The Empire of the Senses (64 page)

The night before, Lev and Josephine had sat at the dinner table, wondering if Franz would join them. Lev remembered how Josephine was nervous, pulling on her rings, asking Lev, even though she knew he didn’t know, where Franz was. Franz had not been sleeping at home, and every morning, Josephine swung open the bedroom door, distressed by the sight of Franz’s perfectly made bed. Lev shook his head. His thoughts were far away, focused on one central task: he was leaving tomorrow for New York. It had all been arranged. Josephine thought it was for business, for importing linen.

Early the next morning, Lev’s suitcase was packed, resting open on top of his bed. He rang for a cab and waited for it to come. Marthe knocked softly on his bedroom door, and he thought he was leaving forever. Finally, after years of deliberations, of creating imaginary business deals in New York only to erase them, he had decided to leave Berlin and find Leah. But that morning Marthe didn’t announce the cab. Instead, staring down at the carpet, she told him Franz had died last night. An officer was waiting downstairs in the foyer. Fat tears trickled down her neck. Josephine was still asleep; she didn’t want to disturb her.

“It’s an awful shock,” Marthe had said, her hand over her heart.

“An awful shock,” Lev had repeated, sitting down on the bed.

Perhaps the Communists wanted to make a point. Perhaps the Zionists had been waiting for their opportunity to avenge Franz’s attempted murder of Geza. Perhaps, perhaps. The shooter was never found. The only discovery the police made was where Franz had slept that night, where he had most likely slept for countless nights: the apartment of Manfred Berres, a construction worker and part-time bartender, twenty-four years old. He said Franz was an old friend who needed a place to stay. He didn’t know anything about his political activity. They simply drank together and played cards. Manfred had lurked on the edges of the crowd during the funeral, fists stuffed into his pockets. Staring at the fresh brown soil thrown over the coffin, he wouldn’t meet anyone’s gaze. He didn’t stay for the whole service but walked off into the bright harsh day, his eyes trained on his paint-splashed boots, his shoulders hunched. He reminded Lev of an old man who had lost some vital part of himself as he shuffled off into the trees, zigzagging aimlessly between them.

Franz could be here, in this café, Lev thought bitterly, motioning for the waiter. The young Argentine came over, bowing slightly. He was handsome, with gleaming dark hair slicked back with gel. His eyes were smiling and he asked Lev if he wanted more coffee. Franz was about the age of this young man when he died. He would be forty-five now. Lev couldn’t stop himself from calculating his son’s imaginary age, comparing him to other young men he spotted in cafés, on the street.
Does he really resemble Franz?
he would wonder while buying tomatoes at the open-air market.
He has his cheekbones, but his eyes are different
. And then he would walk away, tomatoes in hand.

After Franz’s death, Lev delayed his departure for New York. A few months turned into a year. Suddenly, it was 1934 and people were leaving. People were jumping out of windows. People were discussing the merits of Shanghai, the only city in the world that didn’t require an entry visa. People were selling off armoires, silverware, Meissen china. People were asking far-flung relatives to write letters of recommendation
so they could move to England, America, or South Africa, where they could work as domestic servants when they had only ever employed domestic servants. Lev tried to get a visa for the United States, but for that year and the following one, the quota was already filled. Lev told Josephine she should leave Berlin too because war was coming. “You’ve always enjoyed Paris, and you have cousins there,” he suggested. But she refused to leave the city where her son’s body lay. She refused to leave her last surviving aunt. She refused to leave her girlhood memories of the Kaiser and the Empress, even though the red-and-white banners, with swastikas fluttering in the wind, blotted out any semblance of another kind of past. And she refused to leave Dr. Dürhkoop, who had turned out to be a much more devoted and enduring lover than either Lev or Josephine had anticipated. He wanted to marry Josephine. And he did not care for children, so the fact that she was over forty was a great relief to him. One of Lev’s most vivid memories—he could not count the number of times he replayed it—was when they came to see him, the good doctor and his wife. In making their love public, they acted as giddy as children. They asked him to consider a divorce. Their tone was both pleading and decisive. Josephine sat across from him with a strange ecstatic light in her eyes, a light he had not seen in so many years that his chest caved, and he threw up his hands and said, “Mazel tov!” All three of them burst into laughter, relieved, elated, slightly embarrassed. And then the doctor said with a tinge of formality, “It’s for the best, with the new race laws.”

