki—they all moved so quickly now, as if a pause would cause instantaneous death.

Vicki had cut off her hair yesterday, and it had upset Josephine greatly—they were yelling at each other in the living room when he’d come home, Vicki nearly in tears and Josephine emitting that cool fury with which he was all too familiar. He had tried to mediate but failed. Why shouldn’t she look like other girls? It was the fashion. Surely Josephine should understand. Vicki had flung her arms around his neck, her breath short and quick. “Thank you, Papa. You understand. You really do.” He’d guiltily held her in his arms while Josephine surveyed them with a steely glare. In that moment, Lev saw the age on her face: the shadows under her eyes, the slightly dull pallor of her once radiant skin, the thinness of her upper lip. “Forgive me for trying to maintain some semblance of order in this household,” she’d said, before retreating upstairs to their bedroom, where she’d stayed for the rest of the night, not speaking to Lev until this morning. Even then, she answered in a monosyllable when he asked what was for dinner tonight. “Fish.” And then she’d turned away, avoiding the perfunctory kiss he always placed on her forehead before leaving.

The way she’d averted her eyes and recoiled when Lev touched her cheek—all because of what Vicki had done to her hair? No, not all. Josephine’s anger contained various layers, layers that could be excavated, akin to the findings of a massive archaeological dig. On the outer layer, she was angry over a specific, quite recent event, such as Vicki’s hair. Underneath this, her anger percolated over a series of other infractions committed in the past weeks: he’d misplaced her ivory hairbrush; Vicki hadn’t yet sewn the ribbons on her pointe shoes; Marthe burnt the roast again; the dog Mitzi had forgotten herself and urinated on the pillow with a needlepoint of the Kaiser’s imperial palace, a keepsake from her aunt Agatha. And beneath this second layer existed a third layer, filled with the defeat and regret of having surrendered to life’s manifold disappointments. When they had nasty fights, this third layer revealed itself in sharp bright flashes. Her face turned from hardened dissatisfaction to a hollow vibrating sadness, and Lev had to look away, leave the room. He didn’t want to know more of this third layer, but he could guess its contents: a failed music career, the death of her mother, the trouble with Franz—something about the boy wasn’t entirely right—and the end of
a certain way of life, from before the war, before he’d left and returned with pieces of himself missing, pieces neither he nor she could recover.