The Empire of the Senses (56 page)

Mara motioned for Trotsky to jump into her lap, but he stood watch next to Lev’s chair, hoping for scraps. “Vicki will be happier in Palestine,” she said firmly and then added, “You’re celebrating Easter, I assume?”

“Naturally.”

“Hmmm,” Mara said, taking his bowl away and placing it in the sink.
Over the sound of the running water, she reminded him that Christians still believed the Jews killed Jesus. “It’s the myth they cling to, so they can hate us a little longer. For all eternity,” she added, shaking the pot dry and placing it upside down on a dishtowel. Then she recounted some recent attacks, honing in on the more disturbing details, almost with relish.

She sat down again, her eyes tired. “But it’s the season, isn’t it? We’re making matzos out of their children’s blood. Yes, yes, it’s only the season. This too will pass. We’ve said this to ourselves for centuries.”

She went into the living room and fell into the deep leather armchair where Lev’s father used to sit and smoke.

Lev watched her from the kitchen doorway, feeling the usual mixture of guilt and irritation. She was old. And manipulative. She was alone. And she reminded him of this whenever he came to visit. Her husband had died many years ago, and she mourned him, but she was happier without him.

Mara closed her eyes and murmured that she felt tired, motioning for Lev to go. “Oh,” she said, rubbing her forehead. “Did you hear? About Rabbi Landauer?”

Lev shook his head.

“He’s gone. Poof! Just like that.”

“What is this insane story?”

“That’s all I know,” she said, her hand over her eyes. “Someone saw him boarding a ship in Kiel,” she added.

“I don’t believe it,” Lev said.

She shrugged. “What’s not to believe?”

He left her sitting there, a diminutive figure blending into the oversized chair. She barely stirred when the door shut.

Lev stopped by the rabbi’s apartment to disprove what she’d said, although as he climbed the steep stairs to the fourth floor, his chest pounded as if some mysterious organ in his body knew it was true. When he got there, the rabbi’s daughters were huddled together on the rug, clutching their cat, their faces red and blotchy from crying.
Smoking up the kitchen, the rabbi’s wife yelled over the hiss of frying potatoes what a horror it’d been. She shook the pan and speared one of the blackened baby potatoes with a fork.

“He left! Just like that. No note. No explanation. For three days, I thought he was dead, crumpled up on the street from starvation, dehydration. But no. Someone saw him boarding a ship to America. Then they had the gall to ask, ‘He’s going to send for you, yes?’ when I was already in tears. What did they think? Would I be in tears if he’d sent for us? They only want to see me suffer!” She waved the fork in the air, the potato steaming. “I thank Him for the hair salons. At least business is booming. But …”

“You’re alone.”

She sighed, putting down the fork. “Solitude is worse than poverty.” From the other room, they heard the girls fighting over the cat. Then someone dropped the cat, and the animal scrambled up from the ground and raced down the hall, its little bell ringing.

She looked at Lev, her eyes swollen and bloodshot, and managed a bitter smile.

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

She took the frying pan off the stove. “Would you like some?”

Lev stared at the blackened balls of starch, and with the tenderness he knew a woman in her position longed for, he said he would very much enjoy some of those potatoes.

The food heavy in his stomach, Lev wandered through the old neighborhood musing at the men who still insisted on wearing their
peyes
tapering down the sides of their long white faces. Others wore caftans and fur hats, even in this spring air. Packs of children ran by, some of them bumping his shoulder. He used to call out and reprimand them, but today, he didn’t have the energy. Let them run, Lev thought. Soon they will stop running, and they will lumber through the streets because they will feel the burden of living, how tiring it can be, how a multitude of thoughts will pulse through their heads, all competing to be heard, and their children will mercilessly abandon them, their wives will turn
cold in bed, their own youthful skin will gradually start to sag and crinkle until they are no longer recognizable, not even to themselves.

