The Empire of the Senses (6 page)

Hermann grinned, twining the ribbon around his finger. “For Polina’s dollhouse?”

Lev smiled. “What else would I want your ribbon for?”

Hermann handed Lev the strip of ribbon and then tossed the stack of letters over to the side. “Keepsakes. Amulets. These things from home. They won’t save us when the bullet goes through.”

Lev gestured to the return address. “Tell me you won’t think of Elena, sweet Elena Karpovich, who wrote you all those letters in such a fine hand.”

Hermann’s thin mouth formed a bitter smile, cold and sardonic. “She had small pitiful breasts and she would never let me touch them, as if they were such a prize, those wilted drooping pendulums of flesh.”

“Aha! So you
do
remember her.” Lev slipped the ribbon into his back pocket. Perhaps it would serve as a runner along the miniature grand piano he planned to carve and place in the sitting room.

“
Remember
is a strong word.” Hermann flopped down on his cot. He put his hands behind his head and gazed up at the water-damaged ceiling. “More like a flash of thigh, the rub of her smooth pubic hair against my groin, the way she moaned and convulsed, as if I was stabbing her.”

“Delightful,” Lev said.

Hermann rolled over onto his side and stared at Lev. “Better than nothing.”

The word
nothing
cut to the quick. Could Hermann tell Lev often got nothing? The nothing of Josephine’s silent refusal, the nothing of her ghostly vertebrae when she turned away from him in bed, the nothing of her garnet lamp on the bedside table switching off, an act so much more definite than extinguishing a candle, which still left that burnt earthy smell in the air long after the flame was gone.

After a month, Lev was relieved from night watch in the hospital, and Hermann convinced him to go to the taverns. The taverns were strategically placed close to the front. On the way there, Hermann told him it was army supervised, meaning the women had been checked for VD. “They’re clean. Just don’t go sneaking into any villages. One night over there”—Hermann gestured toward a dense grouping of trees through
which a few lights glimmered—“you’ll come back with your dick burning off.”

“I’m married.” Again, he felt like a schoolboy after the words escaped him. Hermann had this effect.

“I would say that’s irrelevant.” Hermann’s eyes glinted in the moonlight. “At the edge of the earth, there are no judges.”

Lev lit Hermann’s cigarette. “And you?”

“Once.”

“Not anymore?”

Hermann took a drag. “She left.”

Lev did not ask why. He knew how easy it was to fall out of love, like sand falling through a half-clenched fist. He had felt twinges of this with Josephine before he left, when she would turn her back to him in the kitchen and he did not know to whom that back belonged. Or when she talked over dinner, the way her mouth moved would suddenly appear grotesque, the food churning around her tongue, followed by a forceful swallow. He would watch her throat working so that she could resume her sentence. And it would end up being such a meaningless sentence, not worth the effort or the patience. But these flashes of un-love lasted only momentarily, and in a rush, Lev would feel at home with her again, triggered by an equally small but valuable gesture. She might stroke his forehead in bed. Or run her lips under his ear when he came home at night, whispering, “Have you eaten?” But Lev worried that over time the un-love moments would gradually overtake the other moments, and that in a decade or less, they would be left with nothing to bind them. It was pessimistic, yes, but he had watched his parents’ affections dissolve into a haze of tobacco smoke, which thickened as the night wore on, the arguing climbing to a pitch of hysteria in the crammed living room. The porcelain plates in the glass armoire vibrated as the noise level increased, his mother’s voice high and tight, a rising crescendo of accusation. She had held a longstanding hatred for what his father did, for his talent of twisting numbers so people paid less taxes. A Communist, an admirer of Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg, she had even wanted to change her name from Mara
to Rosa, but his father forbid it. And then he stopped coming home for dinner.