“New race laws?” Lev repeated. He had heard about these new laws, but there were so many proclamations flooding the paper and the radio, he paid little attention to the news back then. The doctor straightened his back and shifted in his chair, and explained how the Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor prohibited marriages as well as intercourse between Jews and Germans, and so by releasing Josephine from their marriage, Lev was complying with the law. They were asking him out of politeness. And then Josephine added that the law also forbade the employment of German females under forty-five in Jewish households. “So Marthe’s coming with us.”

“Marthe’s over fifty, at least!”

Josephine sniffed and said something about how Marthe most likely would prefer it.

“I see,” Lev had said, although he did not see. He felt as if he was newly blind, especially after losing Marthe, which stung sharply. She had always been on his side. Next, Josephine would demand the monarch butterfly paperweight or the ivory hare with the amber eyes he so lovingly would hold in the palm of his hand.

A year later, after failing to procure a visa for the United States, Lev was lucky just to get out of the country, let alone choose where he wanted to go. Quotas to immigrate to England or America were filled, which was explained in a labyrinth of bureaucratic jargon from the American and English embassies and consulates, where queues wrapped and curled around blocks. It was risky to queue for too long. The SS randomly plucked people from the line and bundled them into police trucks; they ended up in a detention camp, a work camp, or some other unidentified place.

He could go to Palestine, but judging from Vicki’s letters, it was a rough and hard country, no place for old men. The other choices were Australia or Argentina. He had heard that criminals shipped from England had founded Australia, and he pictured their troublemaking descendants hungrily roaming the outback. So he picked Argentina. Overnight, punitive taxes for leaving the country were magically invented. Lev had to declare all properties, savings, pensions, and valuables before he was granted, by the Office of the Security Service for Jewish Emigration, a stamp in his passport that read
Einmalige Ausreise nach CSR:
good for a single journey.

He arrived at the port of Mar del Plata, Buenos Aires, in December 1935. The air was warm and balmy. First thing, he took off his jacket and unbuttoned the first two buttons of his oxford shirt. Summer in December, he thought, surveying the long stretch of white, hot sand. A few people ran into the water and then sallied back out again, taunting the lapping shoreline.

Lev stirs his coffee with a little spoon, which emits a tingling sound as the metal hits the porcelain. Later he had learned, in a somewhat desperate letter from Josephine, that the doctor had left her. Apparently, because she had been married to a Jew the doctor felt this tainted him professionally. He had also stopped receiving dinner invitations from certain social circles because they now found him to be an unsuitable guest at their table. Lev couldn’t help the small cruel smile that played on his lips when he read her tiny scrawl, the franticness of having been left pulsating through the intricate cursive. Of course she didn’t dare ask outright if she could join him in Argentina, but there was a searching, hopeful quality to the letter that suggested she would come if he asked her to. He wrote back:
I’m so sorry to hear of your troubles. I wish you well in these turbulent times. Fondly, Lev
. Maybe, when the bombs started falling, Josephine had escaped to a friend’s bunker in Grunewald forest. Maybe she was trapped under a pile of rubble in the middle of Berlin. Maybe the Russians rolled over her body with their tanks. Maybe she took a holiday to Switzerland or Sweden and never came back. He didn’t know. He only knew Josephine’s polite and somewhat apologetic letters stopped arriving by the spring of 1943. After that, there was no trace of her, as if she had never been his wife. He takes a sip. The milk has made the black coffee cloudy and beige.

