“It’s called jazz, thank you very much.” Vicki dissected her fish quickly, separating out the tiny white bones from the flesh. She did everything quickly, hardly ever still, unless Franz found her splayed on the couch after one of her dances in the early evening, her shoes kicked off, her feet up on the armrest, her toes curling and uncurling, encased in silk stockings. Then she would speak low and soft, staring dreamily into the brocaded wallpaper as if a pattern existed there that only she could see.
“It’s Negro music,” Franz said, taking a sip of water. “Primitive and frenetic.” His hands felt dirty even though he had cleaned them thoroughly in the bathroom. That woman stuck on his skin—he wouldn’t feel clean until standing under the shower for at least ten minutes, the water scalding hot. Afterward, he would use a nailbrush, dislodging any debris from her that might have gotten stuck. Her thick neck, the cigarette smell—he revisited this as he reached for the butter encased in a rectangle of porcelain.
Josephine anticipated this and handed him the butter dish. “Here.” Her fingertips felt cool and soft.
“Thank you, Mutti.” The mind is a terrible master but a wonderful servant—was that it? Franz wondered. Or had Wolf said, The mind is a terrible servant but a wonderful master?
Franz had taken the tram three extra stops just to recover from the nausea washing over him. He dragged himself home, inhaling the cool air, holding it in his lungs, releasing his breath slowly, trying to exorcize himself of the grimy apartment, the boy’s sly smile, the way she’d tapped the long column of ash into the ashtray.
“You can’t possibly reduce Erno Rapee down to that. He’s a brilliant jazz symphonist. If you’d turn on the radio right now, you’d hear for yourself.” Vicki banged her glass on the table. A little water spilled, discoloring the linen tablecloth.
“Vicki, please,” Josephine said without looking up from her plate.
“Well, it’s not primitive! Jazz is not created by merely playing a syncopated two/two bar. It is full of complex rhythm, harmonic precision, auditory and modulatory richness.”
“You’re only repeating what Herr Laban says.”
Vicki rolled her eyes at Franz.
He stared at her and then said the barrette in her hair looked cheap.
Vicki touched it. “It’s not.”
Marthe cleared the soup bowls. She hesitated, glancing over Franz’s shoulder. “You’re not hungry?”
He held up his bowl. “Too much lunch.” His stomach clenched and unclenched. All he could get down was water, possibly some clear broth, but the pea soup, heavy with cream, stuck in his throat.
“He should come home for lunch, like a civilized person. Otherwise, the digestion suffers,” Josephine said, shaking her head.
Vicki threw down her napkin. “Can we please turn on the radio?”
Lev smiled at his daughter. “I agree with your mother. Jazz and its accompanying dances have lost that nostalgic sweeping grace from before the war. These new dances are hollow, mechanical, too fast and feverish …” He paused, searching for the right words. “And yet there’s something liberating and free there too.” He sat back in his chair, glancing at Josephine. “We used to waltz.”
“It was a beautiful time,” she said, fingering the long string of coral beads draped around her neck.
Lev stared into the flickering candlelight.
Vicki pushed back her chair. “There’s no life in a waltz!”
Franz grumbled, “The Charleston, the shimmy. You all look like dancing monkeys high on caffeine.”
Vicki laughed. “Excuse me, he who doesn’t take alcohol or coffee or cigarettes. You should—just once—come out, listen to the bands. But instead, you insist on spending all your time in your room, doing whatever you do. Or hanging around Wolf.”
“So?” Franz snapped.
She shrugged. “He’s a bit …”
Lev stood up. “Vicki, I’ll show you how to waltz. It’s tranquil—you have time to gaze into your partner’s eyes.”
Josephine threw up her hands. “We haven’t even finished with the second course.”
Lev motioned to Marthe. She turned on the radio, the dial skimming through news programs, the daily weather, horse races, until a Strauss waltz filtered into the dining room.
Josephine sighed, pushing away her plate.
Lev walked over to Vicki, taking her hand. “Put your arm here,” he instructed. “Tilt your head to the side, your gaze skimming just above my shoulder, as if you’re looking out into a grand vista.”
