The Empire of the Senses (54 page)

“No,” Franz said in a high whisper.

“Well, it’s uncomfortable regardless, keeping these on,” Manfred said, taking off his trousers, but he stopped when he noticed Franz staring at him, silent and still.

“Is this your first time?”

“No,” Franz lied.

Manfred smiled and playfully flicked the hair out of Franz’s eyes. “It’s okay. I can tell it is.” Manfred cupped Franz’s chin; his hand felt warm and dry. “Let me show you.”

Someone hollered good night and shut off the lights in the hallway. A door slammed.

“You don’t have to—” Franz stammered. He should leave, forget all this—already he had failed, but then he inhaled Manfred’s scent. It reminded him of warm milk and almonds mixed with the sharp sting of his own nervous sweat. He stared at Manfred’s bare chest, as smooth as wood, a rich walnut. Manfred’s warm hands slid down Franz’s forearms. “It’s all right, really.”

“Really?” Franz asked, feeling foolish.

Manfred kissed him on the mouth. The kiss was tidy, just the right
amount of saliva. Franz felt his muscles loosen, his stomach soar with excitement.

Manfred buried his mouth into Franz’s shoulder blade and bit him hard. Then he sucked the place where he had bit him. Franz sighed—a long sigh filled with all the times he had wanted to do this with Wolf but couldn’t. He pulled Manfred into him, their belt buckles clashing. They both laughed. Then Manfred slid off his pants and Franz did too. They stood before each other, naked in the darkness except for the white moonlight filtering through the small dirty window.

Manfred carefully turned Franz around, his hands massaging his abdomen, his thighs, his chest. “See?” He breathed into Franz’s neck.

Franz gulped, feeling Manfred’s hardness pressing up against him.

“Don’t worry,” Manfred said, planting little kisses on Franz’s neck. “We’re alone and free now.”

39

Coming in from the fields, she needed time to let her eyes adjust to the darkened room of the meetinghouse. She pulled off her straw hat, fanning her face. It was hot for April. Before her, she squinted at the outline of Zev and Maya Dubinsky, huddled over a newspaper article. They were discussing something intensely, as usual. They proved incapable as long as Vicki had known them, which had only been the last two weeks, of tepid table talk:
Pass the salt. How was your day? Will it rain tomorrow?
No, no. For them, speech was solely reserved for heavy drawn-out discussions regarding the immigration process, the illusion of assimilation, how Europe was a bourgeois fantasy waiting to crumble, how they must sever all ties to their Diaspora existence and begin anew in the Middle East. Which began, of course, with the assigning of a Hebrew name that was either the equivalent of one’s European name or bore some relation to it.

“Aviva!” Maya called, motioning for Vicki to come over. She still had to get used to her new name, which meant “spring” in Hebrew. Because of the presence of the
v
, it was the name that sounded closest to her real name. As it turned out, there was no Hebrew equivalent for Vicki.

Vicki wiped her brow with her sleeve. “What are you reading?”

Maya beamed. “Zev just published an editorial in the
Jewish Daily Forward
about the necessity of Labor Zionism.”

“It’s only a little article.” Zev shrugged, chewing on tobacco, which Vicki found unnecessarily vulgar. How did Maya stand it? She had grown up in Paris, the daughter of White Russians who had fled Saint Petersburg on the eve of the revolution, whereas Zev hailed from some backwater town near Odessa. Maya had swept her long dark tendrils
into a French twist and then covered her head with a shimmering green scarf. Even in the heat, Maya didn’t break a sweat, despite the tight floral dress she wore just for digging potatoes.

Maya waved the newspaper in front of Zev’s face. “The whole bottom half of the second page—I would hardly call that little!”

He took it from her and rolled it up into a baton. “What I should have said, but I’m too much of a coward to say, is this: what the Jews are seeking in Palestine is not
progress
but a
state
. When you build a state, you make a revolution. And in a revolution there can only ever be winners and losers. This time around, we Jews are going to be the winners.” He grinned, tapping the rolled-up newspaper against his thigh.

