The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  Lev stood a few meters from the dressing station, behind a wall of sandbags. He could hear his own breath beating in his ears, the only real sound. His arms dangled at his sides, waiting. A few meters away, other men were shooting over the tops of the trenches. The taller men always got shot through the jaw, the shorter ones through the eyes. Along the ridge of the trench, a soldier sprinted a meter and a bullet blew out all his teeth, a spray of blood bursting from his mouth. Three men methodically negotiated an MG 08 machine gun—one looked through the sight, another held the lengthy row of bullets, and a third directed them, binoculars pressed into his face. The air sounded as if it was being torn apart by the firing of one of the big guns, by the whistling and howling of the rifle bullets, which squealed like butchered pigs. Yellow and green clouds wafted by from sulfur grenades. Lev breathed in and out. This was all he could do, and yet his limbs were jacked up with adrenaline, his heart pumping as if he were expecting to run a great distance.

  The moments passed. He waited for wounded men. He had been instructed to run out, and if possible hoist them onto a stretcher, and if not, drag them to the advanced dressing station, a tented structure about three hundred meters from the front line. Shells burst overhead. He clung to the sandbags, frantic, but at the same time, overly aware of the most insignificant details: the shape of the shrapnel shell bursting in the sky resembled an old boot, and the gas sentry, ringing various warning bells and rattles, sounded like one of Vicki’s broken toys, a sinister lullaby. Suddenly, the shooting subsided, for how long he didn’t know, and a soldier limped toward him, a cigarette dangling from his mouth. He stumbled to the side, trying to say something. Lev pulled him behind the sandbags. The man pointed to where it hurt—his knee was blown out.

  His eyes shut with refusal when Lev motioned toward the tent.

  Lev yelled, “I have to get you in there. See the wound—” Another big gun went off followed by a rain of bullets. The man clung to Lev. Soldiers ran from all directions. Lev held the man, awkwardly rocking him, trying to remember how he used to hold his son. He coiled his arm around the man, attempting to transmit security and confidence when all he felt was plain raw fear. He was shaking and this shaking made the man also shake. They waited and trembled together, the three or four minutes interminable. Lev tried not to think about whether or not this man’s leg would have to be amputated or if they could insert a metal disk in place of the knee, and whether or not the soft wall of sandbags they leaned against would blow up, eradicating them in an instant. How much heat could the skin take before singeing? Would he think of anything else beyond the rapid destruction of his body, the charring of his hands, the flames crawling up the sides of his legs, the way his boots would appear like two balls of fire beneath him? The man moaned softly, burying his face deeper in the folds of Lev’s field-gray coat. Lev wondered if he was being punished for forsaking God when he had spent so many evenings inside Berlin’s fashionable cafés disputing His very existence over coffee and kaiser rolls, proclaiming that any rational man would not sacrifice his son out of blind faith, that the world no longer ran on superstition and myth, and those who needed the illusion of order, refusing the true chaos of living, lived in fear. Everyone had raised their glasses, their glowing faces framed by starched white collars, reveling in a feeling of shared intellectual superiority, nodding when Lev called out, “We only know what God isn’t, not what He is. Despite all the decoration of churches and priests and marble statuaries, we are merely devoted to the absence of an idea.”

  Shells exploded, filling the air with thick gray smoke, and involuntarily Lev’s lips began moving, the rise and fall of his father’s tongue a salve, a talisman. Yit’gadal v’yit’kadash sh’mei rab, b’al’ma di v’ra khir’utei.

