The Empire of the Senses (16 page)

Lev drew up his knees, his back pressed into the iron grilling of the headboard. Below him, in the bottom bunk, a soldier was describing the pink and newly scrubbed bodies of the peasants after today’s delousing. “They still seemed dirty. It’s in their blood. You can’t wash out that kind of filth.”

Another man commented, “There’s no such thing as dirty blood. Blood is blood.”

Lev picked up her last letter, the one at the bottom of the stack. She wrote:
Yesterday, the children and I went to the cinema for a Henny Porten film—one of your favorites, I know. A Red Cross nurse was passing out candy and cigarettes to the wounded beforehand. One man’s leg had not entirely healed; he was dripping a little blood on the velour seats. When Vicki and her friend Isabella saw his blood dripping, they burst into tears and ran out of the theater. I had to run after them for two whole blocks. When I caught up to them, they were still whimpering like puppies, and I slapped Vicki. Afterward, I felt badly, but she must learn the value of empathy. I think Isabella is too dreamy, and Vicki is always with her now. She claims her mother is an Italian countess. And when her father came home from the east (he was discharged—his left foot was blown to bits), she asked
her mother, “Who is that strange man from Russia with the tall fur hat?” Which makes me wonder, how do you look? Please let me know in advance if you look terribly different, or if you are missing any parts. For the children’s sake, so I can prepare them. But it seems, thank God, that you have been quite lucky thus far
.

Lev put away this last letter. She had written it on October 1, 1917, more than a month ago. She wished he had been wounded just enough so she could tell others about it, but not so much that he’d be a pitiful case, like the man in the theater. He wondered if she resented his “luck,” as she put it, and resented how relatively safe he was, stationed far from real battles, in the backwoods of the east, where soldiers fought typhus and lice instead of men, and staged
fronttheater
, such as Schiller’s
Wallensteins Lager
, reenacting the Thirty Years’ War, as if this war were not enough.

9

The first snowfall left the town glittering and white. In the early dawn, Lev walked outside with the other soldiers, their eyes blinking and watering from the new brightness. The air shimmered with cold. Lev thought his eyelashes might have frozen and stuck together in the short walk from the barracks to the mess hall. In the mess hall, everyone grumbled over another Christmas in Mitau. They drank weak coffee and smoked cigarettes and reminisced about marzipan and gifts wrapped in gold foil under the tree and the excitement of their children—children they wouldn’t recognize by now. “They grow too quickly,” a man grunted, sitting next to Lev. “My wife wrote how my boy is taller than I am.” He took a violent bite out of his ham and butter roll.

Lev felt a cold despondency creep into his bones. How old was Franz again? Nine. Which would make Vicki seven. Maybe she had long hair in plaits and maybe she had outgrown her thumb-sucking. Maybe she slept better now, through the night without waking. But he could only guess at these things. The snatches of information he gleaned from Josephine’s letters about the children often left him feeling bereft. They ate fairly well, they knew their multiplication tables, they missed him—this was about all she wrote. On occasion she tucked in a detail about Vicki’s rebelliousness, which made Lev happy, or about how Franz had played one of the three wise men in the Christmas pageant, but otherwise she relied on stock phrases to fill the pages of her letters:
take care; write often; we’re humming along just fine over here; it won’t be long now; miss you
. Even her closing—
Love, Josephine
—at the bottom of the page felt rehearsed, mechanical, as if her hand automatically wrote the word
love
without the accompanying emotion. But perhaps he was only
imagining this so he could think of Leah, freely and with abandon. He wanted to feel her skin again, kiss her—he almost had done it in the hayloft but had felt too afraid of spoiling the moment. He wanted to do all this and more without those pinpricks of guilt.

The man next to him finished off his sandwich and stood up abruptly. “It started again,” he said, motioning to the heavy snow falling through the steamed-up windows. Then he walked off. Lev stared into his watery coffee and made a mental note to request that Josephine please include Franz and Vicki’s birthdates in her next letter. She would think he was losing track of time, of home, of his footing in the world, and maybe he was.

Lev sighed, lingering a moment longer. There was nowhere to go anyway. It was impossible to work the roads and clear the fields because everything was frozen. Beneath the snow ran a layer of impenetrable ice. A sense of hiatus had overtaken the camp. The soldiers played cards indoors and started drinking before noon. The gramophone perpetually played folk songs. Lev sometimes watched with amusement as the men solemnly waltzed together. They dressed some of the youngest soldiers in wigs and aprons and pretended they were German farm girls from the high clear mountains. With their smooth beardless faces, the young men giggled and trounced from soldier to soldier, sitting on laps and blowing kisses. Lev found the whole scene drenched with despair, but he also laughed from time to time. What else was there to do? The officers, smoking their cigars, enjoyed the gaiety, believing everyone needed a reprieve, that the endless days of snow and fog and ice, with intermittent bursts of blinding sun, were damaging morale.