It took Lev and Hermann thirty minutes, wading through the wide flooded roads, mud splashing on their boots and pants, to reach the tavern. The moon shone brightly, revealing the scurrying of large rats alongside the road. The rats burrowed into the ditches created by past explosions, searching for food and cover. Hermann aimed at one, but it got away. The bullet ricocheted off a birch tree. They silently walked on. Lev saw another one in plain view. He could easily shoot it. He placed his hand on his pistol, the cool gunmetal welcome to his sweaty palm. The dark fur under the white moon gleamed, raised up and wet. Hermann didn’t notice, and Lev let the rat dissolve into the darkness. Silently slipping into the dense foliage, the rat reminded Lev of himself walking in the shadow of Hermann, who was by contrast much more forthright and direct. If he wanted to kill a rat, he did so, whereas Lev wavered and waited and developed an association with the vile animal, which prevented him from killing it. And Hermann advertised who he was, even if many men disliked him for such brashness. His voice was the last one they heard before they dropped off to sleep. His laughter trailed his own jokes. But Lev treaded carefully within his surroundings, first observing the various alliances and then calculating where he fit in, not revealing too much of himself lest someone dislike him. He was careful not to discuss his background, which he had buried long ago, just as these rats burrowed into the fetid soil, leaving behind only the thin line of their tails, until those too disappeared.

Inside the tavern, people carried on as if they did not hear the thundering guns echoing from the front. Lev recognized the policeman from Dachau sitting on a woman’s lap, his arm slung over her flushed neck. In the corner, a man played the accordion accompanied by a boy, possibly his son, who sat with a violin positioned under his quivering chin. The policeman was drunk, his head lolling. He sat with three other soldiers, all of them with their shirts open, their pistols still in their holsters, their boots kicked up onto chairs in front of them. He saw Lev
through the dense smoke and gestured for him to come over. Hermann whispered into his ear, “He’s being sent to the front tomorrow.” His breath was stale from hunger.

Three Rubenesque women approached, their skin glowing in the dim candlelight. They spoke with their eyes, velvety and dark. Lev felt the heat and pressure of their bodies, solicitous and warm. They spoke Russian, from what he could decipher, and pantomimed drinking, tilting their chins back, leading Hermann and Lev to an empty table near the blaring music. The women were burned from working outdoors, the strength of the sun evident on their high cheekbones, delicate creases fanning out at the sides of their eyes. Josephine’s preserved white face remained smooth and untouched by the elements. Lev preferred her when she woke in the morning, a disheveled and messier version of herself, before the perfection of the day crowned her. The women leaned forward, laughing strangely at a joke Hermann made. One of the women, with reddish hair braided into a thick plait, came up behind Lev, massaging his neck, her breath in his ear. She smelled of beets and hay, and when he glanced down, he noticed how her nails carried a line of dirt beneath them, the same dirt that corrugated under his boots from the roads and that was now crusted on his pants. He caught the sour scent of dried sweat from her armpits. So different from pine and soap and lavender. The policeman and the other soldiers had peeled off their shirts, their bare chests shining with sweat, small crosses dangling. They clapped in time with the music. Flushed women danced around them, their hands on their hips. The men playfully slapped the women from behind, and the women threw back their heads. The musicians stomped their boots on the wooden floorboards. Lev wondered absently if one of the women belonged to the accordion player.

Hermann nudged him in the ribs. “Coming upstairs?”

The bare-chested men stumbled toward the dim stairwell with their women in tow. They sang in unison, an old drinking song. A song from home. The women struggled to sing along, their voices bending to the German.

Hermann added, “They have three rooms up there. Five marks for both.” He looked at Lev savagely, his jaw slack from too much drink.

The women cooed and pressed their soft bodies against them. Lev felt his groin tighten, a building pressure. He tapped his boot methodically on the floor, frustrated by his hesitation. Again, the image of the sleuthing rat crouching alongside the road came to mind—why could he not emit a simple yes to pleasure? What did it matter if it was base? They were all, at bottom, base creatures. The thundering guns continued—so close, and yet such amorous activities continued as if it was a Saturday night in Berlin and all they cared for was plentiful schnapps and the feeling of a woman moving beneath them.

“Are they safe?” Lev whispered hoarsely, stalling.

“Hoffman was here last week. Inspecting the cleanliness of the”—a slyness enveloped Hermann’s face—“merchandise.”

“Are you certain?”

“The officers are terrified of disease spreading. They wouldn’t take the chance.”

