The Empire of the Senses (12 page)

“It was perfect. Thank you.” His chest pounded—over an apple, a stupid apple. “It was very kind of you.”

She bit her lower lip, chewing on it. He almost reached out and cupped her chin to stop her, to say don’t chew your lip, as he did with Vicki. He always told Vicki it would ruin her lipstick, and she would throw back her head and scream with delight,
But I don’t wear lipstick
, and Lev would pretend to forget she was still a little girl.

Leah did not wear lipstick. She had probably never seen lipstick in a tube and would think it a novel and amusing invention, if not wholly trustworthy. Her lips were the color of the red gooseberries the army instructed them against eating. Whether or not the berries were poisonous was debatable.

8

Vast areas of land lay in waste, the memory of trees evident in the stubble of black stumps spreading outward until Lev lost count. In the raw morning mist, the stumps resembled the tops of smooth rocks protruding from a shifting body of water. The trees were needed for their valuable sap, for firewood, for fortifications at the front, for the building of bridges. In the morning when Lev arrived, he sometimes had to catch his breath at the clear, clean landscape. He expected voluminous trees, and the naked land confronted him with its bleakness. The villagers stared blankly at the clear-cut land, and Lev wondered, before he sounded the bugle and signaled the start of the workday, if they mourned the dissolution of the primeval forests, where spirits and rocks were still worshipped despite the efforts of the church to steer the people away from such pagan ways.

A new crop of workers had arrived this morning, some of them barely twelve or thirteen years old. Their mothers could no longer hide them, and soon, Lev thought, they would contract typhus or cholera or an inflammation of the lung. The conditions were unsanitary as the boys struggled together, working under a wet sky with little food, and at night they slept in a barn under dirty blankets, a draft blowing in through the many cracks and holes. Lev wondered how Geza had avoided getting lumped into this unfortunate crew—he didn’t have any visible disability, and as far as Lev could tell, he hadn’t maimed or blinded himself in an attempt to circumvent service. Perhaps he’d just been lucky. Lev then entertained the wild fantasy of coming to Geza’s aid by putting in a good word so that the German army would not swoop him up for such backbreaking work. He imagined Leah’s gratefulness, her face breaking into a glowing smile, thanking him, her hand on his arm, for how he had
saved Geza, his boyhood uninterrupted, as opposed to the sorry sight Lev saw before him now—these poor boys forced to perform the work of men. For a moment, Lev returned to the idea of Leah’s gratitude, how she would revere him, speaking softly, her lips close to his face, the intoxicating scent of her hair escaping from under her scarf.

But it wasn’t only about saving Geza and basking in Leah’s gratitude. Lev also felt ashamed of how these Russian boys were treated. True, they weren’t German, but nonetheless they were young and able-bodied, until the harsh working conditions took away their youth, hollowing out their eyes, collapsing their lungs, bloodying their palms, turning their healthy skin gray. Given this abuse, it was no surprise to Lev that some locals, along with a handful of Russian soldiers and even a few German deserters, had escaped into the forests, that they were forming resistance groups. They raided villages for bread and supplies. They committed random acts of violence against German soldiers who foolishly stumbled home late at night from the taverns and teahouses. But Lev saw how some of the Germans behaved, drinking naked on top of a horse in the snow, shooting into the dense trees bordering the barracks, aiming at small animals. One soldier had killed a woman in the forest last night. On her way home, a bullet caught her by surprise, ripping through her side. She had worked as a cook in the mess hall. The officers repeated
Stay German
, a slogan Lev found ironic as all traces of western decorum diminished. And at breakfast this morning, over steaming bowls of semolina, the man next to him boasted about how they had used some village men as draft animals, harnessing them in teams to plows. “And we photographed it,” he said proudly before offering Lev more coffee. This man was barely a man. He looked about eighteen. His sharp blue eyes, set too far apart, reminded him of Franz’s eyes, but then he interrupted Lev’s thoughts with the complaint that there was no cream this morning. “Probably because all the cows have starved,” Lev snapped, irritated that this boy had not noticed the cows standing sickly and skeletal in the fields, cows they’d confiscated from the local farmers and then left to starve and rot.

