The Empire of the Senses (20 page)

The electric streetlamps, the color of Josephine’s hair, the sound of his children’s voices, and even the war, faded away. She was the only real thing to him.

12

By the end of July 1918, Lev and the rest of the men heard the German advance on the Marne River had failed. They cursed Ferdinand Foch, the victorious Allied commander, they cursed the Americans, and they cursed Ludendorff, who had spoken so highly of the spring and summer offensives, promising they would push through the Hindenburg Line and win the war. By March, men under thirty-five were sent west to replace the wounded and the killed there. When collected for the transports to the Western Front, they chalked on the wagons:
Cattle for Slaughter in Flanders
and
Criminals from the East
.

Late into the night, with his usual audience in attendance at the barracks, Otto opined on the power of the February Revolution worming its way into the hearts of German soldiers. He’d heard that along the quieter stretches of the Eastern Front, Russians and Germans fraternized, and German units began to imitate Russian revolutionaries by organizing a soviet, forming councils to criticize the officers, thinking they had the upper hand, or should have it. Otto cleared his throat. “Mother Russia will overtake us.”

Someone snickered.

Lev said, his legs dangling from the cot, “But we don’t notice, too busy leaning over our maps, calculating the distance from here to Germany.”

A few men sipped their beer.

Otto kicked a chair out of the way, his hands gesticulating.

Lev drew in a breath, preparing himself for one of Otto’s monologues, which never failed to entertain and embolden.

Otto’s voice thundered, “Here we sit, susceptible to various dangers,
both known and unknown, as this eastern wilderness encroaches, gaining strength and power over us, many of whom are rear-guard troops, too old, weak, or injured to put up a real fight. The best we can offer is watch duty, or office work. And the moment we’re shipped west, we’ll die at the hands of the French or the English, I promise you.” The men nodded, heavy with liquor, their breath sour.

“Remember Melsbach,” someone called out. A general chorus of agreement rose up. Melsbach had proclaimed himself a Lithuanian. He fell in love with Domizella, a village girl, and he said returning to Germany meant spiritual death. Two days earlier, he had packed his bags and shot himself in the woods. And then there was the translator, Seidel, the only one able to write in White Ruthenian, who’d slowly, over time, fashioned himself into a White Ruthenian, conversing with local pastors, delving into their native history and songs, which he published in Ober Ost’s bulletin. “His Germanness disintegrated,” Otto said, his tone both severe and mocking, “and he’s been singled out as a traitor with double loyalties. His activity has become”—Otto paused for dramatic effect—“difficult to manage.”

Lev sighed, thinking how poor Seidel had lost his grip on the world. As if I have any sense, Lev thought, a twinge of cold irony washing over him. He was actually worse off than Seidel—at least Seidel knew what he wanted, whereas Lev suffered as if living under a death sentence, the days dwindling down, one by one, to when he would abandon this place. He dreaded it, passively waiting yet tormented by the thought of leaving Leah. To return to what? An unknown wife and unknown children. His wife would pretend to love him again, and he would go along with the pretending because what else could he do? But he felt sure they would be strangers. And as he grew more and more entangled with Leah and her family, he traced and retraced Josephine’s negative qualities, as if this justified his desire for Leah and their fantasies of marrying and moving away … to Palestine, or some other eternally warm place. Leah often joked about how he could sell textiles there just as he’d done in Berlin. Sometimes, he went along with the fantasy, adding that he would grow a beard. She would run her hand along his clean-shaven cheek and say, “A beard would suit you.”

But then he held Leah’s hands, squeezing them. “My children.”

And Leah would suddenly stop talking, her whole face flushed with embarrassment. “Of course not. I was only dreaming.” Then she would touch her abdomen because she knew how it felt, to lose children.

But when Lev sat with Leah and her family at their dinner table, they discussed the preparations for Altke’s wedding, whether the rabbi would lose his voice again—his vocal chords were quite fragile, due to mysterious lesions; and remember, Leah’s mother said worriedly, the raspy way he read the Torah portion last Saturday? Amid all this, Lev revisited Josephine’s frigidity, her superficial letters that told nothing of her feelings for him, her obsessive cleanliness and banal dinner chatter, and her family, who had always hated him.

Yes, Josephine really was a cold unfeeling wife, or rather, Lev chose only to remember the times when she had acted as such. Fashioning Josephine into this kind of woman made it easier to meet Leah in the deserted hayloft, his heart singing when he saw the red string on the birch branch, readying himself to touch her soft unfolding body. Because Josephine was a supercilious gentile who refused his advances with countless excuses: migraines, stomach cramps, seasonal allergies. “Which is grounds for divorce,” Leah often reminded him.

“Well, yes,” Lev said, “in Jewish law, this is true.”

