The Empire of the Senses (7 page)

“Ludendorff’s third in command knows things. I bring him the raspberry soda my sister sends me. He says it’s the best raspberry soda he’s ever tasted. Addicted to it.” Hermann leaned back into his pillow. “The war’s far from over.”

Lev put his head in his hands. “I’m not finished. Polina will be devastated.”

“The dollhouse?” Hermann asked sleepily.

Lev fought the urge to cry out, thinking about how he had constructed the frame and some of the furniture pieces, but all the details—those sumptuous details—had not been added. Right now it just looked skeletal, a bombed-out house, and she’d had enough of that, he thought. “Who will finish it for her?”

Hermann slapped him on the back. “She’ll forget about the whole thing in a few weeks. That’s how children are.”

Sunday morning, before dawn, they started marching. They would march until reaching the transport station. No one knew how long the march would last. Some said a day. Others guessed a week. They were headed for Lodz, which was closer to Germany and farther south. The movement felt retrograde, as if they were retreating as opposed to pressing forward into the hinterlands of the Russian empire. But the officer of Lev’s unit explained that by securing Lodz, the Russian advance toward Breslau in Germany would prove untenable. “We are defending Berlin.” His voice grandly rolled over the words with an enticing richness. At the mention of Berlin, the officer’s eyes misted over, as if he too
kept a wife there who, at this very moment, was attending Mass, making the sign of the cross.

Lev had forgotten the heaviness of extra gear. Even his head felt heavier wearing the pointed metal helmet rather than the soft field cap. Across his chest, he’d strapped a rifle, as instructed to do when on the march. On top of his knapsack, a M1914 shelter quarter and mess tin. Connected to the lower half of his knapsack, he carried a bayonet, M1915 water bottle, and M1914 bread bag. His greatcoat, made of coarse gray cloth, sported dull brass buttons. He sweated under these layers of material and weaponry. Each man carried the exact same items in the exact same manner. No one spoke. They were too cold and the burden of equipment forced everyone to concentrate on maintaining a steady clipped pace. Lev couldn’t tell one man from another, and he knew this was the point—to unite them into one moving body for more efficient killing.

Lev instinctually looked around for Hermann, Hermann who would always drop him a wink or a grin, a secret glance acknowledging that they were not strangers in a room full of strangers. But Hermann had stayed behind at base, joking how his job in the press office reassuring Germans back home that they were achieving stunning victory after stunning victory was quite important. He pantomimed an artist bent over his work. “Coloring in the facts—that’s why they keep me here. Only yesterday did they announce our defeat at the Marne, which happened two months ago. But they call it”—Hermann had paused, lowering his voice—“the strategic release of information.”

When they’d parted, Hermann’s metallic eyes blinked as he explained strategies for survival. “Forget the Russians,” he’d said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “The real terror is nature. The snow. We’re not as used to it as they are. Frostbite’s more likely than a bullet.”

They marched for two days and then took a train to Lodz. Halfway there, the train derailed because the tracks had been blown up. The Russians had done it during their retreat. Lev and the other men crawled out of windows and smashed doors into the blinding whiteness of snow. Sharp hail drummed their helmets. The first two cars had crumpled
up against the trees, leaving a pile of smoking machinery and men with entangled limbs cocked at unusual angles. There was no time to drag them out of the cars, to bury them with proper wooden crosses, to recite any kind of benediction, because the Austrians were losing to the Russians. The officer reminded them again of Berlin, of the mothers and wives they must save from the Tatar hordes. “Imagine what they could do, those eastern barbarians,” he said, his breath white and full before him. He left Lev to imagine the possibilities as they marched the rest of the way to the front, passing through abandoned town after abandoned town, the houses and shops and churches and markets closed up and cleared out, the streets echoing with the sound of their synchronized lockstep. Lev wondered if Poles huddled inside the silent buildings, afraid of their own breath, afraid to shuffle an inch lest they be discovered by their executioners or their liberators: there wasn’t much difference between the two.