So Lev didn’t write Josephine about these things. He wrote about clearing the land and making it more useful, about modernizing the
agricultural systems, which were truly backward here. He wrote about the hard black bread that nearly broke his teeth, the beauty of the white birches, how it was getting colder and colder. Much colder than Berlin.
This will be my third Russian winter
, he wrote last time, worried that if he didn’t write this, he would lose count of the weeks and the months that passed through him. When he’d folded the letter, pressing the creases down with his thumb, another stab of guilt attacked him. He’d spent nearly a paragraph describing the slender white birches, how their trunks tilted gently toward the light, the crimson and gold leaves whispering in the wind. How birch sap contained various healing properties and the locals believed that if birches surrounded your home, the devil stayed away. But he was really describing Leah, who reminded him of the white birches and of the white crescent moon peeking through the thin delicate branches. Leah: his tonic, his refreshment, the one spot of beauty he’d found. He’d not seen her since the day he processed her identity card. This he could keep count of; precisely two weeks had passed since then. He’d even loitered around the patch of forest where the Sukkot hut had stood, but it had been taken down. He went out of his way to go into town, hoping perhaps he would find her selling her wares at the stalls on market day. But last time, the square was so crowded he could barely move. Hawkers came up to him, pushing caps and apples and woven baskets into his face, barking out prices and then clasping Lev’s hand as if he had agreed. Lev kept repeating, No, no, I don’t want this, I don’t want it, and then the men looked offended and shuffled off. In the midst of all the confusion, the Yiddish and broken German and the stream of Russian words he still didn’t recognize, he couldn’t find her. The raven hair, the woolen shawl, the way he imagined her smiling at him, half-impish, half-serious, when he caught her eye. He walked back to base empty-handed, without even a glimpse.

For weeks now, Lev had overseen the native workers and a small army of POWs, mainly Russians and Belarusians hacking away for kilometers on either side of the rivers and burnt fields. Lev watched them, his feet cold from lack of movement, smoking cigarette after cigarette as these men cleared wide swaths of land for the building of roads. The men
sweated and swore and hated him as he contemplated the blue smoke of his cigarette poised between two gloved fingers.

And then Otto showed up. He had a compact body, a square jaw, and a glorious nose, a nose that inspired confidence in its blunt bold shape. He smoked fiendishly and never ceased to express his love of women. A few minutes after meeting Lev, bored and fidgety, he launched into one of his favorite monologues. “The force that drives life forward is Eros. It is a force that creates, destroys, and then re-creates.” He lit a new cigarette directly after disposing of the previous one. “A man experiences Eros most powerfully from women; they are the conduits between us and the life force.” He grinned, lighting a match. The blue flame flickered before catching on the tightly packed tobacco leaves. “That is why sex, as much as possible, with as many women as possible, is
imperative
.”

Lev grinned. “And I take it you’ve had plenty here?”

Otto threw back his head, as if the memory of it was too much. “You have no idea.” He spoke as if he could not keep up with the speed of his own thoughts when he described the barbarity of the whorehouse at the edge of town. “Local women carried us on their backs, whinnying like mares, and we clutched their hair, and pulled it sharply so that their necks snapped back. Afterward, they threw us out on the snow—drunk, we rolled around on the ground, no—we writhed on the ground.” He shook his head, his smile echoing debauchery, inexplicable deviance. “The snow at night is wonderfully refreshing.”

Lev imagined what it would feel like to twine Leah’s midnight hair through his fingers, to feel her slim torso bucking under his groin.

“To be dominated like that,” Otto continued, “thrown into the snow.” His dark eyes watered, stinging from the sharp wind. They watched the leaves rise up from the icy ground, circling and swirling along the half-built road in a fitful temper.

“In Königsberg, there was also a good teahouse.” Lev recalled how Hermann had convinced him to go that night. The whore with the reddish hair, the shabby room upstairs on top of the bar, the thumping tambourines down below as he plunged into her. “But VD. You have to watch out for that,” Lev added.

“If you worry about something like this, pleasure flies away like a little bird.” Otto fashioned his hands into two bird wings that flapped through the air.