He passed the old synagogue on Heidereuterstrasse and pictured the rabbi leaving from the port of Kiel, with its massive steamers hovering on the murky horizon. Did he think of his sensible wife, his three young daughters, his gray cat with the bell around its neck, when he boarded the ship?
Life is so terrible it would have been better not to be born. Who is so lucky? Not one in a hundred thousand
. The rabbi had often repeated this Yiddish proverb in jest, but maybe, all this time, he had dreamed of escape. Could Lev really do the same? Leap over to New York and find his beloved Leah? And then what? Would he stay there with her and attempt to construct some salvageable existence in that barbaric city? Was he capable of abandoning Josephine the way the rabbi had abandoned his wife?

Vicki was prepared to leave her familiar world behind, but she was young and energetic. And of course, the glow of new love motivated such grand gestures. The greater the obstacle, the more intensely lovers swore their allegiance to each other—the real test would come once Vicki and Geza moved to Palestine. Only then would they have to contend with the ordinariness of daily life, which was much more detrimental to a love affair than their current reenactment of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Yes, it was much more detrimental, Lev thought, crossing the street for the U-Bahn station. When he had struggled the most—those long arguments with Josephine’s parents, how they forbade her to see him, the clandestine meetings in the Tiergarten—he was more in love with her then, before she became his wife, before he really had her. He remembered the surprise, a few years later, after Franz was born, at the blandness of her bare ankles, how thin and birdlike they looked. Once, she had dangled her foot so sensuously before him, and his blood surged through his veins, a sensation gradually replaced by the irrevocable thud of marriage. But then the war came! The war, the war! Another obstacle of grand proportions to nudge them back into love. And it had worked for a while. He remembered coming home after work
on a Friday afternoon and telling her that he was joining up and how tender, how expressive, she suddenly became, her eyes flooded with hot tears. They sat in the courtyard. She touched his face, his hair, his neck, murmuring that she couldn’t survive without him, that he might die over there, and then she would be the young widow forever in black—a role, Lev realized when he had returned home in one piece, she actually yearned to play. He smiled sarcastically to himself and, not paying much attention, accepted a flyer someone handed him.

Only later on the train, did he unfold it from his coat pocket to see it was a National Socialist advert.
Citizens! Do not believe that the Germany of misfortune and misery, the nation of corruption and usury, the land of Jewish corruption, can be saved by parties that claim to stand on a foundation of “facts.” Do not relent!
The image of a storm trooper, his chiseled profile overlooking an expanse of green hills and farmland, dominated the page. Lev balled up the flyer and let it drop between his knees. He wondered if Franz handed out these flyers, his heavy messenger bag filled with this trash. Kicking the balled-up paper under his seat, Lev reminded himself that it wasn’t entirely Franz’s fault. Over the years, Josephine had encouraged his innate militarism to blossom. She had smoothed down his lapels and complimented his SA uniform. She spoke of the Great War as if speaking of a haunted love affair: the sacrifices they’d made, the food they’d gone without, the faith they’d maintained even in the face of all that death. How she’d scoured the house for metal, how she’d refused to accept flour and butter from her mother because it was unpatriotic, how she’d tended to the wounded soldiers in that makeshift hospital set up in the train station—she spoke of all this as if it were the most magical time of her life. No wonder Franz had grown inebriated with war.

41

Franz had been going to Manfred’s hole of an apartment on Dragonerstrasse ever since that night in the bar. Manfred shared the apartment with his aunt and her family, all six of them crammed into three little rooms. Manfred’s room was separated from the main room by a frosted-glass window. The place was loud and dirty, but they always found their little corner of peace behind the frosted-glass pane, even though when they lay naked in bed, bedbugs would crawl back and forth over their intertwined limbs. Manfred’s aunt and uncle didn’t seem to notice what went on behind the glass pane. If anything, they appeared grateful for his presence, as if he elevated the squalid atmosphere in some way. At first, Franz felt the need to protest, saying they shouldn’t see each other, especially not at night, when they would be tempted to indulge in their “mutual weakness.” But Manfred just kissed him on the mouth and said if they couldn’t abstain, then clearly it was the right thing to do! Lulled by how easy and free Manfred acted, how natural and almost commonplace he made it all seem, despite how inherently wrong Franz knew this was, walking home one evening after a bout of lovemaking, Franz thought to himself, however illogical, that with Manfred, it was all right. As long as no one knew.