Lev imagined himself walking back alone with the rats. He stood up from the table. “All right.”

Hermann threw down a few damp bills. The women quickly stuffed the money into the front of their dresses, the bills disappearing between their milky white breasts.

If anything, it was a wonderful sensation, the taking of a woman. She did not stiffen or recoil. To plunge into the formidable darkness and not feel resistance but a lukewarm flow coursing between them. His thumbs pressed against the insides of her soft forearms, which were splayed above her head, her auburn hair radiating outward on the filthy pillow. At first, he heard Hermann grunting and a light muffled laughter in the next room, but then his own breathing overtook him like the rush of ocean inside a shell, and he forgot how close the war raged, and how the floorboards creaked, and how the heavy moon hung low and bloody in the black sky, illuminating her freckled, downy stomach. He forgot everything except his sex churning through her, and her surprising fluid receptiveness was a womanly quality he had not experienced for a long time, for it had been so long since sex was not a conversation where he was always trying to convince, dissolving pleasure and exhausting him.

Lev now held his palm over this woman’s mouth, and her eyes glittered, apparently wanting to be silenced. He could not believe that she invited such shadows of brutality, that she preferred his improvised force.

After they finished, her face set hard and stony in the moonlight. She closed her eyes, closing out the image of him, as if the curtains in a theater swiftly met, and with it, shut down the openness of her body. The performance of pleasure was over.

At four a.m., Lev and Hermann walked back along the muddy road. Lev’s limbs worked loosely and freely, his lungs expanding, opening to the cool dawn. They walked with their backs to the sound of thunder. Or guns? Thunder or guns: that was always the question. The rumble from the front layered with the chorus of birds vibrating through the trees created an odd score for their meditative silence.

Lev grinned, picking up his pace. “Was Hoffman really there last week?”

The edges of Hermann’s mouth curled upward. “You had a good time, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”
You and the world have drifted away
. “Yes. I did.”

The red sun was rising. Lev realized they had been here for a month, and he felt comfortable with Hermann, walking along this shared road. If he let his mind settle into the rhythm of his steps, let his face bathe in the red light creeping through the firs, and let himself wander back to that forceful plunging into her body, he felt satisfied, close to whole. He did not especially want to return home just now. He let out a sharp laugh.

4

The air was changing. No longer plagued by the torpid heat that had slowed Lev’s days at the field hospital and made it hard to sleep at night with a sheet drenched in sweat, there were now signs of this being replaced by a much fiercer enemy. When he woke, his bed was no longer hot and damp but a cocoon of warmth where he hibernated until the last possible moment, and when they assembled outside at dawn, the crystalline air shimmered with an icy cold, turning noses yellow-white, all the blood retracting from the surface of the skin. They were ordered to watch over one another, to make sure extremities did not freeze. Headgear was introduced, and a demonstration of how to properly cover oneself was conducted on a gray morning in the middle of November. Frost ointment was distributed, as well as instructions for how to identify frostbite. Throughout the days, men constantly told one another in passing,
You have a white nose
. Lev remembered a man who’d lost his nose from artillery fire. A gaping hole marked the center of his face, and when the bandage came off, a hollowed-out crater dipped from under his eyes to the top of his lips.

In the mornings, Lev made Hermann rub frost ointment on his ears, which were slightly distended from Lev’s head. Then Hermann bandaged them up, an extra precaution. And Lev rubbed the ointment on Hermann’s cheekbones, sharp and pronounced, jutting out of his gaunt face. His cheekbones had been the reason why Lev had initially mistrusted Hermann. They lent him a womanly air of seduction, leading Lev to anticipate a betrayal of some sort, Hermann’s obsidian eyes flitting from one face to another, procuring rumors about who would be sent to the front. Last night, when Hermann whispered to him that
tomorrow Lev would be going to the front, it was a golden nugget of knowledge.

“For how long?” His chest tightened, the blood stiffening in his veins.
War tomorrow. War tomorrow
.

Hermann’s cigarette burned a dulcet orange in the dark room. “I don’t know.”

“How do you know I’m going?”

A man moaned in his sleep. Someone smacked him with a rolled-up newspaper.