The Empire of the Senses (15 page)

Lev stared down the road, and beyond that, at the cemetery in the distance, an apparition of gravestones, row after row, glowing white under the moon. “There are many more graves than when we first arrived,” Lev said, pulling out a cigarette.

The man nodded, fingering his moustache, the hairs wiry and frosted. “In the middle of the night, I saw a dead Jew carried on a board into the cemetery, wrapped in a shroud. But when they’d gotten to the farthest corner, where the graves are twisted and broken, he lightly hopped off the
taharah bret
. Two peasants emerged from an underground tunnel, and they did a deal, what looked like the exchange of a bottle of vodka for a dead chicken. And then the Jew got back on the board, his friend wrapped him up again, with the dead chicken hiding underneath the shroud, and off they went. I watched the whole thing.”

“Trading among the graves,” Lev said.

“It’s not a myth.”

“Let’s walk back together,” Lev said, offering him a cigarette. “It’s safer.”

It was almost dawn. The red sun slowly rose in the east, lending hints of light to the dark sky. “Palestine,” his companion whispered. “That’s where I’m going after the war.”

The birds were waking up, rustling in the trees, their calls sharp and scattered.

“Palestine,” Lev repeated, the syllables rolling off his tongue. “They manufacture cigarette cases there.”

The soldier shielded his eyes from the rising eastern sun. It was too bright. Piercing. It made his eyes water behind his spectacles. “It’s the only place for us.”

Lev wondered if this was true.

“Where we won’t be rounded up and counted,” he added sharply. The insistence in his voice urged Lev to agree, to shout, Yes, on to Palestine we go! But no. He couldn’t picture Josephine in a desert among bronzed
halutizim
. The strong sun would burn her porcelain skin. She would shrivel up from a lack of moisture, from a lack of green. The olive trees, with their thin dry branches, would offer her no relief. But in Berlin, she often said how the heavy clouds rocked her into a gentle calm. On days when the sun did not show itself, she rejoiced in the sky’s milky protection. Her eyes shone and her cheeks bloomed when she didn’t have to contend with the sun, as if the two were in competition. But when it grew hot in summer, she became agitated, bored. She snapped at the children and refused to eat. She fanned herself impetuously and dismissed the glasses of lemonade Marthe ferried to her—no, she would not survive Palestine.

And Leah? Leah would survive. It was in her blood to cope, to make do. Unperturbed by her husband’s long absence in the Russian army, by the German occupation, by all the new rules and strictures, by the harsh winter and lack of food, she had merely folded her heavy shawl
over her shoulders and smiled at him, mischievous and goading, asking with her eyes,
What do you want from me?

A funeral procession passed them on the road. A body wrapped in a white linen shroud was being carried, feetfirst, toward them. Two pieces of broken pottery,
sharves
, had been placed over the eyes. The two men leading the procession quickly looked up at Lev and then glanced away. Women trailed the tail end of the procession, wailing
“Zdakah tazil mi-mavet”
(alms for the dead). They rattled bulky charity boxes. There was no coffin because the use of wood for coffins had been forbidden. Bodies were buried only in cloth and lowered into the grave with nothing between the flesh and the earth. And recently, the Germans had outlawed the ritual washing of dead bodies in an attempt to maintain a certain level of sanitation.

The soldier smiled sarcastically at the wailing women. Then he whispered to Lev, “Bottles of vodka are under that linen cloth.”

Looking back at the slow procession, Lev thought he saw a small movement from under the shroud; an arm readjusting itself, or possibly it was only a bit of wind lifting up the shroud for a split second before it settled down again.

When they got to town, hysteria tinged people’s faces. Peasants rushed through the streets, yelling loudly in multiple dialects. A priest lumbered past, his oblong gray face turned inward. The Jewish women were quietly packing up their stalls in the marketplace. The church bells rang. The soldier told Lev, before disappearing down a narrow side street, that today the Germans were rounding up all natives for delousing, followed by inoculations at the military bathhouse.

Lev stared at him.

He threw up his hands. “They think the locals are filthy, that they’re carrying disease. And we can’t suffer another typhus endemic. It nearly wiped out the Serbian army.”