“Is there any other law?” she asked, a slight smile on her lips because she knew Lev came from a place where Jewish laws appeared antiquated, arbitrary. Perhaps even meaningless.

But then Lev, feeling a sudden onslaught of guilt, would rejoin, “We were not such a good match. I shouldn’t blame her for everything.”

And Leah, sensing it more beneficial to appear generous to this phantom of a wife, replied, “Poor matches are poor matches. We shouldn’t blame anyone for it.”

“No, we shouldn’t,” Lev would repeat, and then, as if they had washed off his guilt together, he would touch her body slowly, starting at the nape of her neck, uncoiling her beautiful black braid, his palms cupping her gently rounded shoulders, her full smooth breasts, and the swell of her abdomen and the curve of her hips all fell under his command, as if he was molding her from clay.

He marveled at the wet darkness of her sex, how liquid and open she felt, even when he only brushed her there with his fingers. Even when his hand just rested there, dark heat radiated from her coarse hair. When he straddled her, she gazed up at him with an open guileless expression and guided his fingers into her mouth, the same fingers that had only seconds before been inside her, and she sucked on his dirty fingers with an air of contentment he did not think possible. With this small gesture, she made her desire so explicitly understood that he dove into her with such force she emitted a yelp of surprise. To reassure him it was pleasure and not pain she felt, she folded her legs around his waist, her thighs open and yielding. Lev watched in disbelief when her eyelids fluttered closed, her body tense and attuned to his smallest movements as she frantically clutched his chest, his shoulders, sighing and heaving and twisting as if he was tormenting her, but when he asked in a whisper if he should stop, she shook her head violently and pleaded, “Don’t. Stop.”

Worried and mystified, he obeyed. Suddenly, at what seemed a crucial moment, her back arched and her limbs trembled, as if she hovered over a dark precipice, and some untrammeled force swallowed her whole. After a few suspended moments—Lev watched her intently; her face contorted, her breathing grew shallow, and she made sounds that reminded him of a small wounded animal—she collapsed, turned her head to the side, and smiled. Then she whispered, somewhat ruefully, “Thank you.”

When Lev asked Leah about this, she shrugged and said the act of orgasm was as necessary for women as it was for men. She added it was healthy and good for the complexion, as if it was just one more feat the body could perform. Then she planted a perfunctory kiss on his amazed forehead and began braiding her lustrous hair back into its tame plait.

Though it had happened many times since, her body’s extreme reaction still took Lev by surprise because he had never seen a woman behave this way. Before Josephine, he knew a few girls, Jewish girls from his old neighborhood who let him kiss and fondle them, but when he forayed under their stockings and petticoat layers, they merely laughed, throwing back their long necks, because the idea of sexual relations
before a marriage promise was unthinkable. “Oh Lev,” he remembered Eva Bauer saying halfheartedly, her young face flushed with excitement, “you don’t really care about painting my portrait after all!” When he called on her again, she gave no reply. So at sixteen, he surrendered to what many other young men did and went to a prostitute. She was old, nearly thirty, with dark hair and startling white skin. Coarse black hairs encircled her nipples, and it disgusted him, but in the end, he managed, despite the way she stared at him blankly, her lips curved into a half smile. He had believed the female orgasm was some mythological state, some exaggerated tale men attributed to certain women who were anatomically gifted or oversexed, but now that he experienced it on a regular basis with Leah, who was just a country woman, who sold maize at the market and lovingly ran her fingers through his hair, who told stories of village gossip, Josephine grew into even more of an oddity. In his mind’s eye, Josephine’s face turned paler, anemic, and withered down to brittle bone whereas Leah’s body grew more and more luxuriant, hot to the touch.

With summer ending, Lev noticed how the other soldiers grew restless. They sang songs about unmarked graves awaiting them in the Russian forests, about the Bolsheviks cutting their throats in retaliation for the harsh terms of the Brest-Litovsk Treaty, about being sent off to the Western Front in their already broken state, too weak or too old to fight the French. Lev listened to these songs at night in his cot, contemplating the blue smoke of his cigarette as it traveled up into the air. He did not sing along because the sound of his voice embarrassed him. He was content to listen in the darkness. In this way, he could be in agreement with their despair, while at the same time he inwardly criticized their flair for the dramatic, how they shouted and moaned over imminent death, when this had always been the case. Sometimes at night, when everyone was singing and drinking, Otto would come up to Lev’s bunk and rest his chin on the mattress. He’d whisper that their only option was desertion. “During the train ride through Germany, we jump off”—his two fingers galloped along the edge of Lev’s cot—“and home we’ll be.”

“We’ll die doing it.”

Otto grinned. “We’ll die if we don’t do it.” He propped his lit cigarette on Lev’s boot. “Two thousand men due for transport mutinied in Kharkov.”