  Later, when the firing ceased, Lev smoked a cigarette inside the dressing station, watching the man sleep, his leg elevated on a wool blanket. Rows and rows of half-dead men filled the tent. Lev walked toward the opening, and pulled back the heavy canvas. The air smelled of blood and ashes. The severe sky indicated the onset of evening as daylight drained away. Makeshift graves, pitiful wooden crosses, had been erected since this morning, and now the division pastor conducted a funeral service only a few meters away from the dressing station. Lev watched from the tent opening. He could no longer mock the pastor and those solemn soldiers praying. The howling of the cannons rose again. The pastor tried to appear calm, but never before had Our Father been recited so quickly. The words went like water through Lev’s ears. The men were fidgety, restless, on alert for the crash of a grenade, the whiz of rifle fire. Many of them looked as if they were ready to bolt, their jaws tight, fists clenched. The pastor was sweating. The two dark crimson strips decorating the front of his white robe fluttered in the wind. He tossed a bit of dirt over the shallow graves, barely covering the naked faces, his thin voice rushing, “Being raised in the glory of the resurrection, he may be refreshed among the Saints and Elect. Through Christ our Lord …” A shrill sound, and everyone threw themselves to the ground. A shell exploded fifty meters away. The pastor burrowed his face in the dirt. Lev crouched at the entrance of the tent. He studied the intricate layers of mud splashed over his boot.

  After some minutes, the soldiers started getting up, glancing around sheepishly because no one was hurt.

  But Lev could still hear the sound of bullets buzzing through his ears, as if a chorus of bees encircled him.

  5

  Berlin, 1915

  In the early morning, when the pale violet light filtered into his bedroom, Franz whispered his prayers. He pressed his forehead against the icy glass windowpane, his lips moving silently. He had requested that Marthe not lower the wooden blinds before bedtime because he wanted a view of the night sky. Possibly, a very small possibility he knew, he would see the Red Baron flying his bright plane across the blanket of night, saving them from the English, saving his father who’d been gone over a year now, and saving his mother, and his sister too. Even though they were safe at home, his mother cried yesterday when the old man who delivered the mail did not have the little brown postcard. She received one every week, and when the little brown postcard was delayed or lost in the mail, she yelled at Franz for dropping his soup spoon or for playing with the brass button on his sailor suit or for losing his mitten in the snow. When they went outside yesterday afternoon to look for the mitten, their eyes scanning the inner courtyard of the house where he’d played with Wolf, a sheen of dazzling white covered the gray stone as if a winter sandstorm had transformed their familiar surroundings into an unrecognizable landscape of blankness. It was clear the mitten was absent from the iron garden chairs arranged in a desolate circle, absent from the lonely oak in the center of the courtyard, a withered version of its former self, and absent from the benevolent statue of St. Peter now shrouded in powdery snow. Josephine drew her black shawl tighter and tighter around her shoulders, turning round and round, as if a full circular view of the courtyard would somehow reveal the missing mitten. Her smooth motion reminded Franz of the ballerina inside Vicki’s jewel box, the dainty figurine rotating to a melodic nursery rhyme until the lid closed. By the time Josephine faced Franz, her eyes were swollen and streaming tears, and Franz wondered if the tears would freeze on her cheeks, like the long pointed icicles that they broke off and sucked. He wanted to take her inside before the tears could freeze. He had a terror that if she did not warm herself by the fire, the rivers on her face would become permanent icicles affixed there, as sharp and pointed as fangs.

  It had begun to snow early this morning, the crystalline flakes sticking to his bedroom window. The snowflakes told a story about the Eastern Front, where his father was fighting, and about the Red Baron, who was flying his red plane to get there, to greet his father, to present him with an award for courage, to ask if he had a son. “Yes, I have a son,” his father would say, and he would show him the photograph of Franz in front of the Christmas tree, wearing his Sunday clothes, the white shirt with the wide lace coll
ar. The baron would hold the photograph up to the sky, and he would pronounce in a clear ringing voice, “He will become a great German soldier and fly planes.”

