The Empire of the Senses (3 page)

Lying next to Lev on the transport train, the sleeping men looked peaceful. To escape the flies, many of them had placed pine branches over their faces. A forest of breathing wood. Outside, the trees exhibited the first signs of destruction. Bullet holes had pierced long delicate birches. Then there would be stretches of unmarked trees, white and gleaming. He wondered how recently the Russians had been here. The task of the Eighth Army, according to the officer who’d announced this when they’d boarded the train, was to regain areas that had been occupied by the Russians, as well as advancing over the border area in combat. It was impossible to tell if they’d crossed over the border or not. Lev also did not know if he would be stationed in Königsberg, northeast along the Baltic Sea near the Nemen River, or Mitau, which was more isolated, closer to the Russian border. The Russians had deserted both towns, leaving behind a wake of women and children, probably starving. When Lev had left his house, it smelled of bread. His children’s skin shone from plentiful amounts of milk and butter. Berlin, of all places, would not suffer food shortages, he hoped.

Leaving Vicki behind had felt especially painful. On his last night at home, he tucked her into bed as he usually did. In the next room, he heard Josephine reading to Franz, stories about soldiers fighting in the snow, in the forests, and against all odds, winning. The window was open, letting in warm summer air. In a thin white nightgown, dark curls spilling over her shoulders, Vicki sat propped up on pillows asking him
to sing song after song, delaying the moment when he would switch off the light and darkness would envelop the room.

“When you’re gone, what if I can’t sleep?” she asked.

He told her to think of her best memory, and she asked him how large or small the memory should be, and could the memory include other people, like her best friend, Greta, and could she change a memory so that, for instance, Franz would not have gone along to the candy store with them on the last day of school, and then he would not have picked out the best salted caramel piece, stuffing it into his mouth.

Amused, Lev had said, “It’s your memory. You can do with it what you please.”

“I wouldn’t be lying?”

“No,” he said, holding her small hand, hoping this moment would stick in his mind months from now, years from now: the warmth of her palm, the healthy pink under her fingernails, her brown almond-shaped eyes scanning his face, trying to decipher how serious it really was, his leaving.

“You’re coming back by Christmas?” she asked for the fourth time that night.

He squeezed her hand. “Yes, Christmas.”

She looked doubtful. Possibly she read the fear on his face, which he tried to mask with an overconfident tone.

“Are you sad?” Lev asked. But she only nestled into him, the side of her head pressed against his chest, her body curled into a ball. He stroked her back, her hair, and tears pricked his eyes. He didn’t want her to see the anguish distorting his face, and so he swiftly switched off the lamp next to her bed. He held her for a long time, until, from the hallway, Josephine’s voice cut through the stillness, asking if he’d finished packing his things.

The day he left, Lev watched Josephine through the train window. All in white, standing on the platform, she examined her fan. She didn’t even bother to look up when the train started moving, until the last minute, as if she feared holding his gaze too long, as if such emotion would seem
indulgent. She peered at the car behind his, and he could see that she searched for his face, but Lev did not call her name or wave a handkerchief to attract her attention. He had wanted her to feel remorse, to suffer his absence, to curse herself for missing the vital moment. But, Lev thought, nudging the knapsack with the edge of his soiled boot, perhaps she did not really suffer, at rest within her imperial bearing. Maybe she had walked home and felt more bothered by the afternoon heat than his departure. Maybe she stopped for a lemon ice and fanned her moist face, hoping the powder she had so carefully applied that morning had not streaked. She might pass another soldier and his wife walking to the train with stricken faces, and then she would nod to them in solidarity, reveling in the performance of mourning without really mourning him. And if she sought comfort in the church’s lit candles, Lev knew she would pray for Germany and victory and large faceless things, because praying for a husband was ungenerous to the rest. A monarchist, with her fervent loyalty to the Son and the Holy Ghost, after crossing herself, would she linger a moment and pray for him?