Lev rested on his elbows. “The other option is we stay here.” He resisted adding how he had thought of it many times, beginning a new life with Leah. But the impossibility of this had recently been cemented by a piece of recent news: Leah’s husband was not dead. She had long believed he’d died in the Carpathian Mountains, in the winter of 1915, near the Polish town of Tarnów. That had been the story told by Altke’s fiancé, Slotnik, whose brother Misha had served in the infantry division with Leah’s husband against the Austro-Hungarian army. According to Misha, Leah’s husband had slipped and fallen to his death while they advanced across the rocky peaks. But Misha famously exaggerated facts, and the veracity of his letter had been brought into question by a recent sighting. The pharmacist’s wife had a cousin in Novgorod who saw Leah’s husband drinking in a tavern with some officers of the Red Army. Apparently he had defected from the czarist army and was now with the Reds, as most of the peasants were. He looked alive and well, his eyes flashing as they always had, his reddish hair rakish and long, flowing from under his army cap. The cousin wrote that he was drunk and cursing, toasting to the new Russia with his comrades. The cousin believed he would return home soon, to Mitau, because the war was ending and Russia was now a free state.

After the pharmacist’s wife had read this letter, she ran with unprecedented speed to Leah’s house, the letter clenched in her sweaty hand. No matter it was early evening, and Leah and her family were just settling down for dinner. When she burst through the door, her shrill voice, in a mixture of triumph and panic, announced that Leah’s husband was coming home. This had occurred five days ago, and since then, Leah existed in a state of high agitation. She asked Lev the same questions over and over again: How did the cousin know it was Zalman for sure? Many Russians had red hair—he couldn’t possibly base his evidence on this. And Zalman did not enjoy drinking, another reason why the cousin might be wrong. And what about Misha’s letter? Although Misha did
not actually see Zalman die with his own eyes, the timing of Misha’s letter was precisely when Zalman’s letters stopped arriving, indicating Zalman’s death. How could such timing be mere coincidence? But the last question, which continuously haunted her, was this: How could she have felt so sure of his death and now be wrong? She repeated, as if in a trance, “In dreams, I saw the Angel of Death myself, and he told me Zalman died along the mountain range, that snowy November.”

When Leah consulted her father on this, as he was a Talmudic scholar, he recalled such a passage in the Gemara about the Angel of Death making a mistake. The rebbe drew a labored sigh and explained that in the story heard by Rabbi Bibi bar Abaye, who was often visited by the Angel of Death, a nurse by the name of Miriam had mistakenly been taken instead of a hairdresser by the same name. So the nurse was brought back and exchanged for the hairdresser. Then the rebbe brought the tips of his slender bluish fingers together and shrugged, indicating this must be the case with Zalman.

Amid her fretting and worrying, Leah revealed a few details about her husband, details Lev greedily collected regarding her former life. Zalman had fiendishly red hair and green eyes as narrow as those of a fox. He was bowlegged and he suffered from indigestion. His feet sported painful bunions, and she often had to massage almond oil into the big red lumps. Days passed, sometimes weeks, when he refused to get out of bed. When Lev asked why, Leah said that melancholia, a black bile, would seize him. She had tried everything to help him, even laying tefillin on his weaker arm as a reminder of God’s holy words, which was said to relieve those in his condition, but the only remedy was time passing. After ten days, he would sunnily jump out of bed as if nothing had happened and resume his work at the tannery. But Leah knew it was only a matter of time until it would happen again. Just before the war, the periods between his bouts of melancholy grew shorter and shorter. She feared that soon the darkness would eclipse him. “It’s because I couldn’t give him a child. At least that’s what he always said. He said he was stuck with a barren woman for a wife, the worst kind of luck. Then he would laugh bitterly about never having a son to call his own.” When she explained this, her eyes welled up,
and she appeared weaker, more breakable, as if her bones had instantaneously thinned. “He accused me of withholding this precious thing from him—a child—as if I meant to do so. As if I did not suffer as much as he suffered. As if it was a contest of suffering and he always the victor.” And then she broke into long inconsolable sobs. Lev held her in his arms, felt her quaking body, and so badly wanted to rescue her from this Zalman, this fiendish red-haired demon who was surely riding back to Mitau within the fortnight, licking his lips, anticipating a triumphant return full of carnage and bloody revenge in which he would kill, with the help of his comrades, White Russians, Germans, Austrians, shifty landowners, disloyal peasants, anarchists from the Black Army, and anyone else who stood in his way. Lev couldn’t help imagining Zalman’s face: the green slanted eyes, the unshaven beard, the pointy chin and greasy hairline, the flecks of blood that peppered his cheekbones from some recent pillaging.