The Empire of the Senses (27 page)

He touched his hair, felt how the strands fell through his fingers. Time for a cut and a shave. The strong sun hit his face and its warmth felt good even though he sweated under his white shirt. Lev watched the panoply of people on the streets. They rushed past, their briefcases bumping up against his arm. He scratched his chin, feeling the emergent stubble. He considered buying the afternoon edition; the newsboy waved it around on the corner. He would leaf though it at the barbershop.

Inside, the moist air mingled with the smell of lather and scented aftershave. Sunlight streamed into the room through the dusty wooden blinds. Scissors snapped open and closed, slicing off unwanted hair and a heavy black fly hovered over one of the sinks. Lev listened to snippets of conversation: someone’s wife had left him and now wanted to come back after realizing how depressing Frankfurt was—her lover lived in Frankfurt, but she hated it there. Someone else discussed an investment gone bad—apparently manufacturing umbrella handles had not turned out well. Lev sat down in one of the empty chairs.

“Shall we leave the mustache?” the barber asked.

Lev ran his finger along the rough fringe. “No, take it off. I look younger without it.”
Younger without it …
 The phrase gave him pause. Always unexpected, how a word, an image, the combination of certain colors would pierce through the present moment and leave a perforation in his heart. Instantaneously, he felt Leah’s soft hands on his face, her teasing tone as she tried to convince him to keep his beard, she liked him better that way.
But I look younger without it
, he had protested. She smiled and nestled her face into his neck.
You look like a real scholar with a beard
, she murmured, her breath soft and light on his skin.
A rebbe
, he had joked,
you really want me to become a rebbe like your father and remain here
. Then she would turn serious and ask, “Would that be so terrible?”

No, not terrible. Not terrible at all. It would be too beautiful to imagine, Lev thought, leaning back into the creaking leather seat. He touched his mustache. “Yes, take it all off.”

The barber nodded and started preparing his tools. The ceiling fan emitted a faint whooshing sound, reminding Lev again of the one they’d just bought for the bedroom, how it only made the room hotter, becoming yet another irritant to Josephine’s already delicate state. He sank farther down into the chair, inhaling the musty smell of the leather. The glee he’d felt when he’d left the office early this afternoon, the June air, full of summer, faded. His head hurt a little. It suddenly felt too warm in the barbershop. And the barber was taking his time, lingering over every little detail as he arranged his tools on the chrome tray.

Lev observed himself in the cloudy mirror.
What would Leah think if she saw me now?
Had these nine years taken much of a toll? He turned his head to the side. He had no jowls. He still had nice hair, full and wavy on top. But thirty-nine sounded old, older than the version of himself he carried around, older than the age he believed he truly was: thirty. He had been thirty when he’d fallen in love with Leah.

If she saw me now, for the first time, would she fall for me?
He frowned.
Maybe
. Wiping his brow, he tried to imagine what she must look like now, but his memory clung to her youthful body, her open laughing face, her freckles, rust colored, her black hair, so black it turned midnight blue in the sun. Why try to imagine her differently? What was the use? Better to revel in what he remembered and not trouble with where she was now. Probably still in Mitau, with Zalman. Perhaps they’d moved to a more prosperous town, but this was as far as Lev’s imagination would stretch. Because he couldn’t find out—contact only endangered her. He had told her they should not exchange letters after his departure. She couldn’t read anyway, so she would have to get someone else to read, and then gossip would spread, and Zalman would use the letters to prove she’d been unfaithful in his absence. He remembered Leah asking if perhaps Geza could read the letters to her. She had asked this weakly, because they both knew Geza was too young and volatile to act as an intermediary. Then she got angry and flung a wooden spoon at his head. “I’ll never see you again. It’s what you really want! To return to that shiksa!” They stood in the garden, in the back of her mother’s house, but the kitchen door was ajar, and Lev knew everyone was listening inside. Listening for what he would say next. He told her it was for
her protection—she would be a penniless divorcée if Zalman found out and left her. She could even be killed for sympathizing with the enemy. A traitor.

“I don’t want to ruin your life,” he said.

“You’ve already ruined it,” she countered before bursting into sobs and kissing his face through her tears. The salt he could still taste.