They first entered through the reserve trenches, a mile behind the front line. At the edge of the forest, they passed a pile of wounded oxen baring their teeth in malicious grins, dusted with snow, frozen into uselessness. The distinct sound of cannons drummed from the front coupled with machine-gun fire. All around them, the snowy earth had been plowed by exploding shells. Broken wagons and dead horses had been moved to the side of the road. Dead soldiers had been arranged to the side as well; their eyes stared up at Lev. Sometimes, an arm or leg was missing. Beyond this, at the edge of a clearing, about fifty canvas packs were scattered on the ground, waiting to be searched for letters and the odd treasured item such as a wedding ring, a handed-down pipe, a piece of ribbon, an engraved lighter that would then be sent to the next of kin. The packs belonged to dead Germans. In his own pack, Lev carried Josephine’s silky lock of hair, Franz’s crayon drawing of the Red Baron shooting through the sky, and a diary. He wrote on the cover:
Do not send home
. What would she think of the woman in the green velvet vest who had writhed beneath him? And if she read his doubts: Were they suited for each other? Would her intermittent coldness in the bedroom eventually stretch into one long period of retreat? And how her family belittled him with their subtle insidious comments, comments that
when repeated afterward to Josephine made him sound paranoid and cynical, as if he only saw the worst in people. But they treated him as if he’d grown up entirely in Galicia, in small-town Brody, whereas his family had moved to Berlin when Lev was two. They had servants when money permitted. There were violin lessons on Saturdays and box seats at the opera and occasional trips to the galleries to see the new paintings. Josephine would read all this and deny the truth in it. He imagined how she might resent him, even in death.

After sleeping poorly that night on an uneven dirt floor inside a pitched tent, Lev woke to the smell of burnt potatoes. He peeked through the canvas opening. A few men fried potatoes and leeks, ignoring a man who lay a few meters away, clutching his stomach. He complained of an ulcer. Lev joined the men sitting around the bonfire. They passed him some frozen chocolate someone had sent from home. All supplies had to be melted first. Even the bread arrived in rock-hard bundles, delivered by ski. A soldier repeatedly banged a loaf against the ground, trying to break through the layer of ice. The men complained bitterly of the cold and how the officers were lounging inside the mess hall smoking and drinking hot coffee. Someone said that at the front, the officer’s trenches were like salons, with wallpaper and mirrors and Oriental rugs. Another soldier, who didn’t look older than nineteen, read out a news item: “Everything has gone splendidly. Our troops have successfully carried out their missions, all counterattacks have been repulsed and large numbers of prisoners taken.” He laughed hysterically afterward. Two other men smiled grimly. Lev felt the blood leaving his fingertips and made a fist, punching it into his other hand. He remembered something a soldier said to him on the march. “We wait in the dirt, tormented by lice and hunger, praying that the endless boredom won’t kill us before the Russians do.” The man had kept his eyes trained forward and said nothing else. Lev thought about how more black nights filled with hunger would follow. They would be fed enough not to starve but little enough to feel as if they were starving, occasionally placated by a cigarette, a thimble of whiskey, a trifle that would remind them of their former appetites, their former selves. How silly I’ve been, Lev thought, remembering his first letters home, exclaiming
how he was experiencing life instead of being shut away in the rarified office of the textile plant, believing army life was real life. He’d rejoiced in the physicality of it, in the use of his hands that were now calloused. And he wondered why Josephine did not match his excitement in her replies, why her tone was measured and restrained, chilly even. Perhaps she’d foreseen how he could become addicted to this life or killed by it or, at the very least, utterly changed.

“Hey.” Someone punched Lev in the shoulder. “Look.”

A few meters away three soldiers posed behind a crude wooden cross, grinning at their bounty. Dead rats hung by their tails from the arms of the cross, strung up in a row. Another soldier took a photograph.

“They do this every morning, to show off the rats they killed in the trench overnight.”

Lev kept noticing their paws outstretched, clawing air, and their ash-colored fur.

The man speaking to him smelled of whiskey. “The rats become hysterical. They run into our flimsy shelters seeking refuge from artillery fire, from the fantastic noise. And then they get killed anyway.”

“Like us,” Lev said.

The man smiled, some of his teeth black.

The next morning Lev was sent to the front as a medic. Of course, this was what he’d done before at the base—it was what they’d trained him for—but still he felt a mixture of relief and shame. The soldier pictured on the poster back home only fought with his bayonet and hand grenade, charging into no-man’s-land, his eyes wide open to meet death. This soldier had inhaled the fumes of combat so that his face was blackened from dirt and grime and sweat. There was little room in the public imagination for the mail carriers and sorters, the military policeman, the press officers, the heavy combat vehicle detachment unit, for the reserve infantry and the doctors and medical orderlies who dressed the wounds and recorded how many had fallen.

