The Empire of the Senses (50 page)

Lev glanced up from his paper. For a moment, neither one of them said a word. Vicki glanced at her father. The color had completely drained from his face. He gripped his chest. “Geza—what are you doing here?”

Vicki went over to Geza, taking his arm. “This is the young man I’ve been telling you about.”

Lev ran a hand through his hair. “I’m shocked to see you. I had no idea you were in Berlin.” He remained frozen in the armchair.

Geza shifted from one foot to the other. “If anything, I tried to stay away, but …” He glanced guiltily at Vicki.

The sound of Josephine running down the main staircase and calling out to no one in particular, “Are we finally going to meet Vicki’s beau?” interrupted him. Color rose up into Geza’s face, and he stared down at the floor. Vicki had gone to great lengths to describe her mother to him, but she always ended up criticizing her for her rigidity, her allegiance to a disappeared world, her inability to understand the new way of things. “She’s impossible—just impossible!” Vicki would say, pouting after yet another disagreement they’d had. And now he was about to see Josephine for himself.

Josephine burst into the room, flustered, her hair twisted into a chignon. She wore a long burgundy crepe skirt with a wide belt cinched at the waist. Peering around the room, she touched her earlobe, checking to confirm the back of her earring was securely fastened. “Marthe didn’t bring tea? And please—turn on the lights! It’s dreadfully gloomy!” She shook her head. “I’m sorry—no one ever seems to do anything around here unless I tell them to.”

Geza extended a hand. “It’s a pleasure to finally meet you, Frau Perlmutter.”

She smiled politely, but Vicki recognized the tightening of her facial muscles due to his strange Russian accent, poorly cut clothes, new stiff shoes, and the fact that he was, at the moment, trying too hard. She gingerly took his hand.

“Geza Rabinovitch,” he added.

More tightening of the facial muscles. “Geza Rabinovitch,” she repeated airily.

“I knew your husband in Mitau. He’s a good man.”

Lev lit a cigarette and then immediately put it out. “Yes, we tried to help the local population when we could.”

“What a coincidence,” Josephine said.

Attempting a smile, Lev grimaced.

Vicki switched on the lights. Above them, the chandelier buzzed before emitting an amber glow.

Marthe brought in tea and ginger biscuits, placing the tray on the low glass coffee table. For a moment, no one spoke as Marthe arranged the teacups. Vicki tried to read her father’s face, but he assumed a noncommittal expression of neutrality, as if listening to a radio program on winter gardening methods. When Marthe left the room, a tense silence hung there. The bleak white sky cast a dull pallor over everyone’s faces.

Josephine busied herself with squirting a wedge of lemon into her tea before asking Geza where he lived and what his line of work was. He explained that he had been trained as a bricklayer, but now he taught various agricultural methods to those wishing to immigrate to Palestine at the Berlin Zionist Bund.

Lev frowned. “Are you planning to move there?”

Geza hesitated. Vicki gave him an encouraging nod. “Yes,” he said.

Josephine winced. “The tea’s extremely hot.” She blew over her teacup. “A shame, after only just meeting, to be separated by such a great distance.” Then she looked up and smiled brightly.

Vicki scooted to the edge of her chair. “Well, yes, that’s the thing, you see …”

Lev’s hands curled over his knees, his fingers tensing. “And when do you plan on moving to Palestine?”

“May,” Geza said.

The two men stared at each other.

Josephine clapped her hands together. “Actually, I heard cigarette cases are manufactured in Palestine, by Jews slaving away in workshops.”

“We’re beginning to build up some industry, that’s true,” Geza said, holding Lev’s stare.

“The other day on Friedrichstrasse I saw the most charming little cigarette case in the window of an antique shop—it was inlaid with mother-of-pearl—and I thought to myself: did a Jew make that in Palestine?”

Lev glared at Josephine, who continued, “But then of course, it was overpriced. The man wanted to bargain with me, but I think that sort of thing is vulgar.” She delicately selected a biscuit from the tray and offered it to Geza.

When he declined, she said, “Oh, please take one—you look hungry.”

Vicki stared at her mother, mortified.

Lev stood up. “I need to speak with Geza in my study.”

Vicki shot him a defiant look, and Lev added, “Alone.”