“A grand vista,” Vicki repeated sarcastically. “I see yellow walls. Butter yellow. Not very inspiring.”
They started waltzing around the table, Vicki trying to lead and Lev steering the small of her back. “Settle into the music.”
Vicki shook her head, erupting into laughter. “I can’t. It’s just too boring.”
“If you aren’t cycling, jumping rope, and having a love affair all at once it’s boring, isn’t it?”
Vicki shrugged.
Marthe popped her head into the dining room. “Shall I bring out coffee with the cake?”
“You barely ate,” Josephine whispered across the table.
“I’m really fine,” Franz said.
“Are we dancing or not dancing?” Lev asked.
“Dancing, dancing!” Vicki protested, and then she settled down, laying her cheek on Lev’s shoulder. He counted the time under his breath.
Josephine stood up in one long fluid motion.
Franz smiled weakly at his mother. She was coming over to inspect him again. “Darling,” she said, stroking his hair. “What’s troubling you?”
“Nothing,” he muttered, staring down at the navy trim scalloping the edge of the white plate.
Lev and Vicki finally stopped swirling around the table and sat down again.
She caressed his neck. “Are you upset over a girl?”
A girl. He’d been with two girls and each time he’d felt nothing of the hot rush other men described. Nothing but the mechanical motion of two bodies mashing up against each other, followed by the revolting closeness women thought you owed them afterward, the way they twirled their hair and stared at their nails and flung a stray leg over his. Both times, he’d left in a hurry, wishing he’d never done it, furious at his own inability to feel what others boasted of in graphic detail.
“A girl?” Vicki echoed. “Franz doesn’t even notice girls.”
He frowned, still staring down at his plate.
Lev grinned. “He’s very serious, wrapped up in his studies, and all the clubs. Cycling club. Fencing club. Reading club. Walking club. There’s a club for everything, as if it isn’t allowed to just go to the cinema or have a drink on one’s own anymore.”
“I heard there’s a club for people who’re third children,” Vicki said, stabbing a limp green bean with her fork.
His head pounded, the yellow walls claustrophobic whenever he looked up from his plate. The smell of the offensive pea soup still lingered, even though Marthe had cleared it. He stood up and said he had to excuse himself. When he left the room, he felt his mother’s eyes trailing his back with that pleading questioning look she reserved for him. It was intolerable, how she doted on him, but at the same time, when his head fell into her soft lap, and he let the sound of her voice wash over him as she told him bits and pieces of irreverent gossip, his body loosened, his jaw went slack, and the weight of his thoughts floated upward, toward the rise and fall of her breath.
He climbed the stairs, overhearing Lev tease Vicki about her figure. “So thin and athletic. You don’t have enough meat on you to waltz!”
They were always speaking so loudly, he thought. Almost yelling. While his mother was soft and quiet, the way a woman should be. His father only encouraged Vicki’s tendency to carry on with artists, smoking and drinking and dancing all night. And now she’d gone and cut off all her hair.
“So you have to be fat as well as boring to waltz?” Her voice rang out, followed b
y a peal of laughter.
Franz paused on the second to last stair, trying not to make a sound. If he waited here for a few more minutes, would they say something about him, about why he never had a girl? He clenched the banister, listening to the swish of the kitchen door, which carried the scent of marzipan and berries. His mouth salivated for the cake Marthe placed on the table. The dog Mitzi roamed down the hall and, spotting Franz, picked up her pace.
Franz knelt on the stairs, motioning for Mitzi to come to him.
“The fashion will inevitably change to a more Rubenesque figure. I heard in America they already have pills you can take, to fatten you up overnight,” Lev said.
“I’m never taking those pills!” Again, such a loud voice, so piercing. He squeezed his eyes shut in aggravation. “No, no—just a little piece please,” Vicki said. Now they’re eating cake, he thought, running his fingers through Mitzi’s coarse black fur.
Then his mother’s voice, muffled and low in comparison. “I want to check on him. He might be ill.”
