The Empire of the Senses (23 page)

He touched the birds’ wings, thinking how her nimble fingers had sewn together the strands of color.

Lev and Otto sat facing each other, their knees pulled up into their chests, their arms crossed over their legs. The sun rose steadily, heating the compartment. Otto assumed a stoic expression. Whenever they locked eyes, Otto would slowly nod but then look away, as if it were bad luck to hold Lev’s gaze for too long.

Lev smoked a cigarette, ate a soft apple, examined his boots. He tapped his watch again. In response, Otto mouthed,
Soon
. With the sun beating down on the windows, and the other men stretching and standing up, they were close. Otto watched the passing landscape, his mind working, trying to estimate if they had gone far enough, or too far already.

He suddenly lunged forward, grasping Lev’s arm. “I don’t feel so well,” Otto moaned, holding his stomach. No one paid much attention, despite Otto’s performance. Together, they stumbled toward the exit door, which one had to slide forcibly open.

Lev clutched Otto’s shoulder and in the other hand his knapsack.

Otto yelled, “Open the door—I have to vomit.”

Lev pulled open the door. Otto threw his pack out the window, into the blur of fields and brown earth. And then he stepped off the train as casually as stepping out of a cab, feetfirst, his arms loose around his sides. Lev caught sight of two soldiers a few meters away, near the window. The one lighting a cigarette frowned and started to say something.

Lev jumped and yelled. The roar of the train swallowed up his voice. On either side of him, other deserters also dove into the blurry landscape, and it reminded Lev, for a split second, of relay races in the gymnasium pool, how he would sense in his peripheral vision the long lean white bodies of his schoolmates jumping into the water headfirst, arms outstretched and tense, all of them acutely aware of one another and yet intensely focused on their own success.

His knees hit earth. His elbows smarted. He scrambled upright, feeling the grains of dirt infiltrate the open cuts in his palms. Somehow, he still held his knapsack in one hand. The other hand fisted the air. Ahead of him, Otto zigzagged across the field. Lev’s eyes watered, his ears filled with the sound of whizzing bullets. He ran toward Otto, bracing for the feeling of a bullet lodging itself into his flesh. Only once did Otto turn around, and when he saw Lev, he jerked his head toward a gathering of trees up ahead and cut across the field as quickly and smoothly as an animal in his natural habitat. Lev followed, running parallel. He didn’t notice that the train had passed. He heard bullets even though there were none. He saw fir trees and Otto’s thick neck. He couldn’t even say for sure if he had been shot, his chest tight and burning, but he kept running for the coolness of the trees and the lone figure of Otto up ahead, hurling insults into the still morning air.

Over the course of a month, they made it back to Berlin. They burned their uniforms and identity papers in the forest. For a while, Otto and Lev crossed through the countryside with two other deserters. Boys, barely twenty, who were careless, smoking at night and shooting into the sky at inopportune times, although they occasionally caught fowl to roast over an open fire.

Otto was against them. “The greater our number, the greater our risk,” he whispered to Lev after the boys had fallen asleep. Yes, the boys were senseless and scared. But if left alone, they would be captured and killed. Lev also knew Otto was right.

When they reached the banks of the Vistula River, Otto feigned a chest pain and told the boys to go ahead, promising they would catch up with them. “See you in a few days,” Otto had said, waving his hand in the air, assuming his most paternalistic tone. The boys strode away into the blue-gray morning.

Lev and Otto waited half a day and took an alternate route. They slept in barns, taverns, fields, brothels. No one asked where they came from or where they were going. They only wanted to know if the war was over. “Germany is victorious,” Otto would roar. This statement always yielded a free beer and a small plate of food. As Otto and Lev drank,
each person recounted their own brand of suffering: burnt crops, dead sons, hungry children, a lover who had stopped writing months ago. When they spoke, they stared at Lev as if he held some secret knowledge. Where is my husband? When will the windowpanes stop vibrating from artillery fire? Is my son really dead? He tried to project a kindly expression even though his stomach growled and his fingernails hurt from the dirt packed underneath each nail, and a perpetual sheen of sweat bathed him despite the frigid mornings and nights. As he listened to these people recount their wartime grievances, their ugly mouths moving, the words senselessly pouring from their lips, Lev contemplated his own situation. He’d heard so many stories: Berlin had fallen to the Spartacists; armed workers had taken over the newspaper district as in Russia; Bavaria was now a free state; the Kaiser had fled to Holland; Germany had become a Socialist republic; the monarchy had been restored. And where was Josephine? His children? Had she managed to keep the house? He stroked his beard, which reminded him of how mangy he looked, like a stray dog. He feared Josephine would not recognize him or that she would not want to recognize him.