34

I’m going to marry your daughter,” Geza said once the door closed.

“This is how you ask permission?”

“I’m not asking for permission.” Geza touched the edge of the imposing walnut desk behind which Lev sat, arms crossed, his lips pressed into a grim line.

“I’m asking for your blessing.”

“Speak German,” Lev said sharply, but then he felt guilty. He should soften his tone. He had known Geza and liked him as a boy. And Geza could tell him about Leah. His pulse raced at the thought of this, and yet he feared to ask: Did Zalman and Leah live happily as man and wife? Had Leah forgotten him entirely? Was he alone holding the vigil, nursing the past back to life when there was nothing left of it? He felt his ears burn. Contesting thoughts ran though his head, blending into a chorus of confusion: Did Geza tell Vicki about his affair with Leah? Or had he the tact to withhold such details? Did Leah still love him? What was her life like now?

Lev rubbed his eyes, his head pounding. “I find it peculiar how the two of you”—he paused—“came together.”

Haltingly at first, Geza explained how he met Vicki at the state library. “She forgot her pocketbook on the desk, and so I brought it out to her.” Growing more animated, he dipped back into Yiddish, relating how he never wanted to meddle with Lev’s life, but after seeing Vicki not only at the library but then again on the street, near her ballet studio, he couldn’t ignore such a string of coincidences. “I had no idea she was your daughter,” he lied, thinking back to that spring day, Vicki on Lev’s arm in her white dress, the melodic enticement of her voice ringing through the trees.

Geza continued, “And so, when Vicki finally agreed to have a coffee with me, I was overjoyed. Because for months—I promise you—I avoided her when I discovered you were her father, but I thought of her constantly.”

Looking at Geza, who now rested both hands on the edge of his desk as if he would dismantle it, Lev remembered his own boldness, how unthinkable it was to ask for Josephine’s hand in marriage. Her father had hated him, but maybe it wasn’t so much hate as pain. Pain that now seeped into Lev’s bones at the thought of losing his daughter to this man—to any man—who might take her away. Even worse, Geza planned to take her to a strange land where Jews carved matchboxes in the blistering sun. Didn’t he see it was safer here than in that hotly contested stretch of earth parceled out between Arabs and Jews?

In addition to this, Geza was not who he imagined for Vicki. He worked with his hands. He spoke Yiddish and wanted to grow fruit in Palestine. Vicki had been raised for an entirely different life—one filled with ballet recitals, art exhibitions, silk dresses, and soft lighting. Eventually, she would live nearby, in her own large house with housemaids and cooks and wet nurses for her children. Her husband, refined and reflective, would have a profession that required skilled training—a doctor, a lawyer, a musician. Lev thought he had secured this, exposing Vicki to various cultural pursuits, steeping her in luxury. She studied French at the university, and only a few months ago, she had described how much she loved translating Flaubert into German. Now she had chosen the exact opposite: dirt, heat, labor.

Lev cleared his throat. “Geza, you must take into account how Vicki”—he paused, trying to deliver this next part as delicately as possible—“might not want to give up everything she is accustomed to.” He gestured around his richly decorated office. “Even if right now, in the throes of infatuation, it seems as if she might.”

Geza paced the length of the room. Lev could tell Geza rejected what he’d just said by the way his face calcified into stony disappointment, thinking Lev knew nothing of real love. Well, that’s youth, Lev thought. Always forging ahead with strident opinions, never once wondering if they could be wrong. Oh no—it was always the older generation,
the generation that had lived longer and amassed more experience that was wrong.

Geza paused in front of Lev’s desk. From this angle, he appeared even taller than his two meters. “There’s something else.”

Lev felt as if someone clenched his heart, draining all the blood from it.

Geza handed him an envelope, yellow and worn. In faded pencil, written on top:
Lev Perlmutter
. “She wanted me to give you this.”

Lev held the envelope with two hands, as if handling a delicate object. “Thank you,” he said, choking over his words.

Geza nodded and started to leave the room.

Lev sprung up from his chair. “Wait.”

Geza stopped in front of the door.

“Does she have a hard life?”