“If I were dying, literally dying on my deathbed, you wouldn’t even notice,” Vicki retorted. Franz imagined her spearing her fork into a piece of cake to give her comment the full effect.
Sitting at the top of the stairs, Franz heard the start of that incessant clipping coming from next door, right below his bedroom window. The wind through the trees softened the sound, but he heard it whenever the wind died down. Feeling the heat rise in his chest, he stormed into his room and pushed the curtains back, and yes, as he expected, he saw Herr Lenevski, in the dying light, trimming the hedge that separated their two houses. A White Russian who wore a monocle and butchered the German language. Franz glared down at the bald spot blooming in the center of his head. He balanced on a ladder, his spectacles sitting low on the ridge of his nose as he snipped away, obsessed with the height of the hedge, that it was too high and blocked the necessary sunlight for his roses. He thought about opening the window and yelling at him to stop. But then Herr Lenevski would swear back at him in Russian and Mitzi would start barking and then his mother and sister would run up into his room. He flopped down on his bed. Clip, clip. He resisted the magazines stashed underneath the bed in a shoebox because his mother might appear any moment now. If she saw these magazines, and what he did while he read them, she would be appalled. He let his hand slide down to the floor. He fingered the bed skirt, knowing the magazines lay on the other side of it. His two favorites: Eros: Magazine for Friendship and Freedom, Love and Life-Art, with lifelike illustrations of soldiers marching in time and then fornicating on the other side of the page. And Ernst, the more love-oriented magazine, with poetry in the style of Rilke and short stories accompanied by romantic drawings of men during the period of ancient Greece. They fed one another fruit, stroked one another’s shoulder-length hair, and embraced next to fountains, water spouting forth. He tried not looking at the magazines too often, but when he was alone in his room, especially in the afternoons, when he came home from class and the house was quiet, he surrendered to the images, gorging on them. Afterward, he guiltily cleaned up the mess, not wanting Marthe or anyone else to find traces of his illicit activities. He always promised himself he would not look at the magazines again, but of course, within a few days, he always succumbed.
Clip, clip, clip. How much was he lopping off? Franz leapt over to the window, again pushing back the curtains. Mitzi picked up her head but didn’t move from the foot of the bed. The Russian had vanished, his ladder abandoned against the brick wall.
Defeated, he slumped into his desk chair, and switched on the lamp. He fingered the open pages of the novel he’d started, Hans Grimm’s Volk ohne Raum (A People Without Space), a long rant about the lack of living space in Germany. He sighed, closed the thick book, and stared at the snapshot of himself and Wolf taken last summer in one of the new photo booths where pictures develop within minutes. They’d waited in the photo booth, pressed together, their breath intermingling, wondering when the images would spit out of the little slot. Wolf sat on his lap because of the one stool, and Franz inhaled the particular scent of shaving lotion Wolf used, a lemony balsam. Wolf didn’t notice the swell in Franz’s pants, and if he did notice, he didn’t recoil. He acted as if it wasn’t happening, which Franz took as a hopeful sign. Wolf grinned while Franz assumed a dignified expression, as if posing for a family portrait. Wolf teased him about it afterward, how serious he’d been about the snapshots, how he’d wanted them to look a certain way. Walking away from the photo booth, Franz quickly draped his blazer over his arm and held it stiffly out in front of him, as a kind of curtain. Wolf shot him a sidelong glace and then tossed his copy of the photograph into a nearby trash bin.
Franz spent the rest of the afternoon despairing over whether Wolf had noticed or not, and if he did notice, was he utterly repelled? Which would justify how casually, almost cruelly, Wolf had thrown away their photograph. As punishment. And to explain, without having to explain, that he didn’t care for Franz, at least not in that way. Afterward, when he’d sat next to Wolf at the bar, their knees knocking from time to time, Wolf appeared wholly unbothered, playing cards and describing a recent fox hunt at his grandfather’s estate—how his horse had suffered a stress fracture in the splint bone and they almost had to call off the hunt. Franz tried to listen, arranging his face into an amused smile, but at one point he had to excuse himself for the lavatory, where he sat down in the stall, his face in his hands, breathing deeply, trying to ignore the stench of urine, the sticky floors, the sound of doors banging open and shut, trying to hold back his tears, the pressure building behind his eyes.
