The Empire of the Senses (49 page)

The last time she saw Mara, Vicki had helped her distribute flyers for a KPD rally. It was just before she’d met Geza, before so much had changed. She thought they were taking an innocent stroll through the old neighborhood, perhaps stopping for a coffee, until she noticed Mara’s bulging purse. The purse was filled with flyers, which had to be stuffed into envelopes and mailed to a list of people. Such subversive activity, Mara joked, was conducted in the basement of the yeshiva. Vicki couldn’t leave her grandmother stranded at one of the folding tables in the basement, a stifling room absent of any fans, especially when people her own age greeted Mara, hugged her, and asked after
her health, before returning to their tasks, diligently folding flyers and slipping them into already-addressed envelopes. Not only would they think she was a bad granddaughter but a bourgeois one to boot. And so she ended up sitting next to Mara, folding flyers into perfect rectangles, pressing her fingers along the creases, and Mara then stuffed them absentmindedly into envelopes, all the while using this opportunity to point out the eligible bachelors in the room. “That’s Arthur Oertelt—with the glasses, next to the radiator. He’s training to be an engineer. He’s quite tall—he’s sitting down so you wouldn’t know—and look at his broad shoulders. Not a trace of baldness on his fine head of hair. Never marry a bald man. They’re forever insecure and will cling to you. Next to him is Julius Levin, but everyone calls him Julo. A very talented artist, I’ve heard. Woodcuts. Comes from Stettin, up north, from a good family. They’d hoped he’d go into business, but it seems painting has consumed all his energy. He was engaged until very recently. His fiancée had this dog, a little white Pomeranian, very sweet, but she insisted it sleep in the bed, even though poor Julo has allergies. He said it’s either me or the dog, and who do you think she chose?”

Vicki suppressed a laugh.

“A pity, really. Now he’s single.” Mara grinned. “And over there, by the window, Stefan Lazar, the Romanian; he’s a little older, but—”

Vicki patted Mara’s hand. “It’s okay, Nana. You don’t have to worry about me.”

“Worried? Who said anything about worry?”

“I don’t lack invitations.”

Mara fanned herself with an envelope. “I’m sure you have plenty of company—but it’s the
kind
of company you keep that’s important in life.”

Vicki glanced around at the young men and women working quietly alongside one another, and she thought of her friends who danced on tables, wasted hours at the cafés, wore turbans and monocles and stenciled their eyebrows into an expression of eternal surprise. They competed for the best table at Romanisches, and when they failed, they sulked for days, as if the world had crumbled.

Vicki sighed, handing Mara a stack of folded flyers. “University
boys from good families take me out dancing. To be honest, I like the dancing more than I like them.”

“Yes, but these boys, I’m sure none of them are Jewish.”

Vicki shrugged. “I suppose not.”

Mara held an envelope in the air, as if trying to determine which way the wind blew. “You suppose?”

Vicki conceded that none of them were Jewish.

Mara clucked her tongue. “So casual about these things.”

A young, vigorous man walked into the basement carrying an electric box fan over his head. Everyone stood up, clapping. He plugged in the fan and took a bow.

Mara and Vicki remained seated, squarely facing each other.

“You’re always saying it shouldn’t matter—where you come from, your religion, and now you say this?”

“It does matter who you marry, my little
zumer-feygele
.” With the back of her hand, she stroked Vicki’s pale, soft cheek. The electric fan whizzed, its brass blades slicing the thick air.

Mara leaned in closer, her cloying perfume tingling Vicki’s nostrils. “You are one of us.”

Vicki frowned, doubtful of this.

She clutched Vicki’s wrist with her steely grip. “There will always be
us
and
them
.”

Vicki resisted the urge to argue, and instead she said it was too hot down here and proposed to buy Mara a glass of cold cider, her favorite drink.

Undeterred, Mara kept talking on the way out about how blood never lied, and Vicki shared this blood, no matter how blond her mother was or how German Lev claimed to be. Walking up the concrete steps to street level, Mara described the Cossack hordes that careened through her village when she was a child, in their black boots atop black horses, “as if a black wind perennially swept through the streets, taking some of us with them, leaving others of us for dead. And all I could do was watch through a broken window.”