The door to the barbershop flew open, ripping Lev away from his reverie. The barber paused, holding the sharp blade away from his neck. A man with oiled curls close to his head strode into the shop, accidentally causing the front door to bang against the wall, interrupting the dreamy inertia Lev had been so enjoying. The man was talking about how ridiculous it was, the ban on public speech, as if continuing a conversation he’d been having on the street. “Or course, he has others to speak for him, to advance the cause, Strasser and Goebbels and such, but it’s shameful the way he’s already suffered so much at the hands of the government and still they persist with that damn ban.”

Lev didn’t look at the man directly but watched him in the mirror. His cheeks, a flushed crimson, appeared perpetually inflamed regardless of the heat. The man rambled on about how he would be ready when Germany was ready. “Not long now, I’ll tell you,” he added as the barber tied the smock around his thick neck.

The blade glided down Lev’s cheek, sluicing off a thick layer of lather. Then the man jumped to another story—how the other day, on an errand for his wife, he popped into a shop on Leipziger Strasse only to be confronted by a tangle of women buying up all the summer gloves on display. “They descended on the merchandise as hungry as a flock of dirty pigeons. Bickering, arguing, chattering away—before I entered the shop, through the glass, I thought they were German, but then of course once inside, it became clear to me they were only imposters, believing their overly expensive clothing could hide the fact.”

“Hide the fact?” Lev repeated.

“They’re just a bunch of uninhibited Russian refugees! And how they mix our language with their own, producing such a guttural stream, I nearly had to cover my ears!”

Lev said, “You did, huh?”

“By God, I did!”

The man finally stopped talking. The green quiet of the room settled over them. Lev listened to the faint buzzing of the fly, the fan whooshing overhead, the scissor blades sluicing through hair, the scratchy sound of the razor gliding down lathered chins, and the razor then dunking into soapy water, tapping melodiously against the porcelain bowl. When the barber placed the wet hot towel over his face, Lev closed his eyes and tried to think of nothing.

Leaving the shop, his face tingling from the citrus aftershave, Lev smiled at how the curly-haired man had fallen asleep, snoring as the barber clip, clip, clipped around his large head. Like an infant who tires himself out after a bout of crankiness and then sleeps deeply. Yes, he was an infant—belligerent, loud, unable to distinguish where he began and the rest of the world ended.

As he walked with no real direction in mind, something pelted his hat. It was the drop of chestnuts from the trees lining the streets, splattering the concrete, leaving behind those unmistakable dark brownish spots. He walked past a bearded man, his side locks visible from under his hat. He smiled mischievously at Lev through his glinting spectacles. He carried an umbrella even though the sky, a piercing blue, showed no trace of rain. That black hat, the heavy overcoat—the old Jew had chosen to move about life with a dark cloud hanging over his head. Lev watched him amble past the redbrick institutional buildings, all stone and mass in comparison to his slight body swathed in that thick overcoat.

In the distance, the domes and spires of the New Synagogue rose up. His mother still lived there, in Scheunenviertel. She didn’t like it there but said she was too old to move to Palestine. And you can start the revolution anywhere, no matter where you live, she’d said. His mother would have liked Leah. He had often wanted to tell her about Leah, but he always stopped himself, and now, nine years later, what was the point? It would only give his mother more ammunition against Josephine. He could already hear her chiding:
See? See how much better off you would have been with a Jewish woman? One of our own?
She would then endlessly
carp on about how he had lost his one chance at happiness when he left Leah behind, forgetting the essential details: Leah was married. Lev would have gotten killed if he stayed there. And did she expect him to abandon Josephine and the children? Her precious Vicki?

Without wanting to, Lev boarded the S-Bahn. He would make it a short visit. Remembering it was Friday, he pictured his mother preparing food, laying down a fresh tablecloth, lighting candles—his most sympathetic memories. The train rattled past Rummelsburg, where the old-age home was, and past the windows of people’s homes. Someone listened to a phonograph from an open apartment window. Billboards invaded the summer sky, advertising Sarotti chocolate, shoeshine polish, cigars, bootlaces. Kaloderma soup used an Asian motif, evoking Madame Butterfly.
After the revolution, Montblanc remains the king of fountain pens
, another advert read.

