The Empire of the Senses (55 page)

“A lot of things are going to seem coarse to you.”

She fiddled with the clasp of her watch—the gold watch her father
had given her when she’d turned seventeen. It had an alligator band, bright green, the color of emerald.

He breathed in deeply, his back expanding under his thin white shirt. “But the taste of freedom is, at first, the same as the taste of bitterness.”

“Did Zev say that?”

A line of lemons balanced along the porch railing. He took one and inspected it. “I thought of it. Just now.” He flipped open a pocketknife and cut the lemon in half.

Vicki stared at the glistening white fibers, the seeds embedded in the flesh. The sharp sour scent spiked her tongue with saliva.

Without much thought, he threw the halved lemon over the porch railing.

“That’s a waste.”

Geza shrugged.

She came up behind him. “Think of the labor that went into growing that lemon.”

He swung around, smiling. “My good little pioneer.”

“Maybe I am,” Vicki said, nestling back into his embrace, listening to the pulse of his heart, to the swish of his blood traveling through his veins.

He smoothed down her hair, his hand lingering on her earlobe. “You don’t wear earrings anymore.”

Vicki laughed. “What good would earrings do me here?” Her voice carried an unexpected sharpness.

“I like the lapis ones, the way they swing around your face.”

“Papa gave them to me, after I cut my hair.”

Geza continued smoothing down her hair. Mosquitoes buzzed around them, one landing on Geza’s white shirt, searching for flesh. She flicked it off with her forefinger and sighed. “Do you think he’s devastated, about my leaving Berlin?”

“Well …” He paused.

She pressed her ear into his chest, to hear his beating heart again. If only he really understood how much she was giving up. Of course she
believed in the cause and standing on the “right side of history,” but the reason she had agreed to give up her studies, her papa, her city of light and shade, had nothing to do with Labor Zionism or the Promised Land. He was her promise—I want to be where you are, she thought. So simple. She pulled him closer. “Why are you quiet?”

Geza fingered the line of her bra though her shirt. “I had a coffee with your father. A few weeks ago. He’s coming around to the idea of us leaving. You shouldn’t worry so much.”

She glanced up at him, her eyes filling with tears. “But he seems so sad lately, so troubled. After I leave, who will he joke with? Who will he talk to? God knows how he gets along with Mutti. And Franz barely speaks to him. And why didn’t you mention the coffee until now?”

Geza scratched his patchy beard and avoided Vicki’s questioning stare. “Let’s go inside,” he said. “We’ll get eaten alive out here.”

“Wait.” She pressed her body into his. “I don’t want to go back in there yet.”

In her embrace, his body felt restless and tense. She could tell he was thinking something, something he wouldn’t tell her.

They stared at each other in the darkness.

“What is it?” she finally asked.

“When your father first heard the news, he was upset about our departure. But he’s searching for something too, something he cares about deeply. His life is not only as it appears to you, or to me. What can we really know of another man’s life?”

“He’s my father,” she said, her voice breaking.

He cupped her face in his hands. “Even I have secrets,” he said, his tone light and playful again.

“What secrets?” she asked, wondering why Geza had waited until now to mention the coffee with her father, and what the two of them had spoken about for so long the first time she brought Geza home to meet her family. But he avoided the subject of these discussions with Lev as elegantly as a skilled acrobat, gliding in and out of her questions by posing other questions, until she forgot her initial question or gave up.

He curled an arm around her waist, guiding her back to the house.
“Oh, you know. Once we passed a man who spat out chewing tobacco on the sidewalk, and you said it was a vile habit, so I vowed never to let you know I chewed tobacco. I know you prefer white shirts on men, and so I went out and bought five white shirts. And I don’t even like white shirts! They get soiled so easily. I started listening to jazz, because you love Josephine Baker and Sam Wooding. I borrow the records from Herr Zakrevsky at the boardinghouse and play them in the afternoon, trying to feel what you must feel when you hear the music.” Geza shook his head, laughing to himself. “I can hardly stand it. Gives me a headache.”

Vicki giggled. “Sam Wooding? Did I really say I liked him?” She poked him in the side. “And I never said I prefer men in white shirts—how ridiculous!”