During the day, Manfred worked at a construction site in the Tiergarten district, close to Franz’s house. He was usually up on the roof, carrying tiles. Franz would invent excuses to visit him, admiring Manfred wearing nothing but an undershirt, working among real Berlin proletarian types. Manfred’s head almost touched the trees, the new spring leaves fluttering around his brown curls. On his break, he would walk with Franz through the park, swinging his water canteen, and Franz would recite some lines from Faust. And then Manfred would
tell him about his supervisor, a little Hungarian who was always making obscene remarks. “What a horror!” Franz would add, and then they would laugh about it. After glancing around, Franz drew him close, his young muscular body, full of boyish energy, pressed up against his. He knew it was a risk, to walk with Manfred in this way. He imagined one of his mother’s friends seeing him with this worker type, but he couldn’t imagine his mother’s reaction—the thought sometimes made him burst out laughing because he didn’t know what else to do. It would be so horrible if she knew. An abomination, yes, she would say so. Part of him believed this too, which was why he sometimes forced himself to stay away from Manfred for a few days. He moped around his room, feeling his blood slow, his whole body weakening, dying. He fasted, punishing himself for wanting Manfred, while his mother brought up bowls of broth, bread, and chocolate on a serving tray. He never touched the food. Instead, he stared out the window at the bloodred roses in the garden below, feeling lightheaded, imagining himself tumbling into the air and hitting the ground. How tragic, they would say. He imagined his mother weeping over his dead body. Weeping and weeping. Vicki would cry too. His father would shake his head, confused, as he always had been about Franz. But how light and free Franz might feel, to be rid of this body, a body that wanted so much, more than he could give it.

Eventually, hunger overwhelmed him and he devoured a chocolate bar, and with the taste of chocolate still in his mouth, he would run to Manfred’s apartment as soon as dusk fell. Manfred knew to wait so they could follow the established routine: he undressed Franz, scolded him lightly for staying away so long, and then admired how thin Franz looked, tracing the run of his ribs with his fingertips. Last night, Franz had predictably shown up on Manfred’s doorstep famished, ashamed, in need of reconciliation. Manfred mothered him, made him toast with jam. They ate in bed. Franz stayed until first light, something he’d never done before.

This afternoon, they walked past the horse path, the smell of manure stinging their nostrils, giddy as truants. Franz had skipped out of Lutz’s lecture on the importance of hygiene during wartime to see Manfred again today. He knew it was indulgent—he felt as if he might
get caught somehow, but he didn’t care. Under the shade of trees, Manfred wondered why Franz needed to learn how to brush his teeth without a toothbrush. An orange-chested bullfinch flitted from one branch to another.

“Well, when you’re in the trenches, see …”

Manfred laughed. His full lips, his upturned mouth; he always appeared to be smiling at something. “I just don’t understand. Seems arbitrary, like Lutz has invented these lectures to give himself something to do.”

Franz playfully slapped his baton against Manfred’s thigh. “There’s going to be another war on, you know.”

“Then I better learn how to brush my teeth in a trench.”

Franz murmured, “You stay at home. I’ll defend the Fatherland.”

“Shall I knit you legwarmers and send chocolate bars?”

“Yes, please,” Franz said, fluttering his eyelashes.

Manfred giggled and gripped Franz’s body, which sent a sharp spasm of fear and excitement through him. Franz backed away.

“If you won’t let me touch you, let’s at least go look at the polar bears and the walruses.”

“My sister and I went to the Zoological Garden, when we were little.” He nipped Manfred’s earlobe.

Manfred pulled off his cap, fanning Franz’s face. “You’re teasing me now. Careful.” Then he backed Franz into a nearby tree and kissed him. For a moment, it was only their faces touching in the shaded darkness, the fullness of Manfred’s lips against his own, the restless desire to undress him. But they would have to wait until this evening, behind the frosted glass.

He quickly let go of Manfred when they heard a horse approaching. Wolf trotted toward them, riding an enormous steel-gray gelding. Its tail flicked. “Where were you?”

Franz ran a hand through his hair. “I was …”

Wolf gestured toward Manfred as if shaking an insect off his hand. He rocked back and forth in his saddle, grinning. “Fucking like animals fuck.”