After breakfast, Lev went to Otto’s lodgings. Exiting the mess hall, he already heard the garish vibrations of those folk songs echoing behind him. It seemed that each day they started earlier with the drinking and the meaningless frivolity. He sighed. His shoulders felt heavy, his legs lethargic. He missed home and he missed Leah, and the bleak gray sky promised nothing. Trudging through the empty snow-swept streets, he thought about the last time he’d seen Leah. A few days ago, but it felt like years. It had been unsatisfying because she was with her sister and they were headed to market. So bundled, he could barely see her face
and she was in a hurry. For only a few moments, she stopped on the street and introduced him to Altke, her sister. Leah’s breath was white in the freezing air. Her eyes laughed from under her wool hat. Then she gave him a quick nod, and they continued on their route, chattering away about the price of turnips. He had stood there for a long time, just watching her walk away, even though cold seeped into his boots and he swore his nose would freeze, turn blue, and fall off.

He hoped, in the middle of these silent streets, he would suddenly see her—highly unlikely, but still he glanced around. Every other house was marked with the red warning sign of infection, the windows boarded up for fear the virus would seep into the open air. Lev thought he saw, from behind a lace curtain, a furtive glance through the elaborate patterning. The only imperfections in the new snow were ashes, scraped from the ovens and scattered in front of each doorstep to keep people from slipping. He passed the cemetery and remembered how Aaron had told him about the secret business deals done here among the graves. He stopped a moment, musing at the graves, how the stones were run-down and crooked and jammed together, and in the process of lighting a match for his first cigarette of the day, the blue flame flickered and a dream resurfaced from the night before, a dream he would rather forget. He stood at the end of a long snaking line in the middle of a forest—ahead of him he recognized Aaron and some other Jewish soldiers from his division. An officer made his way down the line, counting off the Jews. He motioned for the first soldier to speak, who said he was a
Vaterlandsverteidiger
, defender of the Fatherland. The officer nodded in approval, moving on. The next soldier stepped forward and stated
Mosaischer Konfession
, of the Mosaic faith. A third soldier proclaimed Israelit, an Israelite, and then the fourth soldier in line proudly announced
Deutscher jüdischen Glaubens
, a German of the Jewish faith, as if he should win an honorary medal for this. When the German officer paused before the fifth soldier, a soldier who vaguely resembled Lev, the man could not speak. The officer swiftly shouted,
“Auf jeden Fall ein Jude.”
Definitely a Jew.

Lev walked faster. The biting cold snaked through his open collar. The image of the German officer’s laughing face when he shouted
Auf jeden Fall ein Jude
danced before him. Such triumph in identifying a Jew, as if the officer had a particular knack for catching difference—a glee akin to a banker’s wife spotting that the diamonds hanging from her rival’s neck were not real stones but cheap glittering imitations. Despite Lev’s dream, the actual count had been orchestrated discreetly. He and the other Jewish soldiers filled out a form with their names, occupations, the date they joined the army, their duties, if they had fought on the front line, if they had been wounded, and if so, what type of wound. They handed back the papers to the officers with the obedience of schoolchildren.

When he reached Antonina’s house, she was cursing and smoking and holding a bowl of steaming water. Uncle was nowhere to be seen. The house was overheated, as usual, and Antonina’s flushed chest heaved as she recounted the morning’s horrors. Otto’s toe was inflamed and he couldn’t walk. He had been hollering all through the night, demanding this and that, and she did not sleep a wink. Wisps of flaxen hair stuck to the sides of her temples. She begged Lev to see what the trouble was. “Maybe you can help with the pain. Maybe you can tell him to stop shouting,” she breathed, a hot garlicky breath, into Lev’s face. “I bring him a poultice, a balsam, but nothing, nothing works.” Sighing, she followed Lev into Otto’s room. Otto, with one sheet twisted around his leg, the pillows thrown to the ground, lay stretched out across the bed diagonally. He gripped the tarnished brass bars behind his head, emitting a low guttural moan, but when he saw Lev, he moaned more dramatically and gestured to his big toe, red and swollen, pulsating with pressure.

