The Empire of the Senses

by Alexis Landau

  Afternoons were dedicated to paramilitary training known as “terrain exercises,” as well as breaking up Social Democratic meetings and standing on street corners in the busier sections of town distributing pamphlets outlining the evils of Communism, as well as how to pick a Jew from the crowd. Some Jews, like his father, had become so integrated into society that they appeared German, but defining traits remained: exaggerated hand gestures, a high nasal voice, rising and falling speech patterns, short stature, weak musculature, and a deferential countenance, verging on obsequious, which one could easily mistake for politeness. “But remain alert to this,” Lutz had explained yesterday during lecture. His shoulders crept up, and he shortened his neck and curved his back and hobbled toward them. “The Jew is always slightly bent, eyes flashing this way and that for any possible threat to his person, whereas the German walks upright, limbs relaxed, face calm; he might even bump into you and appear rude because he is not ever vigilant, ever fearful of his surroundings.”

  Franz heard the front door slam. He pulled a pillow over his head, breathing in the musty smell. His eyes burned and he tried to sleep but he kept replaying bits and pieces from last night. He’d only been invited because of Wolf’s father, who was well acquainted with Pfeffer. It was a long drawn-out affair, beginning in the late afternoon with falcon hunting at an old estate north of Berlin. Ernst Udet, a flying ace from the Great War, was there, and Göring, and Rudolf Diels, chief of police. A handful of Reichswehr officers had been invited as well. They were slim, aristocratic, and overly polite and it was no wonder they longed for the return of the monarchy. Wolf had pointed out that they had chosen well in joining the SA as opposed to the Reichswehr, who were just dandies dressed up as policeman, protecting a dying government soon to be trampled.

  After the hunt, they’d gathered in a vast meeting hall with wood-beam ceilings and a tremendous stone fireplace. Along the walls, the eyes of fallen deer stared down at him. The whiskey was strong, and Franz drank too quickly in an attempt to ease his discomfort, which only made him more anxious. In the corner of the room, he became transfixed by a Dürer print, Knight, Death, and the Devil. Staring at the engraving, he used the momentary reprieve to regain his composure, cursing himself for coming up short when Pfeffer jokingly asked how many Communists they’d uncovered in the past week. Franz had stood there dumbly, staring into his drink, racking his brain for the right number, only to be rescued by Wolf, who replied, “Thousands! And all of them are dead.” Pfeffer had laughed, and then Wolf offered him a cigar. Pfeffer said, “Now, in all seriousness,” and he took Wolf by the shoulder and led him over to the fireplace, where they remained, deep in conversation, for more than an hour.

  Franz sulked in front of this frightful engraving, wondering why he never managed to say the right thing in the right moment. He stared at the minute ligaments in the horse’s neck, which was tense and upright, as the animal maneuvered a dark Nordic gorge. Atop the horse, the knight passed by Death holding an hourglass, and following closely behind pranced a pig-snouted Devil.

  He felt someone come up behind him.

  “In order that you may not be deterred from the path of virtue because it seems rough and dreary … and because you must constantly fight three unfair enemies—the flesh, the devil, and the world—this third rule shall be proposed to you: all of those spooks and phantoms which come upon you as if you were in the very gorges of Hades must be deemed for naught after the example of Virgil’s Aeneas … Look not behind thee.” It was Rudolf Diels, the chief of Berlin police.

  Franz tried not to stare at the massive scar in the shape of a V on his cheek or at the other scars below his lips, carving his chin into odd asymmetric shapes. Instead, his prominent dark eyebrows, the same jetblack color of his hair, offered a safe focal point.

  “That was very eloquent,” Franz said, holding out his hand.

  They shook hands, and Diels smiled politely. “It’s an address from Erasmus’s A Manual for a Christian Soldier, published in 1501. One of my most preferred passages.”

  Franz nodded, turning back to the engraving. He couldn’t bear Diels’s face—his dark eyes bored into him despite his gentlemanly demeanor. Underneath the scars, Diels was quite handsome. Such a shame his face had been ruined in the war.