His head rested on his rolled-up canvas pack, which was jammed against the train window. Before the others woke and started arguing about whether they were bound for Mitau or not, Lev slept. Already the coolness of early morning was gone and a thick heat bathed his face, softening the thoughts that kept him up at night: Josephine spending countless hours with her mother, or the fact that her brother, Karl, had been sent to the Western Front to build the first trenches, which somehow seemed more heroic than Lev’s coming here.

It was a deep sleep, and Lev dreamed the unspeakable, as if the morning hours permitted obscenities. A woman with marble skin and dark-red hair, the color of October leaves, was naked save for a green velvet vest. She writhed beneath him, and his tongue explored her cunt, the smooth contours of it, although they were in the army medical office, in the white antiseptic room where Lev had been examined before joining up. The whole time Lev felt nervous a doctor might open the door and discover them beneath the bright medical lights. The
urgency and uneasiness he felt melded into another dream, in which his mother would not let him wash his hands before dinner, forbidding him to use the same sink basin as she. When Lev asked why, she called him a Jew in disguise as a goy, and she grimaced when she said this, half smiling, half taunting. Lev froze, his hands outstretched before him.

He woke up with the sun bright on his face, his hands outstretched as if carrying something sacred, a tallith, or a Torah wrapped in embroidered velvet. A man leaned over him, trying to jam the window farther down, cursing the stubborn wooden frame. Lev peered up at his unshaven chin. It was an odd sight, made odder when the man vigorously shook his head in disapproval, the skin hanging from his chin swinging back and forth. Dazzled by the bright sun coming through the trees, Lev’s eyes watered, blurring the sight of men milling about, spitting morning phlegm out the windows, scratching themselves, sharing cigarettes. The man above him cursed and stared down at Lev. His eyes were savage, bloodshot. “Does this damn window open any farther? It’s sweltering.”

Lev got up. He still felt the light warmth of the red-haired woman’s body. They pushed down the window in a joint effort. The man grunted with satisfaction when gusts of hot wind blew into their faces. He poked his head out the window, grinning through his unruly mustache, and said, “Smells like horse shit and burning fields.”

Lev grinned back, not wanting to betray his fear. He smelled fire. “Are we near the front?”

The man basked in the wind, his hair wild around his face.

Lev rested his forearms on the window ledge, almost touching the other man’s elbow. He asked again, “Are we near the front?”

“Who knows?” the man said into the wind.

Gradually, the lushness and green protection of the forest grew sparse. Acres and acres of farmland on either side of the train had been scorched, burned out by the Russians before their retreat. Along the road, destroyed houses were bullet-ridden, and in the remaining potato fields, Lev saw oblong little mounds with wooden crosses stuck into them, helmets on top, cocked to the side. If the other man saw the
helmets, he didn’t let on. Lev could tell they were German helmets because of their pointed spikes catching the light. They passed through towns filled with deserted houses, no one on the streets, the gutters full of horse manure. A few starving cows blinked from a field. Lev breathed into his sleeve, the smell of manure and ash overpowering. Diaphanous farmhouses followed one after another as if ghostly bones hung languidly in midair. The man pointed to a broken-down doorway, and then a person appeared, gripping the wooden door frame, only to vomit on the doorstep before retreating back inside. The man grinned again, as if the burnt fields and the people left behind already proved a German victory. He held out a cigarette.

“Thank you,” Lev said, surprised at how the man lit it, with the courtesy of a headwaiter. The train stalled. “Perhaps we’re here.”

The man shrugged, unconvinced.

Lev hoped this might be their stopping place, as the redness of the sun sadly vibrating through the fir trees struck him as beautiful. Beside the train tracks, two women wielded picks in the potato fields, backing away from the ground with alarming force before plunging into the soil again. One of the women looked up at him with eyes as black as prunes, and Lev detected both reproach and fear in her glance. The other woman paid them no notice, as if the bouts of bloody turmoil, whether it was the Russians or the Germans or the French or another invading group, were always occurring and would continue to occur. The way she wielded her pick said this much, radiating a passive acceptance of tragedy, an enduring knowledge that it was not that this one terrible thing had happened to her, but terrible things were always happening. Her passivity was galling, an affront to everything Lev put stock in. It reminded him of his parents. They had left Galicia for Berlin when Lev was two years old—their one act of will. But after this, they lived snugly in the Jewish quarter speaking only Yiddish and treating the rabbis as if they were gods. They refused to venture outside the limits of Scheunenviertel because they did not feel entitled. When Lev asked why, his mother would throw her hands into the air and exclaim, “We should be happy for this much.” Her mouth would set into a tense line,
and she would point to Lev’s light eyes as if this caused his arrogance. “You always want so much. You always ask why, why. This,” she yelled, waving a cloth around the dimly lit kitchen, “is more than enough.”