Otto and Lev made a pact—once they got to Berlin, they would part at Pariser Platz near the Brandenburg Gate. They had been prisoners of the Russians and they had escaped. “Feel free to elaborate,” Otto joked. “Details make a lie more believable.”

Otto repeated this when they approached Pariser Platz one morning in late November. After four years, Lev had imagined it would look changed, but the Adlon Hotel still stood grandly on the corner, and the pillars of the Brandenburg Gate rose up out of the wet morning, as formidable and massive as Lev remembered. Instead of the crisp blue sky and sharp sun and open faces of Berliners stringing garlands around his neck, as he had often imagined of his homecoming, the women wore black, their faces withered. Even the young ones appeared old and thin, staring down at the wet slick stones. When they did look up at him, disappointment filled their eyes, and he glanced away, ashamed somehow of returning to this cold and hungry place, as if he had singlehandedly lost the war. There were hardly any men around, but the few he did
see hobbled across the square on makeshift crutches or begged on the busier street corners, shaking a worn hat. In the middle of the square, a contortionist balanced on his hands, his legs bent over his head, feet dangling around his ears. The chipped porcelain bowl in front of his mat stood empty of coins. Another young woman passed by who appeared far older than her years. She limped and stared at Lev contemptuously. Lev swallowed, terror spreading through him—what if she could tell he had deserted? What if she reported him? Was it evident by his civilian clothes?

He turned to Otto, who was finishing a cigarette. “Otto,” he whispered. “Did you notice that woman?”

Otto flicked away his cigarette butt. “I don’t like cripples. I know men who prefer them, a fetish of sorts, but I find it disgusting.”

“No,” Lev hissed. “I don’t mean that. She looked at us strangely, as if she could tell we’re deserters.” He envisioned a firing squad and felt the softness of the black cloth they would use to blindfold him. He imagined shitting his pants right before the shot went off; he would die filthy and alone, and then his executioners would toss him into a communal grave.

Otto slung a bear arm around him. “Confidence, Lev. Confidence. Otherwise, every wayward glance, every slur or slip of the tongue will plague you and you’ll lose your mind. Don’t let it come to that.”

The raw wind cut through his threadbare shirt, and Lev stuffed his hands into his pockets, clenching his fists. It started to rain. He shivered under Otto’s weighty arm. “You’re right. You’re right.”

Otto surveyed the now empty square. “Go home to that lovely wife of yours. And the child, Vicki.”

“Yes, Vicki,” Lev said, feeling his eyes well up. “And Franz,” he added. What did they look like now? Would they recoil from him? His reflection appeared frightful in the store windows. A throbbing desire to see his children overtook him. He had survived and here he was, in Berlin, alive! Those faceless executioners would never catch him—there was no proof of desertion. His story would hold. Lev ran a hand through his dirty hair, sighing.

“Well,” Lev began, thinking he should say something meaningful, something monumental. “Here we part.”

They embraced.

“Thank you, brother,” Otto murmured into Lev’s ear.

“If I smell anything like you,” Lev said with a laugh, “she’ll never take me back.”

Otto grinned. “Urine, sweat, beer—absolutely irresistible, I assure you.”

Lev gripped Otto’s shoulder; it felt massive under his hand. “Take care, my friend.” He paused. “What are you going to do now?”

Otto stared pensively into the fog. “Maybe I’ll go south. My brother lives there.”

“Your brother?”

“Yes.” Otto paused. “Do you have any brothers?”

“No.”

Otto shrugged. “Strange.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Lev thought he saw a bear. A man in a dark hat led the beast by a chain around its neck, a leather muzzle fixed to its mouth. A ragtag group of children, all shoeless, followed the brown bear. He walked on his hind legs with his paws flopping in front of him. The man, a gypsy, smiled sweetly. He held a tambourine but had no intention of using it.

Otto let out a labored sigh and nodded to Lev, casting him a glance that was both sentimental and savage, a look that summed up the whole of his personality.