  Diels gestured to the engraving. “The rider is undeterred, staying true to his mission. He is the ultimate embodiment of moral virtue.”

  “Yes,” Franz said, his voice catching in his throat. “I can see that.”

  Diels laughed sardonically. “Well, what do I know? I’m just a farmer’s son.”

  Franz nodded again, lost for words. Was he really a farmer’s son? Diels had studied law at the University of Marburg. And he appeared polished in his cutaway suit.

  The lights in the candelabras dimmed. Footmen circulated with aperitifs in filigreed glasses, signaling the start of cocktail hour. Diels toasted him, and their dainty glasses clinked together. Franz felt an overwhelming desire to escape Diels, but they stood isolated from the rest of the group, as if the engraving held a firm grip over them.

  “And what drew you to the SA? Is your father a military man?”

  Out of the corner of his eye, Franz noticed Wolf’s fiancée, Carin, stride into the room with her friend Greta in tow. The women had been invited for cocktails, followed by dinner. Carin, in a shimmery white dress, draped a languorous arm over Wolf’s shoulder. Distracted, Franz pulled his eyes away from her—from her large breasts Wolf so admired, and her bloodred mouth, and her slanted eyes exaggerated by eyeliner. She was half-Swedish but looked closer to Estonian or Lithuanian.

  Franz ran a hand through his hair. “I’m sorry—I didn’t catch the last thing you said.”

  “Your father, is he a military man?”

  “My father …”

  Diels smiled, the same polite insidious smile. “She’s beautiful. I would want to fuck her too.”

  Carin threw back her small shapely head, laughing. Wolf and Pfeffer laughed along with her. They were standing on a sprawling bear rug, and Carin pretended to be afraid of the bear. She wiggled her little stocking foot into its open jaws, emitting a squeal of delight.

  Franz felt his face flush with color. “That’s Wolf’s fiancée.”

  “Wolf von Trotta—yes, I know him. You registered together. Which leads us back to you, I’m afraid.”

  “I’m perfectly happy to answer any of your questions,” Franz said, his tongue heavy in his mouth, his head pounding. He hated when this happened, when he split into two people—the one observing himself fumble and the one fumbling.

  Diels took a pocketknife out of his jacket and balanced it between his thumb and forefinger. “What did you say about your father again?”

  “My father, Karl von Stressing, was chief of the Prussian general staff.” He had registered under his mother’s name, von Stressing, and for all intents and purposes, his mother’s brother, Karl, who had died in the Great War, was his father. He couldn’t possibly imagine uttering Lev Perlmutter as his father’s name—it sounded like a broken typewriter, muttering and sputtering without any clear delineation or active task at hand. It was a passive, inferior, easily overlooked name, which held no currency here—he refused it. The room grew louder and more boisterous. Greta, Carin’s friend, waved to him.

  Diels produced a cigar and cut a neat V-shaped notch into the tip. “You don’t want to cut too deep or you’ll ruin the whole cigar.” He paused. “What was it about the SA that attracted you?”

  Franz muttered something about blood and soil, and the connection between the people and the land, and how that connection must be preserved and not muddied by all the industry and speculation going on in the cities. He said the Poles and the Slavs were driving the German volk from their land, and as of late, they had restored some of it to the original farm owners. That should satisfy him, Franz thought, willing for dinner to be called.

  Diels puffed on his cigar. “I was the Prussian minister of the interior, so of cou
rse, your commitment to the land and its peoples is important.”

  He paused, examining the solid block of ash that had accumulated at the end of his cigar. “But you see, the real value of the SA and the SS is how we make people feel terror. Every day.”

  Had Franz done this? When their trucks came into view, cresting over the hill, the red sun seeping behind the low plains, the Poles sprinted from the fields, leaving behind their scythes and sickles in the luxuriant wheat, as if they’d seen death and were trying to outrun it.

