The Empire of the Senses (31 page)

“So you have to be fat as well as boring to waltz?” Her voice rang out, followed by a peal of laughter.

Franz paused on the second to last stair, trying not to make a sound. If he waited here for a few more minutes, would they say something about him, about why he never had a girl? He clenched the banister, listening to the swish of the kitchen door, which carried the scent of marzipan and berries. His mouth salivated for the cake Marthe placed on the table. The dog Mitzi roamed down the hall and, spotting Franz, picked up her pace.

Franz knelt on the stairs, motioning for Mitzi to come to him.

“The fashion will inevitably change to a more Rubenesque figure. I heard in America they already have pills you can take, to fatten you up overnight,” Lev said.

“I’m never taking those pills!” Again, such a loud voice, so piercing. He squeezed his eyes shut in aggravation. “No, no—just a little piece please,” Vicki said. Now they’re eating cake, he thought, running his fingers through Mitzi’s coarse black fur.

Then his mother’s voice, muffled and low in comparison. “I want to check on him. He might be ill.”

“If I were dying, literally dying on my deathbed, you wouldn’t even notice,” Vicki retorted. Franz imagined her spearing her fork into a piece of cake to give her comment the full effect.

Sitting at the top of the stairs, Franz heard the start of that incessant clipping coming from next door, right below his bedroom window. The wind through the trees softened the sound, but he heard it whenever the wind died down. Feeling the heat rise in his chest, he stormed into his room and pushed the curtains back, and yes, as he expected, he saw Herr Lenevski, in the dying light, trimming the hedge that separated their two houses. A White Russian who wore a monocle and butchered the German language. Franz glared down at the bald spot blooming in the center of his head. He balanced on a ladder, his spectacles sitting low on the ridge of his nose as he snipped away, obsessed with the height of the hedge, that it was too high and blocked the necessary sunlight for his roses. He thought about opening the window and yelling at him to stop. But then Herr Lenevski would swear back at him in Russian and
Mitzi would start barking and then his mother and sister would run up into his room. He flopped down on his bed.
Clip, clip
. He resisted the magazines stashed underneath the bed in a shoebox because his mother might appear any moment now. If she saw these magazines, and what he did while he read them, she would be appalled. He let his hand slide down to the floor. He fingered the bed skirt, knowing the magazines lay on the other side of it. His two favorites:
Eros: Magazine for Friendship
and
Freedom, Love and Life-Art
, with lifelike illustrations of soldiers marching in time and then fornicating on the other side of the page. And
Ernst
, the more love-oriented magazine, with poetry in the style of Rilke and short stories accompanied by romantic drawings of men during the period of ancient Greece. They fed one another fruit, stroked one another’s shoulder-length hair, and embraced next to fountains, water spouting forth. He tried not looking at the magazines too often, but when he was alone in his room, especially in the afternoons, when he came home from class and the house was quiet, he surrendered to the images, gorging on them. Afterward, he guiltily cleaned up the mess, not wanting Marthe or anyone else to find traces of his illicit activities. He always promised himself he would not look at the magazines again, but of course, within a few days, he always succumbed.

Clip, clip, clip
. How much was he lopping off? Franz leapt over to the window, again pushing back the curtains. Mitzi picked up her head but didn’t move from the foot of the bed. The Russian had vanished, his ladder abandoned against the brick wall.

Defeated, he slumped into his desk chair, and switched on the lamp. He fingered the open pages of the novel he’d started, Hans Grimm’s
Volk ohne Raum
(A People Without Space), a long rant about the lack of living space in Germany. He sighed, closed the thick book, and stared at the snapshot of himself and Wolf taken last summer in one of the new photo booths where pictures develop within minutes. They’d waited in the photo booth, pressed together, their breath intermingling, wondering when the images would spit out of the little slot. Wolf sat on his lap because of the one stool, and Franz inhaled the particular scent of shaving lotion Wolf used, a lemony balsam. Wolf didn’t notice the swell in Franz’s pants, and if he did notice, he didn’t recoil. He acted as if it
wasn’t happening, which Franz took as a hopeful sign. Wolf grinned while Franz assumed a dignified expression, as if posing for a family portrait. Wolf teased him about it afterward, how serious he’d been about the snapshots, how he’d wanted them to look a certain way. Walking away from the photo booth, Franz quickly draped his blazer over his arm and held it stiffly out in front of him, as a kind of curtain. Wolf shot him a sidelong glace and then tossed his copy of the photograph into a nearby trash bin.

