The Empire of the Senses (63 page)

Vicki stepped off the bus. The children squinted up at her, wildflowers skimming their delicate chins. She knelt down, her bare knees pressing into the dry earth. Cautiously, a little boy stepped forward from the line of children. She gave him a secret wave, as if they were the only two people in this great valley. He hesitated, his dark eyes scanning her face. She held out her hand. It trembled in the hot, dry air. He saw her trembling hand and he came closer. She sensed Geza standing behind her and the suspended breath of everyone watching.

The boy thrust the flowers toward her. Her fingers brushed his small, warm palm when she took them.

“Beautiful,” Vicki said in Hebrew.

He beamed.

The women hunching over their lettuce beds, the dusty travelers from the bus, the men who carried pickaxes over their shoulders—everyone clapped and laughed affectionately. The boy smiled shyly, tucking his chin into his chest.

Vicki inhaled the sharp wild scent of the flowers; dirt, light, earth. Geza’s warm hands cupped her shoulders, capturing the heat beneath them, capturing the sun and all it gave life to. She closed her eyes and let her future begin.

Epilogue

Cementerio de la Recoleta, Buenos Aires, 1953

It has become a kind of ritual, this communion with the dead. Lev roams freely here at dawn and avoids this place in the midday heat, when the tourists visit, commenting on how the graves, as palatial as miniature homes, are charming.

Once a German woman had gasped, her platinum hair catching the sun, that these little houses were just so
fascinating
. So much money dedicated to the dead, she had said, pressing together her gloved fingers. Lev had pretended he did not speak German and merely nodded. He walked away, down the broad path that cut through the cemetery, littered with leaves and shadows. He had to stop and catch his breath, leaning on the stone knee of a seated soldier gazing at lost battlefields. Lev could still hear the German’s chirping voice reading the gravestones. She butchered the Spanish.

The heavy January heat is getting to him. He loosens his tie and fans his face with a Panama hat. No, he decides, the dead are not fascinating. Nor are the dead truly dead. They haunt him without warning, and suddenly, his eyes smart when he sees Josephine’s long elegant back against the frosted living room window. She bends over, sewing a brass button onto Franz’s coat. Or he sometimes hears the rolling sound of his daughter’s voice when she used to sing in the kitchen, a popular love song—what was it, he wonders, in 1927? It must have been something imported from America, one of the jazz tunes Berlin went crazy for. He racks his brain, but only later, biting into the buttery fluff of
pan dulce
, will the melody resurface, and he’ll whisper the name: “Ich bin von Kopf bis Fuss auf Liebe eingestellt,” “Falling in Love Again,” the English
version, sung by Marlene Dietrich, whose face always reminded him of snow and loneliness.

Lev leaves the cemetery and turns the corner, passing the old man selling flowers. The sharp sweet scent of gardenias wrapped in brown paper carries Josephine to him again, when he used to kiss her behind the ear and inhale the gardenia scent she sparingly sprayed there, in the nested darkness only available to a husband. And yet the whiteness of the flower, the purity of the color, reminds him of Leah.

Lev returns to the cemetery the next morning, when the light-blue sky carries a purplish tint, the half-crescent moon still visible, a ghostly white outline of what the night had been. At this early hour, the cats rule. They luxuriate among the graves. They sulk and stalk Lev for food. Some find rectangles of morning sun hitting granite steps commemorating generals, and they lounge there, lapping up the heat. A black-and-white kitten is fond of sleeping on the marble foot of an angel. A calico sits upright at the entrance, pausing to lick her paws. Lev loves the old brown cat. This cat seeks him out, rubbing his knotted hairy back against Lev’s shoe. He rolls over, his paws dangling limply in front of his chest, white and soft with intermittent patches of pink skin. Bits of dead leaves hang from his whiskers. Lev has named him Der Puma because he has survived.