Vicki tried to reason with her, but the busy street, with its honking cars and lumbering buses, only seemed to bewilder Mara more. “That
sort of thing happened in the countryside among the uneducated where modernity hadn’t yet reached,” Vicki explained in a soothing tone. She led her grandmother across the street, toward a café. “It’s like still being afraid of the dark in a city where streetlights blaze every night.” A policeman blew his whistle, stopping a car so that Mara and Vicki could cross the street.

Stepping onto the curb, Mara regained some of her composure. “Look what happened to Rathenau.”

“That was ages ago, Nana.”

“Only five years.” Mara shook her head in dismay. “A German Jew who made his distaste for Jews widely known, and still they shot him.”

“The foreign minister, or any public figure for that matter, is always someone’s target. Don’t forget, the killers committed suicide afterward.”

Mara nodded, muttering, “I suppose it was an isolated event.” As they entered the café, she brightened. “There’s Sammy!”

Sammy, the same young man who’d procured the fan earlier, ferried a crate of soda bottles out of the café. She whispered into Vicki’s ear, “A real prize, in my opinion. And a
chalutz
, no less. Training how to be a peasant when for generations we were so proud to work with our minds. They say he’s moving to Palestine.”

Sammy nodded to Mara and Vicki. Walking over to him, Mara appeared sprightly, coy. Vicki admired his bright blue eyes and how he held the crate with ease, his forearms strong and tanned from the sun.

“You got us that fan, and now soda too?”

“I’m bringing the comrades some soda, yes.”

Mara clapped her hands together. “A leader among men.”

Now, with Geza on her arm, walking into the damp wind, Vicki wondered if Mara would say the same about him. He was Jewish, a worker from Russia, her home country, and he wanted to immigrate to Palestine. Would she praise him the way she had praised Sammy?

They paused before the deserted courtyard leading into Mara’s house.

Ducking under the archway, Vicki said, “It looks dark inside.”

One of the cats had pressed himself into the windowpane, his orange-and-white fur smudged up against the glass. She tapped on the glass. The cat purred and purred. Then she rang the bell, feeling a rush of nervousness. What if Mara was home? What if she didn’t like Geza and then reported back to her father? Her parents still didn’t know about him.

They waited a few minutes. Vicki shrugged. “She’s probably at a KPD rally.”

“I love her already,” Geza joked.

Turning to leave, Vicki said, “Let’s go to that place Elsa likes. I’m hungry.”

The café was inside a cozy boathouse on pilings over a lake. A handful of tables scattered around the small dance floor. They ordered simple food: onion soup, beer, cucumber salad. Geza ate
pirozhki
and herring. After lunch, they danced, although Geza danced haltingly, giving every step a long thoughtful pause. He preferred to just hold her close, his long fingers spreading over her back, caressing her thick wool sweater as if it were her skin, occasionally running a thumb down the length of her spine, which sent shivers through her. Vicki imagined his naked body pressed up against her nakedness, his bony hipbones skimming her pelvis, how she would cup his shoulders and urge him into her with confidence, as if she had done this many times, when in truth, she was still a virgin. At night, alone in her girlhood bedroom, she pushed a lumpy pillow between her legs and squeezed her eyes shut, pretending Geza lay with her under the creamy sheets, their bodies entangled in the darkness, his laughing eyes encouraging her, wooing her, loving her. When he held her close, she teased him, whispering into his ear, “Can you take me someplace?” He would gently stroke her hair and whisper back, “Not much longer.” “What if I can’t wait?” she pressed, only half teasing now. “I don’t want to take you like this,” he would say, sweeping his hand out as if she expected them to make love in public, on a café tabletop. “I want to make you my wife. Properly,” he would add with a
touch of indignation. His resistance both charmed and frustrated her, but she accepted it, burrowing her face into his chest, embarrassed, flattered, and full of want.

After dancing, they walked out on the wooden deck that stretched over the water. They stood together at the rail and watched a chain of black swans gliding past.

Geza gripped the railing, his knuckles white. He gazed at Vicki.

She knew from his pained expression what he was about to say. They had been over this before, countless times.

“Come to Palestine with me. I leave in the spring.”