“Congratulations anyway, on the editorial,” Vicki said, feeling uncomfortable all over again. Last night at dinner, she had offhandedly complained about tending to the baby animals because it was boring, smelly work—the calves just stared at her all day with their doleful blank eyes, and when she stopped moving for one second, they took the opportunity to shit on her shoes. A few people laughed in recognition, including Geza, but Zev ate his rice without looking up from the plate, his jaw tensing, before launching into a tirade about the importance of Jewish work: young Jews from the Diaspora would be rescued from their effete, assimilated lives and transported to remote collective settlements in rural Palestine where they would create a living Jewish peasantry, which inevitably, though unfortunately, excluded the Arabs. Under the table, Geza had squeezed Vicki’s hand. He understood, at least, how difficult it was to suddenly shun her European upbringing and trade it in for this. Even if
this
—a line of dirt ever present under her fingernails, the rarity of a shower, singing songs she didn’t know the words to—was what they wanted. Or said they wanted. And every night, cupping her face with his rough hands, Geza promised, “It will be different once we get there. It will be different.”

Vicki did hope the kibbutz, Beit Alfa, would be different. And she knew, as Geza reminded her, that she should be thankful to Zev. He had arranged a place for them here, at the
hachshara
training center in Skaby, southeast of Berlin.
Hachshara
, Vicki learned, the Hebrew
word for “training,” was the name for Zionist preparatory and training centers where young people received instruction at no charge prior to immigrating to Palestine. More and more Jews were applying to make aliyah, and the Jewish Agency for Palestine guaranteed a certain immigration quota, which the British mandate authorized. But Geza pointed out the most important thing: if they immigrated through one of these centers, they could make the quota and not pay a thing. Otherwise, it was very expensive.

At least this training center was located on a sprawling old farming estate. The Hechalutz had dormitories for the Young Pioneers built on the property. Agricultural chores were carried out in the morning. In the afternoons, they attended classes on Jewish subjects including religion and Hebrew. Then the evenings, called “social evenings,” were dedicated to Jewish spiritual life—traditions, customs, rituals, all of which Vicki knew nothing about to the point of embarrassment. Not knowing a word of Hebrew, she didn’t understand the songs and poems, but she noticed most of the others acted the same way, mumbling their way through the words, mashing them together, and then ending with gusto on a certain syllable to convince themselves and others of their dedication. In Skaby alone, eighty
chaverim
waited to immigrate. You were supposed to serve two years before immigrating, but somehow Zev had gotten Geza and Vicki on the passenger list for the
Pacific
. They were to set sail in June. Even though Vicki knew she should feel lucky, her heart pounded with the same question pounding through everyone’s heart here:
If it works, and we really get a place on the ship, what awaits us?

In the white moonlight, she lay in her cot, next to Maya, who slept peacefully, asking herself this question—what would it really be like? She pictured sandbars, the lapping of turquoise waters, cerulean skies, stone walls bleached the color of bone, and muscular Jews striding, their tanned arms swinging, singing their Hebrew songs. Or at least this was what she was supposed to imagine. What they wanted her to imagine, the Mayas and Zevs of the movement. And what, in her worst moments, in the small hours of morning, her mind racing, her chest coated in sweat, did she actually imagine? No shade, save for a lone and
withered palm. Scorching sun burning her scalp as she picked tomatoes with bloodied fingertips. Communal bathrooms and shared meals. Her skin perpetually coated with a fine layer of dust kicked up by the wind.

Punching her pillow into a shape that would induce sleep, she drew in a sharp breath at the thought of leaving her father. It wasn’t as easy as they said, leaving family behind to start a new family, a different, better kind of family. Her father—their after-dinner debates, the way he gave her flowers on her birthday and took her to the ballet, his wry smile, always ready to engage her in witty repartee. Even for her mother and Franz, she felt a pang of regret, leaving behind the familial disputes and irritations for new disputes and irritations in an unfamiliar terrain, with those who did not share her blood. And good-bye to Berlin, good-bye to all that? Maya called it a mechanical city, a frigid inferno with its snub-nosed cab drivers and rivers of automobiles honking at nothing, but she didn’t see, or want to see, the wide shaded boulevards of Charlottenburg, window shopping at Wertheim’s, the ladies in their ermine collars and pillbox hats, the placid waters of the Wannsee in the height of summer, the jazz bars and the dancing girls and the sidewalk cafés crammed with people who were endlessly arguing, debating, and contesting the ideas of the age.