  Franz stood by the window in his flannel nightgown, his bare feet on the wooden floor, knowing Mother would fly into hysterics if she saw him without slippers. She would say he was trying to catch his death after only having just recovered from the grippe. But it was still early; she would not open the door yet. School remained distant until she opened the door and the process of washing and dressing and eating began, all in preparation for the brisk walk there. In class, Herr Bedderhoff might call on Franz to recite the “Cavalier’s Song” from Wallenstein. Franz turned away from the window and concentrated on the oil painting of Mitzi, the family dog, a black schnauzer. His father had captured the dog’s true essence: the prominent bushy eyebrows nearly covered his curious eager eyes, and his salt-and-pepper beard was perpetually coated in saliva, as pictured here. Franz always stared at this painting when he could not remember the words exactly. In a harsh whisper, he sang, “To horse then, comrades, to horse and away! And into the field where freedom awaits us, in the field of battle man still has his worth. And the heart is still weighed in the balance.” The last line always troubled him. Franz paced his bedroom, treading lightly, not wanting to wake Vicki in the next room, who would surely ruin this sacred ritual by barging in and wanting to play. When he refused, she would cry, and then Mother would hurry in, and these magical morning hours would be lost.

  Franz plopped down on the floor next to his bed and hugged his pillow into his chest. What of that line about the heart in the balance? Yesterday, after Herr Bedderhoff had made them recite the song three times, and then a fourth for good measure, Wolf’s arm shot up defiantly. Herr Bedderhoff appeared surprised when Wolf asked what the last line meant. Bedderhoff’s neck turned pink, which had only occurred one other time, when his front trouser buttons were undone. After Wolf asked the question in his piercing high voice, Herr Bedderhoff arranged his face into a contemplative gaze and answered that we all must keep up our spirits and dismiss horrid rumors only used to dismantle German pride.

  “Is that how we must keep our heart in the balance?” Wolf had persisted.

  Herr Bedderhoff said of course that’s what it meant, and then ordered the boys to take out their colored pencils and a piece of paper.

  But Franz believed Bedderhoff did not really know the meaning of that last line because his voice had cracked slightly, and his neck had remained red and white for a long time afterward. But his father would know, because his father read many old and important books. Through the glass doors of the bookcase, Franz would catch his reflection in their spines. After dinner, his father always read in the sitting room by the fire, but he did not like the children to disturb him unless they were willing to listen. Only then would he read aloud, reciting the story about Hamlet’s dead father, who became a ghost, or how Viola loved a prince so much she dressed as a boy to win his heart. That particular story was Franz’s favorite. Mother would sit nearby, embroidering, and occasionally his parents would comment on a piece of family gossip or a news item from the paper. Franz thought that it must be very dull to be an adult, and to be married. In the winter evenings, his mother and father grew tired and quiet and they sat as still as statues, listening to a radio program. They did not laugh unless they were entertaining company, and then they laughed too much, as he could always hear the hearty relentless laughter of his father and the breathless protestations of his mother; their intermingled gaiety funneled down the narrow hallway as he tipped into sleep.

  But their voices had been replaced by a deafening quiet since his father left. There were no more lavish dinner parties, and Mother dismissed Marthe early. Mother said of course everything happened earlier because it grew dark at 4:30. In November the clocks were set back, and what did Franz expect? That they not change the clocks just so he could stay up as late as he fancied? “In that case,” she had joked, “you’ll have to write the Kaiser, expressing your complaints and what you propose as an alternative.” But it was not falling back an hour that bothered Franz. The new ghostly silence permeating the halls was crisp and singular, as if they were waiting with held breath for the renewal of salt rations, for the news of English soldiers slain by the thousands, for the recovery of the red mitten, for the brown postcard to arrive in the mail. Franz much preferred the shared silence of his parents when his father was home. Knowing they sat together in the sitting room by the light of the oil lamp, which shed an amber glow, and knowing that in about an hour he would listen for the sound of his mother’s heavy dress brushing the floor past his bedroom as she looked in on him and the cadence of his father’s walk as he passed by Vicki’s room and their conspiratorial whispers as they headed toward their sleeping quarters, arm in arm—well, now he only heard the isolated ticking of the grandfather clock and the skeletal rattling of the pipes attempting to push heat through the radiator grates and his mother’s weightless step as she gravitated toward sleep, hoping it would take her earlier and earlier each evening.