Franz spent the rest of the afternoon despairing over whether Wolf had noticed or not, and if he did notice, was he utterly repelled? Which would justify how casually, almost cruelly, Wolf had thrown away their photograph. As punishment. And to explain, without having to explain, that he didn’t care for Franz, at least not in that way. Afterward, when he’d sat next to Wolf at the bar, their knees knocking from time to time, Wolf appeared wholly unbothered, playing cards and describing a recent fox hunt at his grandfather’s estate—how his horse had suffered a stress fracture in the splint bone and they almost had to call off the hunt. Franz tried to listen, arranging his face into an amused smile, but at one point he had to excuse himself for the lavatory, where he sat down in the stall, his face in his hands, breathing deeply, trying to ignore the stench of urine, the sticky floors, the sound of doors banging open and shut, trying to hold back his tears, the pressure building behind his eyes.

Franz sauntered over to the framed photograph of Wolf from that day, his own face nearly obscured. He had placed it on a low table next to his bed, which displayed other important items: a Hakenkreuz pin that he fixed to the knot of his tie, the black, white, and red banner of Imperial Germany draped over the table, serving as a makeshift tablecloth, and his DNVP membership card. He was now a young member of the German National People’s Party. His father didn’t know. At meetings, they spoke of restoring Germany to her former glory, that a moral and national rebirth was necessary to reestablish Germany’s long-lost connection to the ancient Greeks—that the true German
volk
would only emerge when the foreigners, the Jews and the Slavs, had been expunged. And above this altar, as he called it, he’d hung two oil portraits to be
enjoyed simultaneously: Frederick the Great on horseback and Bismarck, his domineering profile illuminated by a bloodred background.

He heard his mother’s light footsteps ascend the staircase and down below the radio turned up, jazz blasting.

“Vicki—please! Lower the dial,” Josephine called from the stairs.

Franz ran his finger along the edge of the gilt frame, as if he could touch Wolf von Trotta’s perfect cheekbones.

17

Berlin, Friday, June 10, 1927

In March, Geza arrived in Berlin. The changeable sky confounded him, compared to the constancy of his Russian sky. Here, clouds shifted unpredictably. Rain started and stopped, and the sun emerged, blindingly bright, without warning. Never knowing if the day would grow cold or hot, he often perspired too much or shivered in a thin shirt, ill prepared. In his view, the unreliable weather explained the irritable and frenetic nature of Berliners. They pushed and shoved on the tram. A simple exchange, for instance the buying of a sausage roll, was rushed, the vendor clearly impatient with how slowly Geza conducted himself. So he trained himself to speed up, moving his hands swiftly even for simple tasks—unlocking the door, buying bread, spooning his soup, taking off his hat. He carried out these mundane actions with alacrity, with an uncharacteristic crispness. And he started walking at a clipped pace down the street to keep up with the mass of moving bodies walking even faster alongside him. Avoiding eye contact was another behavior he copied, observing how people looked down at the pavement or just past his shoulder, as if acknowledging a fellow pedestrian indicated a softness, a weakness, or that you wanted something.

If Geza had stayed in Mitau, he would have joined the Red Army, as his friends had done. His mother and his stepfather, Zlotnik, also urged him to join, because if he enlisted, the family would receive food rations and assistance with farm work. He refused. He did not believe in the workers’ movement, suspicious when they proclaimed that Jews were equal to Russians, using Trotsky, head of the Red Army, as a prime example of this new Russian Jew. Despite his mother’s protestations,
he had left Mitau two years ago and worked in Warsaw as an apprentice bricklayer, saving up enough money to come to Berlin. Eventually, he hoped to move to Palestine. When he got to Berlin, he first found work as a nightclub errand boy, but he should have known such a job would expose him to illegal activities, and after a near run-in with the law, he quit.