No, she didn’t see it. Vicki watched Maya sleep, her thin arm flung over her face. She snored lightly, joining the chorus of snorers. A milky purple light filtered in through the dusty windows. It was almost six. Soon there’d be a knock on the door, followed by a general rousing: stretching and yawning and disheveled hair. Bleary-eyed and barefoot, they would stumble over to the sinks, splash cold water on their faces, and prepare for another day of physical labor. Vicki savored these last moments before the sound of that knock—it felt luxurious to just lie here in bed, the pillow balled up under the crook of her arm. Thankfully, she only had one more week tending to those calves. And then they would return to Berlin, and she would prepare to leave. Forever.

Last night after dinner, after Zev’s whole speech about Labor Zionism, she and Geza had stood out on the porch, watching the hazy sunset disappear. He smoked a pipe, a new affectation he’d taken up. Vicki suspected
he thought it made him appear more manly, older and world-weary, when in fact, it looked a bit silly sticking out of his mouth as if he were a sea captain.

She sighed, leaning against the post. “How does animal husbandry pave the way to my Zionist future?” She was half joking, but at the same time her voice cracked and she felt tears well up in her eyes.

“Oh, Viv,” he said, coming up behind her. He called her Viv now, short for Aviva. It sounded more palatable to both of them. He wrapped his arms around her waist and perched his chin on her shoulder.

“Do you miss your tutus and rose petals?” he teased, alluding to a ballet recital where she’d performed, in white tulle, a variation from
La Sylphide
.

Her throat tightened. From inside the main house, she heard them singing in Hebrew. Under her blouse, Geza’s hands spread across her stomach. “The thing is, ballet is a—”

She sighed. “Bourgeois fantasy. I know.”

“Viv, I sympathize.”

She turned around to face him.

The singers stopped, and then someone began to recite a poem.

“Do you really?”

He tucked a loose strand of hair back into her floral scarf. “Yes, really.”

She wanted to shake him. He always relied on this light teasing tone, on his lopsided grin, even when things felt serious. Especially when things felt serious. Feeling the heat rise in her chest, she was about to tell him that maybe she couldn’t do it—she barely had any skills and learning Hebrew was impossible. A backward language, writing from right to left. It made no sense. None of it did.

The strange intonation of words drifted through the screened-in windows. They listened for a moment. Then Geza admitted that of course it would be very hard for her, at first, to leave behind such a comfortable Europeanized existence. She noticed how he avoided saying
bourgeois existence
, as that phrase had been so overused it ceased to mean anything.

She leaned her head against Geza’s chest, feeling herself forfeit to
him even though the fight she wanted to start still simmered within her. The voices picked up again, and this time singing was accompanied by the slapping of a tambourine. Geza started rocking her back and forth, humming under his breath. She resisted, but he twirled her out and then rolled her back into him. He plucked off her scarf and started waving it in the air as he crossed one foot over the other, dancing a circle around her.

“Geza, stop!”

He danced more wildly, his arms curving over an imaginary ball, and then, flexing his palms, he shot his arms upward. Having donned her scarf, he stomped his feet, his hips sashaying from side to side as he repeated this wavelike arm movement.

Vicki leaned against the post.

“C’mon.”

Suppressing a smile, she shrugged.

“You should try.”

She made a disparaging gesture. “This?”

“Folk dancing, yes.” He pulled off the scarf.

Everything was wrong with it—the pronouncement of the heel crashing down first, the lack of turnout, the clapping and the stomping. Peasant dancing. With scarves and tambourines. The dancers actually sunk closer to the ground whereas the whole point of ballet—what she loved—was the elevation, the ethereal, otherworldly quality of floating through space, the boxed tips of her pointe shoes skimming the floor as she
bourréed
across the stage.

The sun dipped behind the blue hills. She no longer had to squint at him. Shadows filled the porch with what felt like a mire of gloom. Geza walked over to the far corner of the porch, gazing out at the wooded forest.

She went toward him but then stopped. “I’m sorry—it’s just—that type of dancing seems coarse.”