Lev wanted to say something more, but he only saluted him and watched Otto cross the square. He wanted to see if he would go into the bar on the corner or if he would buy cigarettes first, but he couldn’t stand here all day.

He made himself start walking in the direction of Charlottenburg. He might see her on the street, before even reaching the house. Many times he had constructed the scenario of their reunification: at home in the garden, a mild spring day, her hair loose and swimming over her shoulders.
A moment alone, their lips brushing, his hand on her cool skin before the children rushed toward them. But already, it felt so different: the sky dark with clouds, the rain, she would be sitting inside by the window, the rose garden soaked and indifferent to his fantasy. He wasn’t even in uniform. Straightaway, he would have to lie. Lie about how he left Mitau, lie about Leah and his life there. Another thing that hadn’t entered into his homecoming until now: he was in love with Leah. He had tried to push away her image as they made their way back to Berlin. When he thought of her, he lost focus, stumbled over his words, made sloppy mistakes that Otto said would cost them their lives if repeated. “Stay focused and alert!” Otto had barked. “Don’t think about the past,” he had added, as if he knew what hummed inside of Lev. But now that he had survived—he was here, in Berlin!—his mind freely retrieved her image, and the sensations and details of their love affair bled into this old life, this old city, as if he had opened a familiar book, one he had read many times, and yet underneath the pages another story, the real one, sang beneath it, an intractable melody.

Down the main avenue, a streetcar approached, and he jumped onto the back of it, the way he used to when he was a boy. For an instant, he worried what the other passengers thought of him in his ragged state.
Confidence
. He mouthed the word, Otto’s deep voice echoing in his head. A little girl stared at him from under her bonnet, but when he smiled, she pretended not to see him. She looked about nine—the same age as Vicki would be now! She held her white rabbit muff close to her chest, and faintly, Lev recalled giving Vicki a similar one attached to a silk cord that hung from her neck. The streetcar trundled down the main road running along the Tiergarten. Up ahead he could see the Zoological Garden, and his heart leapt at the sight of two disgruntled pandas munching leaves. Franz and Vicki loved the pandas. At least the pandas were still here. Hardly anyone strolled the park save for a few darkly clad figures, and Lev tried to remember what day it was, perhaps a Monday or a Tuesday when fewer people visited. The air, the trees, the stones all carried a bluish-gray tint, which would have depressed Lev if he didn’t feel elated and nervous, revisiting each street corner, each signpost and archway that reminded him of another life. The stall
where he often got flowers was shuttered, but that didn’t prevent him from remembering how he purchased white gardenias for Josephine on Fridays from an elderly man who wore one thick-soled shoe to compensate for his shorter leg. Did Josephine still insist on Oriental lilies for the garden? Did she still prefer freshly cut tulips in the foyer? Were these luxuries still necessities or had the war changed her into a more sensible, frugal woman? He gripped the streetcar railing, gulping in the wet cold air, his mind racing—would she still be beautiful? Could he still love her? Had the Russians returned to Mitau? Had Leah’s husband returned? Would Leah embrace Zalman, kiss his face, as if she still loved him? A stab of jealousy attacked him, unfair as it was. As he rode home to his wife, why did he begrudge Leah the same fate? Human nature. That’s what Otto would say. After a man possesses a woman, he must ensure biological certainty; he needs to know that if there’s a child, it’s his. Hence his repugnance at the thought of Leah coupling with another man. All other emotions—jealousy, pain, obsession—were only symptomatic of the desire to secure paternity. Perhaps this simple biological explanation would make sense if Otto still stood next to him, hollering on about it, but alone with his thoughts, it broke down into a rubble heap. He returned to the image of Zalman reuniting with Leah. The roughness of his ginger beard against her perfect cheek. The plundering of her dark hair through his thick fingers. Her thighs spreading … he would have trouble breathing if he lingered too long here. His chest ached—he touched his heart. It seemed to contract, to recoil under his skin. He squeezed his eyes shut at the sound of Leah’s shallow breath, warm on his neck when they made love, but now it would be Zalman’s neck. Without warning, Lev doubled over the brass railing and retched into the moving street. Luckily, the piercing trolley bell signaling the next stop covered his guttural sounds, but the little girl in the bonnet saw.