Now Geza worked as a bricklayer again, through the recommendation of his boss in Warsaw. It was fine work. He always had Fridays off, which he liked to spend in the Prussian State Library, in the cool confines of those rooms, leafing through newspapers or just staring into space. His life felt simple: he started work at seven and he finished at eight. The boardinghouse provided him with a cot, a blanket, and every Friday clean sheets that smelled of starch. Sure, he had to share a room with a family of four, and sometimes the joints in his hands hurt after work, but he didn’t mind. He wore the same white apron and black pants, his uniform for bricklaying. He grew to like his fellow workers, a rowdy crew from Odessa who spent all their wages on vodka and then complained that they never earned enough to keep a girl. Geza smiled at them, bemused by their theatrics, while he quietly saved and saved.

Only one thing was not simple: the envelope sewn into his threadbare jacket. Inside the envelope was a letter from his aunt Leah for Lev Perlmutter. She had asked, just before he left Mitau two years ago, that if he made it to Berlin, he must find Lev Perlmutter and give him the letter. She had not really asked him. She had thrust the letter into his hands and demanded it. She had learned to read and write for this very purpose. It had taken her a year. “If you find him, give it to him,” she had said, her face clouded with urgency. “Promise me,” she insisted. Geza promised.

He carried this promise around his neck like a stone, even though he knew where Lev lived. He knew Lev’s house in Charlottenburg with the blue door and the brass handle and the white lilies lining the pathway. He had seen the stately brick mailbox, a little house unto itself inside the low garden wall, into which he could easily slip the letter. But he had not done it.

That day in March, when he went to deliver the letter, he hovered
outside the garden wall, watching for the right moment to dispense with it. He wanted to complete the task, as he found romantic entanglements such as these distasteful. Just then, the front door opened. Geza shivered in his white shirt and watched Lev skip down his steps, whistling a popular tune. He looked healthy and rich, smoking a cigarette, wearing an expensive fedora. About to turn away, Geza saw a young woman laughing and calling after Lev. The sound of her voice, as melodious as a little bell, entranced him. She wore a knit cap molded to the shape of her perfect head. Sunlight bounced off the crisp white fabric of her dress. Her long dark hair streamed down her back, and there was something intelligent and daring about her, despite how she still wore her hair long. Perhaps it was the way she teased her father or the way her agile movements gave the impression of lightness, fluttering before him like a skylark.

He couldn’t stop looking at her.

She teased Lev, motioning to his bowtie, and they laughed. Then Lev took her arm and they made their way down the stone path.

Geza darted out of view, hiding behind one of the massive oak trees lining the street. After a few moments, a woman and a young man also emerged from the house. He concluded the woman, also in white, must be Lev’s wife. She held her head high and wore an elaborate hat with feathers and pearls in it. The hat reminded him of an ostrich. The boy sulked and she tried to comfort him. Geza thought it was strange, how this boy, who was nearly a man, acted as if someone had taken away his toys. City life must make men soft, he thought. The mother and son walked behind Lev and his daughter. Clutching the letter, Geza trailed the family down the street for a few blocks. He tried to catch what the girl was saying, to know more about her, but he couldn’t hear the exact words. Only the golden sound of her voice washed over him.

Leah’s letter was still sewn into his coat pocket, even now, as he walked to the Prussian State Library with a few sheets of loose paper under his arm. He might write to his mother and reassure her all was well. Or he might let his mind wander in the vast octagonal reading room. So quiet and still, the reading room provided relief from the tumult of the
boardinghouse, with cigar smoke lingering on the furniture, the running children and their mothers shouting after them.

Out of the corner of his eye, Geza noticed a woman leap over a puddle, and the lightness in her step reminded him of the girl he had seen that day, when he almost dropped off Leah’s letter. Almost. But when he had his chance, after Lev and his family rounded the corner, he chose not to. Lev had looked comfortable in his life—and his beautiful daughter adored him. Despite his promise to Leah, Geza also thought such a letter, whatever its contents, might ruin this family. And then what? What did Leah want from Lev after all this time? The simple act of dropping her letter in Lev’s mailbox would involve Geza in more tumult, more tears, more separation when the world with its Great War had already had enough of this. No, Geza had decided, I won’t do it. I’ll wait at least and see. He didn’t know what he was waiting for, but it felt like enough to walk away with the letter still in his possession, convinced he had somehow helped the young girl with the ringing voice in her white dress, a sight of beauty he would otherwise never have seen.