Geza buried his face in her hair. “You did. You did,” he murmured, guiding her back into the house filled with singing and light.

40

These days, whenever Lev thought of his marriage he saw the ruins of a beautiful Greek temple. Doric columns erected against a sharp blue sky. The pediments still intact with friezes of the Trojan War: fallen heroes, serene goddesses, bucking horses, the overall structure in place despite countless attacks from barbarian tribes. People still visited and placed their hands on the cool stone, channeling what was lost. They said to themselves, taking a snapshot, What a pity. In those days, it must have been spectacular.

Yes, spectacular, Lev sighed, thinking back to the Ice Palace, where he had first spied her twirling slender figure, and the chance afterward to share a coffee with such a remarkable creature didn’t seem possible back then, especially with sand in his pockets and those stiff new shoes. But it became possible. The opportunity to know her unfolded before him like a runner of the finest silk rippling down a flight of stairs. Boldly, before her governess lumbered over, he had turned down the edge of her glove and kissed the inside of her wrist. Right there in the café. An unthinkable thing to do then. In return, she gave him a breathless glance, conspiratorial in nature, as if they were in it together. He had not seen that look for so long. Not since the war. Not since he returned from it and she pretended to be happy he’d come home, and he pretended to be happy because she acted happy, but she wasn’t and neither was he. Because he returned not more German but less. Without medals, honors, or distinction, without even a wound to show for his bravery. Less German, more Jew. Lev knew what she thought of him behind her silent eyes: shirker.

After the war, he had started visiting his mother again. He walked
the dog when Josephine went to Mass on Sundays. He no longer felt the charm of her Christian ways, no longer admired that little golden cross she wore around her neck. And what did Josephine detect behind his eyes? Leah: the gleaming white birch trees, their bodies moving beneath them. He had left his lifeblood in that small dark corner of the world, scanning the papers for news of Mitau, for any trace, any clue, of Leah.

With only his memories and dreams, he muddled through the years, convincing himself he was lucky—they hadn’t lost everything in ’23; their healthy children had gone to the best schools. Lev kept getting promoted until he became director of Bremer Woll-Kammerei textiles. Josephine threw dinner parties, entertaining guests with her effortless sparkle, but afterward, alone in their bedroom, she was worn out. The rosy flush of her cheeks evaporated as quickly as all that champagne they drank. People complimented him on his wife’s charms, perhaps imagining how after the party, she was sexually ravenous, fulfilling the promise of her coy smiles and touches on the elbow. If only they knew about the invention of Herr K, how she turned her back to Lev in bed, how the next morning she acted as if everything was fine, pouring coffee from a gleaming chrome pot.

And Dr. Dürhkoop—what good was he? It had been nearly a year of treatment. Lev had seen him strolling through the Tiergarten. He wore his hat tipped at a jaunty angle. When Lev told Josephine how he’d seen the doctor in the park, she’d turned positively red. Maybe, Lev sighed again, he should be the one seeing the doctor. What would the good doctor say about his vivid dreams of Leah, how he’d been going back to that opium den without Otto, because she existed only there, in the ether and the smoke.

Until now. He could board a steamer next week and find her in New York. Find his son. He had even fabricated an impressive lie to Josephine about visiting a textile firm in lower Manhattan to procure a certain type of linen. Keeping the dates vague, he had created a flexible window of time during which he could leave. Josephine had seemed surprised, making a sarcastic comment about how special the linen must be to travel all that way, but then she didn’t ask about it again. His comings
and goings no longer concerned her. But Lev still didn’t know if Leah was in New York for certain, and if she was, he needed an address. He knew the city was geographically small, a long thin stretch of land, but filled with tens of thousands. She might have moved to another city by now. She might never have left Riga at all.

When Lev met Geza for coffee a few weeks ago, Geza had acted subdued and dismissive. He said he didn’t know where Leah was. She might be living in New York, or she might not. He had seen her two years ago, when she gave him the letter in Riga, and she had not said anything about America. When Lev begged him to find out, at the very least, if she had left for America, Geza nodded reluctantly.

“And if you can, her address in New York?”

“Don’t abandon your family,” Geza said, stirring cream into his coffee. “What good would it do now? Think of your wife, your children.”