The door of the café jangles and in walks a girl who reminds him of Vicki, when Vicki was young. The short, dark hair revealing delicate white earlobes. The curious, quick eyes. The easy grace with which she surveys the pastries behind the glass and gestures to the swirled Danish. She takes it and pays in one smooth sinuous movement. They live in Tel Aviv now, having only survived the kibbutz one year. After the birth of their child, a sickly boy named Theodore, they felt different about their national obligations. Lev knew this would happen, but of course he had to sit back and watch it, witnessing through her turbulent letters all the strife and worry they put themselves through when he could have simply told them kibbutz life was unsustainable, except for the most ardent. Reluctantly at first, Geza became a shop owner. Now they have five shops scattered throughout Tel Aviv that sell household goods, and they are quite profitable. Who knew dishcloths and peppermills
and sieves would be so popular? Vicki teaches French at a high school. She is a good teacher; engaging, encouraging, the students love her. Lev remembers with a half smile how much she hated French. He tells anyone who will listen about Vicki, his daughter the French teacher who lives in Tel Aviv. Theodore has grown strong and healthy, and they say he looks like Lev, the same mistrustful eyes, the same olive skin and wavy chestnut hair. In the fall, he will start at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He wants to be an archaeologist. Good, Lev murmurs, good.

Filled up with coffee and bread, he leaves a few coins on the table and ambles out into the street. The strong sun hits his face; another bright day, the same enduring blue. Rain will not come until April. Until then, the days will be bone dry, his sitting room filled with sunlight, the windowpanes dusty. He lives in Palermo Viejo, in one of those old ornate family homes, which has been subdivided into apartments. The neighborhood is full of small quiet streets opening into shaded courtyards, cobblestones strewn with the lavender petals of jacaranda trees. Irrepressible bougainvillea sprouts over whitewashed walls. When he looks up, he sees balconies lined with caryatids, private terraces housing potted plants amid chaise lounges for taking a coffee in the sun. He passes front doors made of oak set behind impressive ironwork, doors to protect marble entrance halls and salons with painted ceilings, even if the paint is peeling. There is no tango on the street corners, as all the tourists expect. But there is a horse-drawn cart operated by an old man selling soda water. The cart rattles by Lev’s window every morning to deliver wooden crates stacked with green siphons. Up ahead, Lev spots the knife sharpener, dragging along his whetstone on an odd wheeled contraption. He blows his harmonica to announce his passing. The chemist is opening his doors, and the scent of eucalyptus wafts into the street.

Lev pauses at the corner, the eucalyptus tingling his nostrils, and debates whether to turn or keep walking. The thought of his apartment, his narrow bed, a late morning nap, followed by a cool shower is appealing, but so is his favorite stationery store, which sells the most expensive and beautiful pens, heavy paper, and leather-bound notebooks that he likes to buy and leave empty. Once, for a lady friend, he purchased one
of these notebooks, crimson leather with a little strap that kept it closed. She complained that if he wanted to buy her a book, why did he buy her an empty one? It is a reason, among many others, that this lady friend is no longer a friend. But women, at his age, are a hassle. It takes too much energy, and he has too many memories, to charm a woman into thinking he is the sort of man who enjoys polo and picnicking, who will buy her baubles and insist she looks beautiful in a newly acquired pair of earrings, when she does not.

He chooses to go home, taking Avenida de Mayo, where in sidewalk cafés Spanish anarchists debate politics. But it’s still early and the chairs stand empty. Waiters are setting tables, opening up umbrellas, and washing the sidewalks with mops and buckets. Lev carefully steps over the soapy rivulets. A man in a white suit is already sipping a glass of sherry.
He starts early
, Lev thinks.
The moment he wakes, the memories must begin again, like a vengeful lover returning each day with more bad news
. Lev doesn’t drink until dusk. If he allowed himself to start earlier, he fears it would be as early as this man, maybe earlier. The man senses Lev looking at him. Lev tips his hat and keeps walking. He probably wants company, someone to talk to over a bowl of salted marconas. There’s too much to say, so it’s better to say nothing. Lev’s story, how he got here, where he came from, tires him. He can’t stand to recite it another time, to another stranger.

Turning the corner, he catches sight of himself in the window of a leather-goods shop for wealthy gauchos. Riding boots and polo belts are on display. An expensive saddle is featured on a wooden horse. A man once tried to sell him an estancia down south, in Las Pampas.
This is the land of Jewish cowboys
, he kept saying, grinning widely, his mouth full of fillings. What would Josephine say, to find him atop a steed, arrayed in the Western style?
A Jew on a horse?
That’s what she would say.