The Empire of the Senses (22 page)

Leah guided him from one gathering of relatives to the next, always clutching his hand, their palms sweaty and intertwined. Old women appraised him knowingly. He avoided their glances, feeling ashamed, already imagining the gossip that would ensue after his departure. He knew these women well now, having overheard them talk of errant men in the marketplace, at the dinner table, on the street.
He left without a note, without a word. She’s alone with the children, another’s on the way, and winter’s coming
. Yes, he heard them.

Lev closed his eyes, his jaw tensing. He had to tell Leah, but how? He looked at her searchingly. She smiled back, mistaking his look for the question of when they could safely slip away from the wedding party unnoticed.

“No one will miss us once the
badkhn
starts,” Leah whispered. She tightened her grasp around his arm. A squirrelly man in baggy trousers, his linen shirt breathing open at the neck, clamored onto the stage accompanied by the yelling and cheering of guests. He bowed deeply to the crowd, an imperious smile on his lips. He began rummaging through the gifts stacked neatly in piles at the edge of the stage. He scratched his head and frowned. More laughter erupted. Lev looked at Leah, wondering what this was all about. She clapped her hands with the rest of them but when she felt Lev’s eyes on her, she said, “He’s the master of ceremonies. He announces each gift, commenting on the giver of the gift, and then shows it off to the audience.” Lev wanted to say such a ritual seemed uncouth, embarrassing those who had not been able to afford enough, and vaunting those who had given richly. But the way she enjoyed the spectacle, her face flushed, stopped him. Yet he felt repelled by this little man who bellowed out that the fine silver kiddush cup was from the Mazurskies, “An illustrious and notable family I might add.” The
badkhn
grinned, his teeth crowding his mouth. Next he frowned a clown’s frown, holding up a tattered prayer book, letting the cover flap open to reveal yellowed pages. “Is this all that Boris Lachmann could afford? But how well he eats!”

Leah covered her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking with
tremulous laughter. “It’s true,” she said between parted fingers. “He’s so stingy.”

Lev sipped his beer, wondering who Boris was and why everyone cared so much. A cool wave of condescension passed through him as he took in the revelers, how the men drank on one side of the room, shrouded in a cloud of smoke, the women on the other, their heads covered since their wedding day, the din of voices rising and falling, and the excited face of the
badkhn
as he held up an embroidered pillowcase, a candelabra, his scrawny arms gesticulating. He waved the next gift in the air, a gilded mirror that reflected the blurry faces of the guests, and asked in a falsetto voice, “What is love?”

Leah tugged on Lev’s sleeve. “The light is dying.”

Through the windows, the fiery sun backlit the branches of the apple trees. She motioned with her head toward the door.

They slipped out of the stable, beer-filled laughter trailing them. The air still held the day’s heat, a heavy moist heat Lev could clench in his fist.

They heard the
badkhn
’s hearty voice as they walked farther into the trees toward the little huts. He asked again, raising his voice, “What is love?” and not waiting for a reply, he answered, “It is a small candle flickering on the mantel. Briefly, it leaves its mark. Then once again fades into the dark.”

Lev motioned to a hut at the edge of the orchard. “Here is where I first saw you.”

She blinked at the fading twilight. “Was it really here?”

“You don’t remember?”

She buried her face in his sleeve. “I remember everything.”

He breathed in her hair, pulling off her scarf. It fluttered in the warm wind.

She tried to reach for it but he held it up high.

She cupped his cheek. “Someone will see us.”

“Who can see in the dark?”

“There are always eyes.”

He led her into their hut, as he called it, but another family’s rugs and plates had been left on the ground. A little salt dish stood in the corner along with some stale bread. Through the roof of pine branches, slices of night could be seen. Leah flicked her finger against a hanging lemon. Lev tried to take a bite out of an
etrog
but it hit his chin.

She sat down on the rug, staring up at him. “People will wonder where I am.”

“With me, naturally.” Lev twirled her green scarf above her head. She didn’t say anything, and he noticed her eyes were wet. He bent down to his knees and straddled her. The heat of her body moved through her clothing, seeping into his. He thrust his pelvis into hers and fumbled with her difficult undergarments. She did not assist or protest. Her legs felt like lead in his hands. “After you leave,” she began.

His heart bloomed into his throat. “After I leave, what?” he repeated roughly, instantly regretting it.