Antonina said, “Even a sheet over his toe and he screams.”

Otto nodded weakly.

Lev studied the toe. “It’s gout.”

“Gout?” Antonina repeated.

“How can I get rid of gout?” Otto murmured, straining to lift his head.

“My brother-in-law, he had gout, and they chopped off his toe.” She sharply swung her arm through the air, illustrating the amputation.

“Shut up,” Otto roared.

“Milk and cherries lessen the pain,” Lev said.

“Milk and cherries?” Antonina waved a wet rag through air. Droplets of water sprinkled Lev’s face. “Cherries in the dead of winter? Only the czarina eats cherries in winter.”

“Cherries?” Otto asked. His eyes were glazed over, his ears crimson.

Lev pulled up a chair next to the bed. “Listen. I heard of a wonder-rabbi, a cabalist, who could possibly heal your toe. We could go. I could take you.” He felt his spirits lighten at the thought of this adventure—better than playing cards with his tobacco-stained fingers, thinking about how his son was growing taller, mixed together with his yearning to see Leah again, alone. Then guilt always tried to chase away this desire, and Josephine’s admonishing face appeared before him. What would she say if she knew about Leah?

Antonina kept waving the wet rag through the air in a circular motion. “Are you telling him lies about me? I’ve done everything I could, everything—”

“Get out,” Otto shouted, wincing from a new shot of pain.

Protesting, she left the room.

They trudged through the snow, Otto hanging on Lev’s arm, Lev shouldering most of Otto’s weight, telling him about the wonder-rabbi’s powers. “People seek him out, go to him with their problems.” They stopped to rest a moment. They were near Leah’s house, but he could not hear the stream because it had frozen. Over the last month, he had been ferrying her a handful of flour, a few potatoes, a dead chicken, a thimble of vodka—anything he could pilfer from the mess hall’s kitchen, from the army’s meager supplies. Anything that provided him a chance to see her, if even for a moment, when their fingertips touched during the exchange of these provisions. But even with the extra food, her sister had fallen ill from typhus. These days, due to the biting cold and lowered immunity, people were less resistant to diseases transmitted through lice. But somehow, even when there wasn’t enough to eat,
behind each frosted window six candles blazed, marking the fifth day of Hanukkah.

Lev gestured to the lit candles, recalling what Leah had told him. “During the holidays, that is when he sees people. He holds court in one of the prayer houses. Jews, gentiles, all types, seek him out to be blessed, to be cured, if someone is sick, if their wife is barren, if they cannot ejaculate, if they are lusting after another man’s wife”—he paused—“they line up and wait for days to see him.”

Otto lifted up his bad foot, which was swaddled in wool. His toe was too sensitive and swollen to fit into his boot. “I’m not waiting for days.”

“Look,” Lev said. Down the snow-packed street, the doors of the prayer house stood open. Men filtered in and out, in black caftans, smoking cigars and strong pipe tobacco. As Lev and Otto approached, they heard grumbling and arguing, voices rising to a pitch of irritation while others conferred in murmured tones. Otto gripped on to fences along the way, but most houses had no fences. He was covered in sweat, his neck red and pulsating. He tore open his coat, sending a few brass buttons flying. He eyed the plain wooden doors and broken stone steps and hesitated to enter. Exiting, an old man in a tall fur hat threw his cigar butt into the bushes and stormed off.

Inside, it was dark and crowded, and all the men converged around a staunch red-haired man in a velvet cap who guarded the entrance to the next room, where, from what Lev and Otto gathered, the wonder-rabbi held court. The door was closed, and the man in the velvet cap smiled grimly with his arms crossed over his chest. He avoided eye contact even though various men came up to him and pleaded, saying they’d been waiting since dawn; their daughters had diphtheria, their cows no longer yielded milk, or soldiers had taken away their sons. The litany of need rose and fell like a chorus. Otto held on to Lev’s shoulder, breathing heavily. The smoke burned their eyes and made it hard to see. The small windows embedded in the stone walls were dirty and let in dull gray light. Some men didn’t bother with the doorkeeper. They griped and lamented, carrying on dramatic monologues for an invisible listener. One man whined and wrangled with God, accusing Him of providing a bad harvest, and on top of that, his wife had taken
to her bed. Her hair was falling out. She was coughing up blood. Her chest had sunken into a cavity. “Like a hollow bowl!” he cried and threw down his fur-trimmed hat. “This winter is an empty desert in which You have stranded me—You, merciless and unforgiving, are preparing that I should soon become a widower.”