Vicki sighed and turned away from the lake, leaning her back against the railing.

“Don’t look like that,” he said.

The thought of not going with him made her whole body ache, but she also couldn’t imagine telling her family good-bye, Berlin good-bye, her friends and studies and all of Germany good-bye. Besides, her family didn’t even know he existed, let alone that she was in love with him. First, he would have to agree to meet her father.

A shot fired off in the distance.

She sighed. “You think it’s better for us to live there.”

He kissed her neck. “I like how you said
us
.”

Vicki snuggled her face into his chest, inhaling the smoke that always lingered on his clothing from the boardinghouse.

He stroked her hair. “And yes, better for us, because we are
Jews
.”

“My mother isn’t even—”

He pressed his lips to hers. She closed her eyes, willing the present moment to suffice, but it never did. He always had to talk about the future.

He ran a finger along her chin. “Your grandmother is both Jewish and a Communist. Two strikes against you!”

She laughed and pretended to punch him in the arm.

Someone had turned on the jukebox and a garish polka floated over the deck.

He set his forearms against the railing and stared out at the black
lake. “In all seriousness, Vicki. What I’m about to say, you’re not going to like, but the fact is, you don’t understand the way things really are from your vantage point.”

“ ‘In all seriousness, Vicki,’ ” she repeated.

His jaw tensed. “I wish you wouldn’t mock me.”

She turned around and assumed his same position, knocking her elbow into his.

“The fact is, a new language is developing.
Ubermensch
means ‘superman.’ If you’re Aryan. And
untermensch
is ‘subhuman,’ for Jews. And then there’s
strafexpedition
.”

“Punitive expedition.”

Geza nodded. “That’s right. I’ve seen the storm troopers on their
expeditions
into the Jewish and Communist neighborhoods. I’ve seen the men left behind, bloodied, barely breathing, badly beaten. It’s a pogrom.” He drew a breath. “Which is why we have to leave.”

A heavy mist gathered over the lake. Vicki shivered in her coat and thought back to the rally in Nuremberg, to the girl tossed high in the air, to the way her father pensively stared out the car window afterward, and how her grandmother had said she would move to Palestine, if only she were younger.

“We have a right to Palestine. Not because it was once our homeland but because no other country will have us.” He concentrated on the wooded forest across the lake, as if Palestine were just there, within reach.

She took his hand and kissed the top of it. From inside the café, a raucous laughter erupted.

“Is that a yes?” His voice vibrated with hope.

She bit her lower lip. The gunmetal sky tipped into evening. “There’s still time.”

He looked away, disappointed.

She caressed his shoulder. “Come to the house and meet with my father.”

After a long pause, he said, “All right.”

“Next Sunday?”

“Next Sunday,” Geza repeated.

33

Geza arrived freshly shaven, little nicks visible along the underside of his chin. He smelled faintly of lime cologne and wore his best suit. His polished oxfords with the square toes were new and stiff and creaked when he walked. Vicki spotted him though the living room window, striding nervously up to the front door, a bouquet of white roses accented with holly in hand. It was the Sunday after New Year’s, and the family was recovering from various celebrations and parties.

Lev sat in the living room reading the paper. He said, in a droll tone, “So you say I know this young man?”

Vicki caught her reflection in the gilded mirror hanging on the opposite wall. She looked older, more sophisticated, a bit leaner. Love had fashioned her into a woman.

The doorbell rang before she could reply.

Marthe opened the door, ushering Geza inside and taking his coat. He paused in the foyer.

Lev raised his eyebrows expectantly, a slight smile playing on his lips.

Vicki sat upright in her chair. “Where’s Mutti?”

Lev motioned upstairs. “Changing.”

Geza hesitated in the archway separating the foyer from the sitting room. He held the flowers awkwardly away from his body. Marthe, sensing his unease, took the flowers and said she’d put them in water straightaway.

Vicki smiled at Geza and motioned for him to come into the room.

Lev didn’t bother to look up from his paper. Perhaps, Vicki thought, he was trying to act unimpressed, but it was rude.

Geza took two loping strides into the room, his shoes creaking along with him. “Hello, Herr Perlmutter?” He extended a hand.