Geza glanced around the study, at the leather-bound books lining the shelves, at the charcoal etchings encased in gilded frames, and the luxuriant Oriental rug beneath his feet. He swept his hand out before him. “It’s all relative, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” Lev said softly, feeling the worn envelope in his hand, as if Leah were just there, beneath the thin paper.

Realizing Geza was about to reenter the living room, reenter the world of Vicki and Josephine, the world he had sacrificed so much for, Lev said hoarsely, “Don’t tell Vicki.”

Geza’s hand cupped the porcelain doorknob. “I won’t. I don’t like involving myself with other people’s affairs. But—”

“There’s a stipulation,” Lev said. “There’s always one.”

Geza gazed at him. “All we want is your blessing. That’s why I’m here today—what happened then is not my concern.”

Lev sunk back into his desk chair. “All right, all right. You have my blessing. Mazel tov.” Then he slid the unopened letter beneath a paperweight, the one with the monarch butterfly frozen under the rounded glass, its emerald wings spread.

35

Mitzi sauntered into the living room. Josephine called to her, but she went straight to the door of the study, sniffing the dark oak. She sank down, her nose pressed under the door, and waited.

Josephine sighed, pouring more tea into their cups. “They’ve been in there for ages.”

Vicki nodded, staring into her tea.

“Do you know where Franz is? He said he would be home by now.”

“I don’t know.”

Josephine shook her head. “So strange, how he disappears.”

“He’s joined up with the brown shirts.”

Josephine got up, carrying her tea over to the window. She gazed out at the skeletal trees, the barren branches shaking in the wind. “I don’t see why they have to keep them away from their families, up all hours of the night.”

From behind the door, Lev raised his voice.

Mitzi let out a low growl.

“Oh, stop that,” Josephine said.

Vicki joined her mother at the window. She set her teacup down on the windowsill. “They’re training for another war. That’s what Geza says.”

“Another war,” Josephine echoed. Her eyes, usually blue and sharp, appeared opaque and misted over. “And Franz will fight.”

Vicki impatiently paced the room, picking up an ashtray and setting it down, fiddling with the tassels hanging from the velvet drapes, twisting the candles deeper into the silver candlesticks. She flopped down on the velvet sofa, propping her feet up on the ottoman.

Josephine remained by the window. “At least he’ll be a hero, fighting for Germany, as Grandfather did.”

The thought of Franz fighting usually sent her mother into hysterics.
If any harm comes to him, I’ll perish
, she often said, her eyes welling up. But a calm air had settled over her. She stood frozen by the window.

Vicki lit a cigarette, the ashtray cradled in her lap, anticipating that her mother would reprimand her for smoking. But Josephine didn’t notice. She only traced her finger along the frosted windowpane. “It’s already been predetermined anyway. We can’t change the future.”

Vicki held the smoke down in her throat for a prolonged moment before speaking. “What are you going on about?”

Josephine turned away from the window, the color high in her cheeks. “I know it must seem strange, but sometimes …”

Mitzi let out a series of sharp piercing barks.

Josephine winced, putting a hand to her head.

“Mitzi, stop,” Vicki demanded.

The dog settled down again, nose to rug.

A few blackbirds squawked, settling on the branches of the linden tree.

Josephine stared at the birds. “Most people think they’re bad omens, but actually, they’re not—they travel between our world and the next.”

Boring her cigarette into the chrome ashtray, Vicki said, “I hate blackbirds. They scare me.”

From the kitchen, they heard the beginnings of dinner: a pot clattering, Marthe instructing the new kitchen maid on how not to burn the roast, the chopping of onions as the blade hit the cutting board.

Vicki looked at her mother. Something was different about her, as if the contours that normally outlined her face had smudged, turned blurry. “What did you mean before, about something seeming strange?”

Josephine smiled and straightened her skirt. “Silly. I already forgot.”

Vicki gestured to the closed door. “It’s nearly dinnertime.”

“Well, what did you expect?”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s quite a lot to discuss when you bring someone home, like that.”

“Such as?” Vicki demanded.

Josephine settled into the couch, adjusting her long pleated skirt. “Oh, Vicki. Please.”

“What?” she cried, already knowing what her mother meant.

Her mother plucked a piece of lint from her skirt. “Don’t force me to say it.”

“Oh, Vicki, please!” Vicki shouted in response, causing her mother to flinch.