“Everyone will know I’ve been with you.” She stared at the ground, her thick hair covering half her face. With the back of his hand, he brushed it aside like a curtain.

He ran his hands along her legs, and she softened, hugging his hips with her thighs. “How will they know?” But he already knew—the old women with their glances, the way people observed them. It was clear they were in love.

The night wind wafted through the thin wooden walls. She leaned back on her elbows, staring into his eyes. “And then—” She breathed in sharply. “What will happen to us?”

He felt his throat tighten. “In two days—” He stopped, trying to collect himself. “The Russians are coming back—Zalman is coming back. If I stay here, they’ll kill me. If I go, I might make it.”

She regarded him thoughtfully. “I know. I heard some of the other soldiers talking.”

He touched her face. “Nonetheless, we have tonight. This moment. That’s still something.”

“Is it?” she murmured, staring down at the packed earth.

He moved his hand up her inner thigh, and rested his palm between
her legs, feeling the softness there. She lay down, pulling him with her, and he undid his pants, raising up his hips for a brief moment. Partly it was a lie, what he had said about the immediacy of this moment and the uncertainty of their future, and partly true. True in the abstract sense, but they did not live in abstracts. Guiltily, he gripped the back of her neck and covered her mouth with his so she couldn’t talk more of the future, unknowable as it was.

13

Two days after the wedding, Lev and Otto found themselves on a transport train heading west. All the young able men had been roused at five in the morning and told they were needed where the fighting counted. “Belgium, Brussels, France, we’ll be slaughtered within hours,” Otto said to no one in particular. The men around them dozed off, drank, played cards. They had been traveling for half a day, barely out of the dense forests. Otto had packed a spare change of civilian clothes, and Lev had done the same. They were prepared to burn their uniforms and rip up their identity cards, but they would wait until they reached Prussian soil to hurl themselves from the train onto some unknown stretch of land. This was their plan. Otto smoked fiendishly, his bloodshot eyes flashing at the slightest change in the train’s movement. Lev asked about Antonina, trying to fend off the urge to talk about Leah. He knew if he did, he would sound sentimental, and Otto would say all women were the same, that what Lev felt was only an illusion. His eyes burned from the smoke and from the autumnal wind, which blew dirt and dust through the open windows. It stuck to his face, to the surface of his teeth.

Otto shrugged, studying his dirty fingernails. “Antonina wailed, begging me to take her. She didn’t want to be left for dead, for the Reds to pick apart. Uncle watched from the corner and offered me a bottle of vodka. I have it here, if you want.”

“Maybe later,” Lev said, waving away a mosquito.

“Women,” Otto mused, “they turn quickly. She played the czarina in the beginning, and now, my last image of her is with her hair strewn around her face, her eyes puffy from crying, her chest heaving. Well”—Otto unscrewed the vodka bottle—“what about your precious Leah?”

Lev motioned for the bottle. “She wanted me to stay and become a rebbe. Well, not quite that. But a tradesman, as if I hadn’t left behind an entire family and profession in Berlin.” He took a long sip, the astringent liquid burning. Talking about her in this way momentarily lifted the heaviness that filled his throat like a pile of stones so that every time he spoke it didn’t sound like his voice.

Otto rubbed his eyes. “She was a simple woman.”

Lev felt the urge to argue this point. Yes, she was in some ways simple. She wanted a child and she wanted his love. She worried about how long the food supply would last through winter, if the cows were sick, if her sister’s typhus had healed, if the season would be harsh or gentle and when the ice would melt. She looked forward to summer, and when summer came, she walked barefoot, little particles of dirt collecting between her toes. She swam in the same river where she washed her clothing, the same river from which they drew water. She loved gossip and often whispered secrets to Lev about a cousin or an aunt, secrets that meant nothing to him, but it was a delight to hear the incredulity in her voice, the pleasure she took in the telling. But she was not simple when Lev tried to tell her about his life in Berlin. She would play with her hair and grow distracted, and after a few minutes, she would tell him to stop. She would say Berlin, a city she would never see, only made her less real to him. “And what is this? What am I?” she raised her voice, gripping the sleeves of her dress. He would comfort her, his embraces easily lapsing into lust, and then they forgot about Berlin, which is what she wanted in the first place.

Lev took another sip from the bottle. “She wasn’t so simple.”