Trying to suppress his mounting anger, Lev cried, “You’re taking away my child! My Vicki! What does it matter if I stay here now? I’ve already given up so many years of my life.”

“Think of the upheaval,” Geza kept repeating, as if immigrating to Palestine did not qualify as upheaval.

Lev’s heart contracted at the thought of Palestine, the place where he and Leah had once dreamed of moving, the place where his only daughter would live. Clutching his chest, he looked around at the other passengers on the tram to see if anyone noticed, but no one did. The woman across from him chewed gum, her lips smacking together in a rhythmic motion. How closely people resembled farm animals. Lev shook his head. He had dressed too warmly for the weather, and inside the train car, it was hot and stuffy—people never wanted to open the windows, even in the heat. An antiquated superstition about catching cold. He was sure if he tried, an old woman would start protesting, only to be joined by other old women until he would be faced with a chorus of them, all clutching their throats and pointing to the open window. No, it wasn’t worth it.

Instead, he felt sweat trickle down his sides and thought about how Easter was this weekend, and surely Josephine and Franz would go to church, and how Passover fell the night before. Would Vicki still go to
church? She had become quite the Zionist, and he was sure Judaism was part of her cultural training. They only wanted good earnest Jews in Palestine, not the aesthete assimilated ones who shirked the Sabbath and shopped on Yom Kippur, who felt embarrassed to walk next to their Yiddish-speaking caftan-wearing brethren from the east.

The train jerked forward and back. A few more stops until he reached the Scheunenviertel, where his mother, he could be sure, would be waiting with recriminations.

Every time he saw her, she looked a little older.

“You’re late,” she barked, shaking out a sheet in the front yard before hanging it on the laundry line.

Lev took off his hat. “The train was crowded.”

She motioned for him to follow her inside.

“Where are the cats?” he asked, his eyes adjusting to the darkened sitting room.

“Out back in the sun. They stay by me less and less. Traitorous creatures.”

In the kitchen, she stirred a large pot on the stove. The aromatic blend of parsley, carrots, and freshly made matzo balls made Lev’s mouth water.

“Here. Taste.” She held out a large spoon pooling with hot yellow broth, cupping one hand under it.

Lev gingerly bent toward it.

“I’m not going to poison you!”

He took the spoon from her. “It’s hot.” He blew over it.

She leaned against the stove, her arms crossed. Lev noticed she’d recently had her hair done, dyed a jet black to match her eyebrows. She tapped her foot impatiently. He swallowed down the warm liquid. It was too salty.

He said it tasted wonderful.

“I’m serving it Saturday night. For Passover.”

One of the cats sauntered into the kitchen.

Lev raised his eyebrows.

She fidgeted with a dishcloth. “I know. I know. But it’s nice, having
the Nardovitches here for Seder. And then afterward, we play charades and drink the pear-flavored schnapps from the old country.”

“Sounds enjoyable.”

She pulled a cigarette out of her apron pocket. “Don’t mock me.”

“I’m not mocking you.”

“Yes, you are.”

He asked for more soup. “I just remember how you used to rail against religion, saying it would destroy the revolution, how it was a beautiful distraction. That’s all.”

Mara turned her back to him, pouring a generous amount of soup into a bowl. “I was younger then, the way Vicki is with her Zionism.”

She sat down next to him at the table. “I don’t mind beautiful distractions so much now.”

“You think it’s Zionism she loves? If Geza wanted to move to Johannesburg, she would move there too,” Lev said, feeling compelled to finish the soup with his mother sitting there watching him. Thoughts flitted around his head, and he entertained telling her about each one before discarding it: the discovery that he had a son, his affair with Leah, whether he should try to find them in New York under the pretense of procuring a certain type of linen. The problem was, if he told his mother one thing, the rest would tumble out. He could never just dip his toe into the water with her—it had to be a full immersion.

He finished the soup, balancing the spoon against the lip of the bowl.

“When is Vicki leaving?”

“June,” Lev said, his voice catching. “I’ve even agreed to help them with the passage fare. Otherwise, she’ll still leave, but they’ll have to travel belowdecks. Think of the stench, the filth.”