  Franz sat cross-legged on the floor, feeling sleepy. The scent of baked apples floated into his room underneath the door. Marthe had possibly opened the inner sanctum of the oven, to check on the shriveling golden skin, and if this was true, then there will be baked apples for breakfast, a rarity since the war. Under his bed, Franz had built a secret shrine to the Red Baron. Using an old shoebox as the foundational structure for his panorama, Franz placed the baron’s model red plane in the foreground, along with a photograph of the baron’s kind, brave face, a photograph he filched from his mother’s armoire. On the back of the photograph, someone had written in cursive: Victory is imminent. Franz did not know what imminent meant, but he assumed it had something to do with the Red Baron, a code name the English wouldn’t understand. When Franz slept on the floor, he turned the panorama to face him so that he could fall into sleep with the baron’s handsome face staring back at him. And he dreamed of shiny apple-red fighter planes bombing French villages, and of the baron dodging bullets, his plane dipping and swerving with the wind.

  The bedroom door opened. “Franz!” The thick hem of his mother’s dress approached. “What are you doing on the floor like this?”

  Franz gazed up, blinking. His mother’s face, framed by her wheat-colored curls, looked drawn and pale. Shadows fell under her eyes.

  She knelt down, touching his forehead.

  Over her shoulder, he saw Vicki in the hallway, sucking her thumb. Her teddy had been abandoned at her feet, dropped on its ear.

  “Why have you been sleeping on the cold floor?”

  Franz heard his own voice well up inside his throat, a choking needling sound. He might not get baked apple for breakfast. “I wanted to share their suffering.”

  Josephine searched his face. “Whose suffering?”

  “The soldiers defending the fatherland.” Franz fingered the edge of her organza skirt. Luckily, the panorama was hidden under the bed. He heard Marthe opening the oven in the kitchen. The smell of baked apples grew stronger. His nostrils flared out to catch more of the buttery golden scent.

  Franz could tell his mother was deciding whether or not to get cross with him. He continued, his palm gathering up more organza, “They all have to sleep on the hard cold ground in the middle of the forest. In tents. While I’m here, warm and cozy.” He paused. “It’s not fair.”

  “Mutti,” Vicki called from the hallway, in her black wool tights, her belly distended.

  Josephine turned around, her teardrop earrings spinning with her. “Vicki, wait a moment please.”

  She pulled Franz into her chest, stroking his fine golden hair. “No, it’s not fair. It’s not fair at all.”

  He soaked up her clean pine scent, which always reminded him of summer Sundays on the Wannsee, when Papa would take out a rowboat and they would eat mustard sandwiches in the tall high grass. They would find a quiet spot surrounded by firs, and Mutti would sing �
�Bei Mannern” from act one of The Magic Flute. The color bloomed in her cheeks when she sang.

  At breakfast, Marthe served the plump golden apples on a plate, with stewed raisins on top. She spooned an extra dollop of raisins onto Franz’s apple, saying that he needed to grow strong for when Father returned. “He’ll expect to see you much taller by then.”

  Franz stabbed his apple with his fork and smirked. “We need more nails for the nagelsaulen. Today’s collection day.”

  “Again?” Marthe asked.

  Josephine stood up and rummaged through one of the kitchen drawers. Every school boasted its own nagelsaulen, a wooden cross, studded with nails in commemoration of the war effort. Everyone was expected to hammer a nail into the structure every Friday to praise the soldiers.

  Josephine parceled out five nails for Franz and then five for Vicki.

  Studying the nails in the palm of her hand, Vicki said, “Will this save Papa?” Half of her apple remained on her plate, sunken in at the core.

  Josephine sipped her coffee. “Papa is safe and sound.”

  Vicki fingered the nails. “Someone said Papa and other soldiers could be locked up in England and never let go. That they would be slaves!” Vicki’s dark eyes widened, startled by her own words.

  Franz glared at her, stabbing the last piece of apple with his fork. “That’s stupid.”

  “Greta said her mother sent clothing and cigarettes and pictures of Germany because they’re captured.” Vicki stared at Josephine, who continued to sip her coffee, savoring the last drops of milk and sugar. They’d nearly run out of their sugar ration, and yet ten days still remained until the first of December.