Otto punched him in the arm. “When you see your Josephine, Leah will melt away.” He made an obscene gesture with his hands, and Lev felt nauseated by Otto’s thick fingers. But he didn’t have the will to argue, knowing Otto would turn their private discussion into a public forum, enlisting the other sleepy men to debate the merits of monogamy, the futility of fidelity, if a man could live as happily with one lover as with another.

The lowering red sun shone on Otto’s face, making him appear
beastly. “You look like a devil,” Lev said, flicking his cigarette butt out the window.

“And you look like a half-drowned water rat, with that patchy beard and the weight you’ve lost.”

Lev touched his face, feeling the hollows under his eyes. He hadn’t shaved because Leah preferred a beard, and all decorum had fallen away at the base. In the heat, the men strutted bare-chested, suspenders hanging down around their waists, their fatigue pants shredded and dirty.

Otto gripped his crotch. “Josephine won’t recognize you.”

Lev bit into a stale piece of bread.

Based on their calculations, tomorrow they would cross into Prussia, and then they would jump, positioning themselves as close to the German border as possible. But after this, a blank. Where would they burn their uniforms? Their papers? How would they avoid other units? If caught, they would be killed for desertion. Would they find shelter, food? They’d packed some tobacco, bread, rotten fruit, enough for a few days. After that? Otto’s face, as he dozed off, his large head angled against the window, appeared unbothered, as if jumping off this train was merely a strategic detail. He had said, before closing his eyes, that the next days would be difficult, so better to sleep now. But Lev couldn’t stop agonizing over each step of the plan: How does one jump from a speeding train? And seeing Josephine for the first time, his children, his house—would it all be there as he left it? Worst of all, Leah’s expression when he’d told her he was definitely leaving hung before his eyes. The day after the wedding, they sat on cushions in the far corner of the room, while her mother yelled from the kitchen over the smell of burning bread, and Geza had just brought fresh water through the door, and the samovar emitted a shrill whine.

After he told her, she said flatly, “You’re leaving because Germany has lost the war.”

Lev shrugged, said he wasn’t sure, but they needed men in the west, and Geza burst out, “I’m leaving too, once this is all over!”

Leah’s mother walked into the room, holding Sezja the cat in her arms, massaging his gray fur. “What’s this about you leaving us?”

“Yes,” Lev said, resisting the urge to prevaricate, something he often did when a situation turned uncomfortable.

Leah asked hoarsely, “When exactly?”

He took her outside, behind the house, even though the back door was open and he knew her mother was listening, and probably Geza too. “Tomorrow morning, very early.” He felt guilty, like she should punish him, but she only hugged him close, and little sobs escaped her mouth, little pockets of air filled with sorrow.

When Lev woke, the dawn carried an uncharacteristic coolness. The other men on the train slept soundly. If today was the day he would die, each surrounding detail assumed an enhanced meaning. A flock of crows lifted off the ground, circling fir trees. Black birds are a bad omen, Lev thought. A bluebird or a dove would have reassured him. Someone whistled a low melancholy tune, and it seemed the tune was his death knell. He started to sweat in his undershirt, and at the same time, he felt a chill sweeping through him. When they jumped, would he fall and break his bones? Or get shot in the back while running away? He rummaged in his front pocket for cigarettes. If he had an odd number of cigarettes left, a bad sign. Touching the tips of the cigarettes, he counted five. He shoved the pack deep into his pocket again.

They were the only ones awake at this hour, but Lev wondered if others were planning the same thing, feigning sleep, their muscles as tense and ready as his had been all night. Lev nudged Otto with his foot, tapping the face of his watch. Otto held up two fingers—two more hours. With a blanket folded around his shoulders, Otto unpacked the contents of his knapsack: a knife, two pairs of socks, tobacco, a pipe, the bottle of vodka, a comb, his civilian clothes, his identity papers, his rolled-up drawings, a pair of underwear. Otto instructed Lev to make sure his civilian clothes lay on top so he could easily change. At the bottom of his pack, a stack of Josephine’s letters. On top of the letters, a loaf of bread Leah had baked before he left. The bread was wrapped in a white muslin cloth, embroidered with birds. “Something from home,”
she had said, because she couldn’t read or write, only knowing how to account for a barrel of apples, a pint of pickles, or the price of coral beads by making a few marks in a ledger.