Lev took the last drag of his cigarette, watching the women walk away, retreating into the thick woods, their scythes on their shoulders.

“I think,” the man said after flicking his cigarette out the window, “we’re here.” His face glowed in the red sun. “But we’re not at the front.” He tapped his ear. “No artillery fire.” His head tilted to the right, as alert as a bird listening for a mating call. “Faintly. I hear some fire faintly in that direction.” He gestured in the opposite direction of where the women had gone.

Lev’s stomach knotted with hunger. They had not eaten all day. He tasted nicotine mixed with the orange peel he occasionally bit into. The man told him at camp a hot meal would be served. “And maybe if we’re lucky, we’ll have a wash and some whiskey.”

“Where are you from?” Lev now felt convinced this man was a Berlin waiter in one of the posh dining clubs where he liked to take Josephine dancing.

“Dachau.” The man twisted one end of his mustache into a fine point. “I was a policeman there.” He paused and then began twisting the other end. “Have you been?”

“I haven’t been south of Frankfurt.”

“It’s a beautiful place.”

The general hum of discussion, as they lined up in the aisles of the train, established they were at Königsberg. The man with the mustache forged ahead and then blended in with the other men as they waited to debark the train. Lev could still see the back of his clean neck, the close shave he must have enjoyed before leaving Dachau. A huddled silence fell, followed by one voice speaking above the rest, a confident and conspiratorial stream of words radiating from the front of the train, where one man stood, small in stature with sharp clear eyes that roved the crowd as he described what lay ahead. Lev heard snatches of conversation from others commenting on what the man was saying. Most of them couldn’t hear him very well. Someone standing behind Lev
breathed in quickly and asked, “Did he say we’re leaving for the front today?” Lev felt a renewed shower of sweat break over his chest. The man spoke quickly and energetically and had a lean animated face. His eyes darted around the car as he explained that the front line was only a few kilometers away, that some of them would be sent there, and some would be held at camp until needed.

The engineer clamored toward the man, placing a thin hand on his shoulder. “Do you think I’ll be sent to the front directly?”

The man rubbed his chin. “It’s possible. You are young. But”—he paused—“they are always changing their minds. From what I hear, it’s not as organized as it seems.” Other men nodded. Lev watched him with fascination. His information was merely speculative, and yet he had fashioned himself into an authority on what the authorities were thinking. His name, Lev heard, was Hermann Streich. Physically, he was round-shouldered and slight, his oblong face wagging back and forth with various theories, but Lev felt drawn to him, as the other men did.

When they arrived at the camp, there was drinking and music. The air was celebratory over the recent taking of the Polish fortresses of Kowno and Wilna, which had driven the Russians farther east. Forty officers ate outside at a long wooden table, the red stripe of the general staff on their pants. They toasted and cheered the new crop of men. Another table was set up, where Lev and the rest were served mutton with small sickly beets. As he was cutting through his meat, he heard cannons sounding off, and then two columns of troops appeared, all in field gray.

Hermann leaned over his plate, whispering, “They’re going to the front line. We’re still fighting the Russians. They did not retreat as easily as our good officers would have us believe.” He motioned toward the other table, where the officers ate. Lev tried to eat the beets sitting in a pool of oil. His stomach protested, but everyone had said, eat what is in front of you as fast as you can. As he ate, Lev overheard the officers talking about how even though the land was ruinous and barbaric, they would build it up again, cultivate and nurture it, as this was the German way. “We take what is backward and diseased, and with the strength of our will and hard work, we transform this”—an officer gestured
with disgust at the surroundings—“into fertile, productive, and useful resources.”