After strolling down the aisles of shrines, Lev finds a bench in the sun and sits down, paper in hand, although he never reads the paper here. He places it next to his thigh, a tightly rolled-up baton of ink. What is there to know? He has already seen the worst of what humans are capable of. Anything that follows is merely a muted stream of regret. He would rather sit here, in his own square of sunlight, and think of how in January the streets of Berlin are bitterly cold and slick with ice, how the wind blows wetly through your overcoat, how the linden trees are stripped of leaves. Maybe Josephine is still there, among those linden trees. Ah, no—the trees have been blasted from their roots. Their street, Charlottenstrasse: a pile of rubble. He hopes she fled to the Bavarian countryside, where she could bake apples on Sundays and
wear that glittering diadem he had once bought her. He pictures her walking among the farmhands, through the wheat fields, in one of those long sweeping black silk dresses she wore before the Great War, with the high collars and the billowing sleeves. And on her flaxen head, she wears the diadem with the shining yellow stone at its center. Pagan queen of the harvest.

A high whistle interrupts Josephine wading through the wheat. A woman with a scarf tied around her head calls to the cats. Lev knows her. She arrives every morning at eight. She pulls a tin barrel full of milk through the wide path of the cemetery until she sets it down and mixes it with water. The cats follow behind her, a roving cloak of fur, waiting for the watery milk.

The sun rises. Lev takes off his linen jacket and rolls up his shirtsleeves, revealing his weathered skin. Bulbous blue veins run down his forearms. His arms used to be so white, as pale as birch trees, his mother would say, but after eighteen years here, they have browned, like leather left out in the sun. Good enough for skinning, he thinks soberly.

The cats lap up their breakfast, crowding around the crone’s skinny ankles. Lev’s stomach grumbles. It’s time for
medialunes
and
café con leche
. In his first years here, he missed certain things: the flat matches he used to buy in Berlin that fitted his waistcoat pocket, his small cigars, and black tea in a glass, Russian style, with mountains of sugar poured into it. He used to ask for black tea in a glass at his customary café on Avenida de Mayo, and they laughed at him good-naturedly, but brought it out steaming hot, as requested. Still, they cajoled him into trying
café con leche
. They would serve it on the house. After so many times, he grew used to the milky coffee and now prefers it. Strange, how certain tastes change, even after so many years, even when he used to think,
Who can eat dessert for breakfast?
But here he is, eating the buttery bread, stuffing it into his bearded mouth, enjoying the rinse of milk and sugar and coffee sliding over his tongue. Little flakes of pastry fall onto his dark trousers. He dusts them off dismissively.

This is the way things are now: breakfasting at “his” café every morning after a stroll through the cemetery. Because he’s always up
before sunrise, he converses with the whores. Sometimes, they tell him their troubles: an errant boyfriend, a cousin who won’t move out, that they’re too busy or not busy enough. He brings them cigarettes. The women are beautifully tired, especially when they have taken off their shoes, their high heels dangling from their fingertips as they make their way home.

And watching blond Germans, former soldiers of the Reich, and dark Jews eating in the same café amuses him. Their proximity. And now it is the blond German who will be hunted, tracked down, interrogated. At least this is what Lev hopes for, even if it means his own son would be hunted. But Franz died before the war even began.

Three weeks after Vicki and Geza left on the
Mauretania
, the Berlin police found Franz working on a farm in Grunewald forest. When they brought him home, his face was dirty and rough, his skin weather-beaten. His blue eyes stared at Lev with incredulity. He cried in his mother’s arms and said Wolf had talked him into it, a terrible mistake. Josephine rocked him and shushed him and said of course, Wolf was to blame. Their tears intermingled. Before Lev’s eyes, they fused into one, mother and son, as Franz burrowed his head into the folds of Josephine’s silk robe.

They threw Franz in prison for five years. For five years, Lev battled to get him out. The complexities of the case multiplied—the murder weapon had vanished, Wolf had fled the country while Franz stood for the kind of disobedience the government insisted on squashing, although more and more, Berlin flourished with bright violence. Bloody riots. KPD demonstrations. Semitic-looking pedestrians attacked at random on train platforms.

In the midst of this, Lev wrote Leah a letter. He explained how he had received her address from Geza two years too late. He wrote about what had happened to Franz. At the end, he added:
When he’s released, I’ll come for you. Wait for me? Please wait for me
, he added, not wanting to sound presumptuous, to demand so much after so long. He didn’t know if she still loved him or if she had found someone else. He didn’t know anything about her life until she wrote back.