“Yes, but,” Lev said, not entirely ready to forfeit, “I’m married, you see. I simply can’t bring home some vile disease and pass it on to her.” But this wasn’t the only reason why Lev did not go to the taverns. He couldn’t fully explain, but such places struck him as decidedly vulgar. The proprietors masked such taverns as cozy little cottages in the woods, but the women looked meek and anxious. Despite their rouge and scented bodies, these women pretended at pleasure, until afterward, when the truth collapsed around their faces.

The men had taken a break, leaning on their pickaxes and shovels. They were exhausted, sweating in the cold. A few of them smoked. The sun was setting, illuminating the dirt so that it appeared a fiery red.

“Should we keep them working?” Otto asked. He stomped his feet to get the blood flowing, grinding his discarded cigarette butts into the snowy ground with his heels.

“Give them a few minutes.”

The men watched Otto and Lev with intensity, their mouths hanging open, their eyes squinting at the setting sun. Up above, an eagle emitted a piercing cry.

Otto cocked his head. “A mating call.”

Lev had never seen such a large bird. He wondered how it didn’t fall from its own weight.

“I greatly admire birds.” Otto followed the figure eights the eagle drew in the air, the elaborate looping and swerving and sudden downward dives. Then Otto turned and strode toward the men, his heavy gray cloak flying behind him.

“Get to work! Get to work!” he shouted in Russian, his arms thrown up as if urging the wind to blow harder, faster. He kicked one of the men in the shin. The man yelped. Otto’s gray form flew down the line. As he approached, they picked up their tools again, throwing the force of their bodies behind each swing.

The way the tip of Otto’s sharp boot had shot out so unexpectedly and kicked the man, as if he routinely dispensed such bright and sure violence, made Lev uneasy. When Otto walked back, his jaw tensed and released. He reminded Lev of a powerful dray horse, the way one could detect a ripple of movement twitching beneath its skin.

Otto impatiently pulled out a cigarette, his eyes trained on the men hacking at the soil.

Lev, feeling the urge to speak, to explain, to fill up the still air with words, started telling Otto about the problem with the workers, how they dug around the stones because the stones were precious, holding secrets of the land, whereas he had been instructed to crush them up. “The natives, they’re backward. Still on the three-field system of cultivation. And they leave big round stones sitting in the middle of a cleared field, as if afraid to touch them, as if their ancestors dwelled in the porous gray matter.” Lev laughed. “Strange, no?”

The rushing urgency of a distant train echoed through the trees, causing the workers to pause for a moment.

Otto snorted. “They’re pagans, protecting stones, thinking there’s life in them. But it’s better than Christ, our savior.” He sneered. “A perfect lie.”

Lev pulled up the collar of his coat. The wind cut through it. “You’re not a Christian?”

“Turn the other cheek—do you think I would believe in something invented for the sole purpose of keeping us enslaved? It goes against our very instincts as men.”

“Our instincts as men,” Lev repeated.

“To fight and fuck and reap the infinite pleasures of aliveness—religion condemns this—condemns what it means to be human, what it means to exist in the world, in the here and now.” His cheeks glowed carmine pink from the pleasure he took in the boom of his voice. But it was not an unpleasant voice, Lev thought. It vibrated with the warmth and vigor of a man who did not live in fear.

“Who knows what exists beyond this?” Otto stretched out his arms to encompass the whole of the surrounding forests, trees, the distant
steppes, the dirt, the working men, the two of them. He added, “The meek shall inherit nothing,” and with it, he unwittingly emitted a light spray of spittle.

Lev took a few steps back. “We don’t know anything beyond this.”

Otto’s eyes shone in the diminishing light. “Precisely!”

Two hours later, Lev and Otto reclined on cushions, drinking tea from small steaming glasses. Otto had convinced Lev to come to his lodgings, where he was boarding with a Russian family—a middle-aged woman named Antonina and her uncle, who spoke fanatically of the Japanese war, the only war the Russians ever lost. But Antonina kept interrupting and shouting at him to fetch fresh water for the samovar. The uncle flinched every time she shouted, but he didn’t move. He sat stationed on a pillow next to Lev and Otto, asking softly, “But how long will the war last?”

Antonina fussed over Otto, refilling his tea glass.