All through the streets soldiers on horseback herded villagers in droves to the bathhouse at the edge of town. They marched them past
the horse market and the abandoned church garden, and past the mill and the Belarusian cemetery, past the kerosene shop and the taverns and the iron goods store and the low brick building that housed the shul. The Jewish bars were deserted, empty of their elderly patrons, who enjoyed drinking kvass and playing cards out front for hours at a time. All the houses had been checked for shirkers. Front doors swung open, revealing empty dusty rooms with overturned chairs, a carpet pushed out of the way in case someone had attempted to hide beneath the floorboards, scattered newspapers, a samovar still steaming. A cat yawned, stretched out along a windowsill.

Lev started running toward Leah’s house, down Tanner Strasse, retracing his steps from the night before. He passed soldiers coercing women into lines. The women begged and cried, offering small misshapen lumps of gold they had sewed into the hems of their skirts. They’d heard the inoculations would cause them to go barren. One woman threw back her head and opened her mouth, pointing to a gold filling. “You can take that, can’t you?” The soldier shook his head disdainfully and used the butt of his rifle to herd her down the street with the rest. Lev kept running. He’d heard that at the bathhouse men and women had to strip off their clothing and stand naked in the cold brick room before going into the showers, where they would be assaulted by huge blocks of ersatz soap and canisters of disinfectant. Soldiers, outfitted in white short-sleeved gowns, administered the cleaning process, armed with scrubbers, hand brushes, loofahs, and rough towels, bombarding the natives with torrents of hot water, after which they brushed them with canvas sacking. And oftentimes, after seeing to it that a woman had been completely disinfected and scrubbed clean of all possible lice, they raped her.

At Leah’s house, the door stood open. Beyond the house, Yatke bridge stretched over a rapid stream. Across the stream, fields upon fields of dry, flat yellow land. In the distance, the slaughterhouse and a scattering of red barns.

He spun around at the sound of leaves crunching; someone darted between the trees.

“Leah?”

He saw nothing now, only trees and dirt and a fallen bird’s nest with tiny white eggs inside.

In Yiddish he said, “I’m not taking you to the bathhouse.”

A few moments passed. Stillness surrounded him. Even the rushes in the trees stopped fluttering.

She stepped out from behind a birch, squinting.

“I’m alone,” he said.

Leah nodded, one hand pressed against the birch, the other hand motionless at her side. Her eyes, animated with fear, appeared brighter and larger than Lev had remembered. He walked to her, and after a brief moment of hesitation, took hold of her hand and marveled at how perfectly it fit into his. “Let’s find someplace to hide you,” he said, leading her over the bridge, in the direction of the fields.

He hid her in the loft of an empty barn. With handfuls upon handfuls of hay, Lev covered her body. His fingertips lightly touched her heavy clothing, moving over the outline of her chest and her hips and her shoulders and her hair until only her face was visible. She reminded him of a living sarcophagus, immobile, inert, but one that blinked and breathed when the back of his hand accidentally brushed the side of her cheek or his calloused knuckle skimmed the bottom of her soft earlobe. And when this brief point of contact occurred, her liquid eyes would scan his face, searching for clues to who he was when not outfitted in field gray, and where he lived and with whom, for she had not failed to notice his wedding band, just as he had not failed to notice hers. As he covered her, Lev felt the heat radiating off her body, and this womanly heat shortened his breath, made it hard to think.

Weak afternoon sun shone through the diamond-cut window. Soon it would grow dark. And then she could return home, Lev told her. Leah nodded from under the hay. He dropped another handful over her forehead. She squinted and smiled.

“Now you look like a mummy,” he whispered.

“What is a mummy?”

“At the Kaiser-Frederich-Museum,” Lev began, “which is an enormous domed building, bigger than all the churches here put
together.…” He paused, as if a spectral self had taken Franz to see the Münzkabinett, the “coin cabinet museum,” and Franz, an avid collector, had stared at the large odd coins from Asia Minor, from the seventh century B.C. He had pressed his nose to the glass, leaving a smudge.

“Go on,” Leah urged, raising her chin.

Lev balanced on his knees, listening to a shuffling from down below. But it was only a stray dog that had wandered into the barn, peering up at them, and then, after realizing there was no food, it wandered out.