Lev stood a few meters from the dressing station, behind a wall of sandbags. He could hear his own breath beating in his ears, the only real sound. His arms dangled at his sides, waiting. A few meters away, other men were shooting over the tops of the trenches. The taller men always
got shot through the jaw, the shorter ones through the eyes. Along the ridge of the trench, a soldier sprinted a meter and a bullet blew out all his teeth, a spray of blood bursting from his mouth. Three men methodically negotiated an MG 08 machine gun—one looked through the sight, another held the lengthy row of bullets, and a third directed them, binoculars pressed into his face. The air sounded as if it was being torn apart by the firing of one of the big guns, by the whistling and howling of the rifle bullets, which squealed like butchered pigs. Yellow and green clouds wafted by from sulfur grenades. Lev breathed in and out. This was all he could do, and yet his limbs were jacked up with adrenaline, his heart pumping as if he were expecting to run a great distance.

The moments passed. He waited for wounded men. He had been instructed to run out, and if possible hoist them onto a stretcher, and if not, drag them to the advanced dressing station, a tented structure about three hundred meters from the front line. Shells burst overhead. He clung to the sandbags, frantic, but at the same time, overly aware of the most insignificant details: the shape of the shrapnel shell bursting in the sky resembled an old boot, and the gas sentry, ringing various warning bells and rattles, sounded like one of Vicki’s broken toys, a sinister lullaby. Suddenly, the shooting subsided, for how long he didn’t know, and a soldier limped toward him, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He stumbled to the side, trying to say something. Lev pulled him behind the sandbags. The man pointed to where it hurt—his knee was blown out.

His eyes shut with refusal when Lev motioned toward the tent.

Lev yelled, “I have to get you in there. See the wound—” Another big gun went off followed by a rain of bullets. The man clung to Lev. Soldiers ran from all directions. Lev held the man, awkwardly rocking him, trying to remember how he used to hold his son. He coiled his arm around the man, attempting to transmit security and confidence when all he felt was plain raw fear. He was shaking and this shaking made the man also shake. They waited and trembled together, the three or four minutes interminable. Lev tried not to think about whether or not this man’s leg would have to be amputated or if they could insert a
metal disk in place of the knee, and whether or not the soft wall of sandbags they leaned against would blow up, eradicating them in an instant. How much heat could the skin take before singeing? Would he think of anything else beyond the rapid destruction of his body, the charring of his hands, the flames crawling up the sides of his legs, the way his boots would appear like two balls of fire beneath him? The man moaned softly, burying his face deeper in the folds of Lev’s field-gray coat. Lev wondered if he was being punished for forsaking God when he had spent so many evenings inside Berlin’s fashionable cafés disputing His very existence over coffee and kaiser rolls, proclaiming that any rational man would not sacrifice his son out of blind faith, that the world no longer ran on superstition and myth, and those who needed the illusion of order, refusing the true chaos of living, lived in fear. Everyone had raised their glasses, their glowing faces framed by starched white collars, reveling in a feeling of shared intellectual superiority, nodding when Lev called out, “We only know what God isn’t, not what He is. Despite all the decoration of churches and priests and marble statuaries, we are merely devoted to the absence of an idea.”

Shells exploded, filling the air with thick gray smoke, and involuntarily Lev’s lips began moving, the rise and fall of his father’s tongue a salve, a talisman.
Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei rab, b’al’ma di v’ra khir’utei
.

Later, when the firing ceased, Lev smoked a cigarette inside the dressing station, watching the man sleep, his leg elevated on a wool blanket. Rows and rows of half-dead men filled the tent. Lev walked toward the opening, and pulled back the heavy canvas. The air smelled of blood and ashes. The severe sky indicated the onset of evening as daylight drained away. Makeshift graves, pitiful wooden crosses, had been erected since this morning, and now the division pastor conducted a funeral service only a few meters away from the dressing station. Lev watched from the tent opening. He could no longer mock the pastor and those solemn soldiers praying. The howling of the cannons rose again. The pastor tried to appear calm, but never before had Our Father been recited so quickly. The words went like water through Lev’s ears. The men were
fidgety, restless, on alert for the crash of a grenade, the whiz of rifle fire. Many of them looked as if they were ready to bolt, their jaws tight, fists clenched. The pastor was sweating. The two dark crimson strips decorating the front of his white robe fluttered in the wind. He tossed a bit of dirt over the shallow graves, barely covering the naked faces, his thin voice rushing, “Being raised in the glory of the resurrection, he may be refreshed among the Saints and Elect. Through Christ our Lord …” A shrill sound, and everyone threw themselves to the ground. A shell exploded fifty meters away. The pastor burrowed his face in the dirt. Lev crouched at the entrance of the tent. He studied the intricate layers of mud splashed over his boot.