Franz sauntered over to the framed photograph of Wolf from that day, his own face nearly obscured. He had placed it on a low table next to his bed, which displayed other important items: a Hakenkreuz pin that he fixed to the knot of his tie, the black, white, and red banner of Imperial Germany draped over the table, serving as a makeshift tablecloth, and his DNVP membership card. He was now a young member of the German National People’s Party. His father didn’t know. At meetings, they spoke of restoring Germany to her former glory, that a moral and national rebirth was necessary to reestablish Germany’s long-lost connection to the ancient Greeks—that the true German volk would only emerge when the foreigners, the Jews and the Slavs, had been expunged. And above this altar, as he called it, he’d hung two oil portraits to be enjoyed simultaneously: Frederick the Great on horseback and Bismarck, his domineering profile illuminated by a bloodred background.
He heard his mother’s light footsteps ascend the staircase and down below the radio turned up, jazz blasting.
“Vicki—please! Lower the dial,” Josephine called from the stairs.
Franz ran his finger along the edge of the gilt frame, as if he could touch Wolf von Trotta’s perfect cheekbones.
17
Berlin, Friday, June 10, 1927
In March, Geza arrived in Berlin. The changeable sky confounded him, compared to the constancy of his Russian sky. Here, clouds shifted unpredictably. Rain started and stopped, and the sun emerged, blindingly bright, without warning. Never knowing if the day would grow cold or hot, he often perspired too much or shivered in a thin shirt, ill prepared. In his view, the unreliable weather explained the irritable and frenetic nature of Berliners. They pushed and shoved on the tram. A simple exchange, for instance the buying of a sausage roll, was rushed, the vendor clearly impatient with how slowly Geza conducted himself. So he trained himself to speed up, moving his hands swiftly even for simple tasks—unlocking the door, buying bread, spooning his soup, taking off his hat. He carried out these mundane actions with alacrity, with an uncharacteristic crispness. And he started walking at a clipped pace down the street to keep up with the mass of moving bodies walking even faster alongside him. Avoiding eye contact was another behavior he copied, observing how people looked down at the pavement or just past his shoulder, as if acknowledging a fellow pedestrian indicated a softness, a weakness, or that you wanted s
omething.
If Geza had stayed in Mitau, he would have joined the Red Army, as his friends had done. His mother and his stepfather, Zlotnik, also urged him to join, because if he enlisted, the family would receive food rations and assistance with farm work. He refused. He did not believe in the workers’ movement, suspicious when they proclaimed that Jews were equal to Russians, using Trotsky, head of the Red Army, as a prime example of this new Russian Jew. Despite his mother’s protestations, he had left Mitau two years ago and worked in Warsaw as an apprentice bricklayer, saving up enough money to come to Berlin. Eventually, he hoped to move to Palestine. When he got to Berlin, he first found work as a nightclub errand boy, but he should have known such a job would expose him to illegal activities, and after a near run-in with the law, he quit.
Now Geza worked as a bricklayer again, through the recommendation of his boss in Warsaw. It was fine work. He always had Fridays off, which he liked to spend in the Prussian State Library, in the cool confines of those rooms, leafing through newspapers or just staring into space. His life felt simple: he started work at seven and he finished at eight. The boardinghouse provided him with a cot, a blanket, and every Friday clean sheets that smelled of starch. Sure, he had to share a room with a family of four, and sometimes the joints in his hands hurt after work, but he didn’t mind. He wore the same white apron and black pants, his uniform for bricklaying. He grew to like his fellow workers, a rowdy crew from Odessa who spent all their wages on vodka and then complained that they never earned enough to keep a girl. Geza smiled at them, bemused by their theatrics, while he quietly saved and saved.
The Empire of the Senses Page 24