A tired-looking woman sitting across from him stroked her little dog, which she had stuffed into her purse. His shaggy ears perked up at the sound of someone unwrapping a sandwich two seats down. On either side of the tracks, workmen dug up the street, the sound of construction melding with the staccato vibration of the streetcar as it raced along. Lev paged through his paper, skimming an article on the cycling races, but the thought of seeing his mother unfocused him, made him uneasy. Every time he saw her, she complained it had been too long and the visit too short. When he arrived, she was unsatisfied, and even more so when he left. He could skip it altogether, but something about the Friday afternoon light, golden and burnt orange, drew him back to her.

He walked on the sidewalk, a rarity here as the Jews had a predisposition for walking in the middle of the street or, rather than walking, roaming, Lev thought. There were hardly any automobiles, just carts, so the streets invited foot traffic, fruit stands, stalls selling eggs, cheese, butter. Lev insisted on walking correctly, on the sidewalk. No one noticed him. They were accustomed to the stray Berliner stumbling into this section of the city unofficially designated for recent refugees from Poland,
Romania, Hungary, and Russia, as well as home to religious Jews, well-off Jews, pickpockets, counterfeiters, and people like his mother who couldn’t be bothered to leave. A slow-moving group of men with long beards waded through the street as if confronting a rough surf. Lev heard snatches of Yiddish mixed with German and Polish. Prayer houses dotted the sidewalk. By day, they served as storefronts where you could buy pencils, notebooks, soap, sheets of paper. Lev passed the Jewish boys’ school with its commemorative bust of Moses Mendelssohn planted next to the arched entryway. Children trudged along with their tallith under their arms; they appeared thin, almost transparent. As if it were still wartime. As if these children had just arrived from the east, underfed, hair full of lice, combatting typhus, diphtheria, and God knows what else. Lev shivered, remembering how children died in Mitau from disease, the miniature coffins lowered into graves, their mothers throwing themselves over heaps of unearthed soil. He shook his head, guiltily relieved that his own children had survived the war and were now vibrant and healthy, consumed with their studies, with their clubs, with their haircuts. He smiled again, thinking of Vicki’s short hair, how it really suited her.

A group of young men stood on the corner, arguing in Yiddish. Yeshiva students, Lev thought. Their pale skin appeared even paler against their somber clothing. They didn’t notice anyone else, not even the pretty girl who passed wearing a silk summer dress. “He is everywhere and nowhere,” one of them proclaimed. “Why this absence? Always this maddening absence!” another in a skullcap interjected, only to be cut off by a tall wiry youth who commanded the group, “We cannot keep defining ourselves by what we are not. Then we are nothing. The fate of modern Judaism lies in our hands. We must speak in positive terms.” They were talking about God. Lev lingered on the corner, amused by their naive passion for the unknowable. The students crossed the street, their voices rising to a crescendo of incredulity. They didn’t see the truck rounding the corner, bounding toward them. The driver hit the brakes and then he leapt out, waving his arms and cursing in Russian. Two men wearing similar velvet caps turned to look,
pausing for a moment from the business deal they were discussing. But the students kept arguing and gesticulating, having crossed the street without realizing they’d brushed up against death.

Bracing for the visit with his mother, Lev eyed the bar across the street. It would be impossible to withstand her recriminations otherwise. The door was open—no one ever closed it. The place, as he’d expected, was run-down, shoddy, with a backroom where people ate and a front room with a public bar, the kitchen separating the two sections. They served good brown bread, smoked fish in various sauces, blood sausage from Warsaw. Russian émigrés who had escaped the revolution just in time enjoyed schnapps at the bar, commenting on how the particular sharp taste of the liquor, akin to black licorice, reminded them of home. Two old women with crinkled white skin considered Lev with suspicion before returning to their conversation about how unhappy Rabbi Reznick was over the low attendance for shul on Saturday mornings. “But he doesn’t make it very enticing,” one of the women complained. The other one took a quick sip of tea and replied, “I suppose everything these days must have something
enticing
about it.”