“I can’t quite explain,” Lev whispered. “It’s too foreign from this.” He motioned to the darkened barn, to the low-hanging beams and the scattered hay and the cracked windowpane. Voices shouted outside. Through the window, Lev saw two German soldiers strolling lazily in the fields. One drew out a flask and drank from it in long lusty gulps. The other soldier threw his cap on the ground. His hair was as red as fire. They argued for a moment before the soldier with the flask handed it over to his comrade.

Lev turned away from the window. “You should stay here until dark. Completely dark.”

“Stay with me until then,” she said.

He made out her eyes and mouth more clearly than the rest of her face. She breathed quickly. Her neck gleamed. He wanted to take her neck in his hands and run his mouth along her collarbone, feel the pulse of her blood under his parted lips. She raised her hand up out of the hay and Lev clasped it, crushing his palm into her palm. Her cheeks flushed in the dimming light, she slowly told him about the wonder-rabbi, the cabalist. “He will bless you,” she said. After a pause, their hands still locked together, she added, “He blessed me. He drove the dybbuks from my house. The dybbuks who were wreaking havoc on my womb.” Her eyes were wet and shining. “I am a childless mother. Everyone knows this. Women will not touch me for fear of catching what I have caught. But the rabbi saw them, the dybbuks, dancing in my womb, rejoicing because they had spirited away my unborn children. And after he saw this, he blessed me. And now, he told me, like Sarah, I will have children. He said it’s not too late.”

Lev watched her mouth, her warm breath visible when she added,
“He blessed ten men when the war started, and they are all still alive.” She studied him. “Come next month, during the festival of lights. His doors are open then.”

He nodded, moving his thumb in circles along the inside of her wrist, and wondered if this was the closest he would ever get to her skin, her heat. Abruptly, she propped herself up on her elbows, her thick hair falling around her shoulders. “Tell me, what does your wife look like?”

“I don’t remember,” he joked, brushing the last few strands of hay off her shoulders. A snapshot of Josephine was safely tucked into his shirt pocket, inches from his chest.

She didn’t laugh. “It doesn’t matter anyway, what you remember or don’t remember.”

“No?”

“The way you look at me,” she drew a breath, “tells me it doesn’t.”

That night, Lev leafed through Josephine’s letters. He tried to shut out the other men’s voices, as well as the fleeting touch of Leah’s hand upon his face when they had parted in the trees behind her house. She had smelled of hay and mint, and beneath that, her innate scent of heather heated in the sun. “My cousin was killed at Maubeuge,” someone said gruffly while unbuttoning his uniform. Another man replied that he thought he had crabs, moaning how he itched all over. “At least you’re not in the trenches,” someone else said, spitting. “The rainwater is half a meter deep there. Those boys in the trenches paddle in the water as they fire, and the constant dampness causes bladder and kidney trouble,” after which he punctuated his point by spitting out another wad of tobacco onto the earth-packed floor.

Lev kept her letters in a stack tied with a string under his wire mattress. She had been writing less frequently because she was busy working for the DRK, the German Red Cross, as a nurse. She described how the troop trains arrived every hour, packed with wounded, hungry men. In between these trains, passenger trains also came, full of Prussian refugees with nowhere to go. She said they looked wild and rabid, wrapped in dirty wool blankets. The women always had too many children, none of whom they could feed. She wrote about how one woman had to be
detained because she suspected every person on the train wanted to shoot her. She was shrieking and sobbing, while her three boys looked on in silence. Some of the trains had been converted into stationary makeshift hospital wards. She emphasized how she was always busy, ferrying bread, coffee, and soup to the soldiers. But she did not seem to mind this. On the contrary—her letters were full of the energy and urgency war produces; she felt useful, and Lev imagined how the soldiers admired and complimented her. He thought she must enjoy her new role, playing Florence Nightingale, the lady with the lamp, gliding down the aisles of the infirm, a glowing apparition. It suited her. Lev reread part of a letter from two months ago:
I try to keep the children at home, but Franz insists on coming to see the wounded soldiers, and his will often proves stronger than mine. He desperately wishes he could fight and thinks being a child during the war is utterly useless. But I am secretly overjoyed that he is not old enough, for we would have surely lost him by now to one of the battlefields. Don’t you think so?