November 11, 1928

11 Rivington Street
New York, NY

Dear Lev
,

I am overjoyed to receive your letter. I think of you every night, when the moon shines brightly down through the window, the way it once did in Mitau, lighting up the birch trees. I wonder if there’s a place for us, if there ever will be. And yet I understand how you must sort out the trouble with Franz—you cannot abandon your son during such a time. You must help him. Get him out of the prison and lead him away from violence
.

My days are very busy working as a seamstress in a small shop. At least it’s not a factory, but it’s sweltering in the summer and frigid in the winter. We still live with Misha and his family in a small apartment with two rooms
—
there’s not much space, but we help each other. Sasha and I sleep in a Murphy bed—have you heard of this? It disappears into the wall during the day, and then at night, we pull it from the same wall. Sasha thrives in this metropolis. He plays baseball in the middle of the street with other boys and he draws at the dining table. Intricate sketches. He wants to become an artist, but I want something better for him—a lawyer or a doctor. He delivers newspapers early in the morning before school. I have included a photograph of him with this letter. Certain expressions, the way he shakes his head when he’s displeased, remind me of you
.

We have been lucky enough to meet some distant relatives from the old country. Benjamin and Rose Dubrowensky from Riga, but they now go by Dubrow. They are planning to open a cafeteria in Brooklyn next year, and they have already promised Sasha a job clearing tables. Rose is Misha’s second cousin and she married Benjamin a few years ago. Benjamin is from Belarus and has taken an interest in helping Sasha—they can’t have children, which I suppose is one of the reasons for their generosity
.

I yearn for the day when you will find me. I might be old by then. My black hair has already faded, and living here, I don’t laugh as often. But perhaps there will still be a trace of the girl you knew in Mitau
.

I am waiting
.

Love
,

Leah

Lev still carries the small black-and-white photograph that tumbled out of her letter. It’s in his wallet, faded and frayed from too much handling. His son balances on a wooden plank over muddy tracks, with a large sack slung over his shoulder. He wears lace-up boots and a short wool coat, and he’s about to throw a rolled-up newspaper over a clipped hedge. He looks suspicious, his hooded eyes staring into the camera from under his cap. The weather seems damp and cold, the trees bare. Lev has always wondered where this picture was taken and who took it. Somewhere beyond the skyscrapers and busy streets, perhaps a neighboring town outside the city. His son’s eyes, rounded and dark, both accept his circumstances and rebel against them.

In 1933, Hitler took control of the Berlin police and released all prisoners affiliated with the SA and SS. When Franz was freed that spring, Josephine emerged from her long dark depression, and Lev began to plan for New York.

Franz slept in his old room. He enjoyed the comfort of Marthe’s cooking, and he hesitated to leave the house. Josephine made Lev promise not to mention the night of the shooting. “He’s fragile,” she kept reminding him. But, as Lev predicted, after a few weeks, Franz started leaving the house again and disappearing for long afternoons. His place at the dinner table was once again empty. He had rejoined the SA as part of the Hilfspolizei (Auxiliary Police). He handled his parents with care, explaining how Göring had recently uncovered plans for a Communist uprising. During these conversations, color flooded his cheeks. His blue eyes flashed. Josephine listened, her face frozen in horror. She begged Lev to pull him out of the SA, away from all political activity.
“I will talk to him,” Lev had said, knowing such talk would do nothing, turning over in his mind the booking of his berth to New York, the warmth of Leah’s hand in his, the fluttering of her soft eyelashes across his face.

Two months later, Franz was shot in the chest three times. It happened when he emerged from a tenement building on Bernauer Strasse, a working-class part of town. Early dawn, the rosy sunrise illuminated the ugly apartment blocks. Franz paused in the doorway of the building, lingering above the chipped cement steps. His dress shirt billowed open and he started to button it. Fiery hues drenched the sky, the intensity of such colors reflecting the passionate night he’d just spent with Manfred. He had two more buttons left, a tie folded in his back pocket, when the bullets tore through him.