  Diels cupped his hand under his cigar, scanning the room. “Do you think you could?”

  On a side table next to the leather couch, there was a silver ashtray, overly ornamental, with two birds rising up in near flight on either side of the shallow dish. Franz momentarily debated whether or not this actually was an ashtray—but he already held it in his hand. Diels stared at him, his eyes dark and unblinking.

  “Here,” Franz said.

  Diels gently rested his cigar against the side of the ashtray, rotating it until the long column of ash broke off in one even piece.

  Franz’s heart beat violently in his chest, and he wondered if this was what the Poles felt when they ran from the fields, when all he could see were the backs of their white shirts billowing in the wind. But why did his body tense and his heart contract, pumping blood to his muscles in preparation for instantaneous flight, when all he’d done was fetch what may or may not be an ashtray for the head of the Berlin police?

  Diels slapped him on the back. It nearly took the wind out of him. “It’s going to get a lot more difficult than standing around with a drink in your hand, waiting for dinner.” And then Diels sauntered off, nodding to Pfeffer and a few Reischswehr officers.

  Greta came toward him, smiling shyly. Oh, thank God, Franz thought. Someone to make me appear less pitiful. In her fluttering yellow chiffon dress, she still reminded him of the small girl in glasses, with two long plaits, trailing after Vicki in the snow when they’d gone to the cemetery that time to commemorate all the fallen soldiers, at the end of the war. She’d always favored him, sliding in and out of his life depending on circumstances that either brought them together or pulled them apart. They’d been pushed back together again because Greta happened to be Carin’s friend, and Carin always insisted Greta join them because double dates were more social, and Carin enjoyed having people around who would laugh and drink and admire her beauty.

  She lightly touched his arm. “You look quite smart in brown.”

  Franz frowned. “I think black would look much smarter.”

  They both noticed Carin and Wolf disappear into the library.

  “Shall we join them?” she asked.

  “I don’t think Wolf would prefer our company just now.”

  She took a sip of champagne. “He’s quite the lady-killer.”

  “It’s true.”

  “And Carin fancies him.”

  Franz nodded, surveying the room, wondering where Diels had gone, and if the impression he’d made was as bad as all that.

  “Anyway, I thought maybe we could all take a drive sometime.”

  “Yes,” Franz said absently, “we could.”

  Greta beamed and said something about riding with the top down in autumn feeling so fresh and brisk that it was just the thing to enliven the senses.

  Someone started banging away on the piano, playing an old military marching tune from the Great War. Everyone turned to listen, and the solemn earnest faces reminded Franz of church.

  Greta’s warm breath filtered into his ear. “That’s Ernst Hanfstaengl—but everyone calls him Putzi.”

  He leaned closer to her. “Who is he?”

  “Head of the Foreign Press Bureau in Berlin—his mother’s American and he studied at Harvard.”

  The smell of her gardenia perfume was not offensive to him, as most women’s perfumes were, and the high color of her cheeks, how she always tried to stand near him, aroused a certain degree of sympathy.

  She touched the long strand of pearls around her neck, fingering the knot made at the end. “And Putzi’s wife, Helene, dissuaded Hitler from committing suicide when the police came to arrest him after the putsch.” She paused, breathless and flushed. “Isn’t that amazing?”

  He let his hand slide around her waist. “Yes, amazing.” It didn’t feel entirely repulsive, to do this.

  She gazed up at him, her wide-set eyes brimming with emotion.

  The room erupted into applause.

  Putzi stood up and bowed with an exaggerated flourish. Greta still stared up at Franz, as if they were locked in a passionate embrace. Out of the corner of his eye, Franz caught Pfeffer looking over at him with approval. He pulled her closer, the soft chiffon of her dress sliding under his palm.

  28

  A few weeks later, they went motoring with the top down through the Tiergarten on a crisp Sunday afternoon in Wolf’s new cherry-and-cream Opel Regent. Wolf and Carin sat in the front, Franz and Greta in the back. From this vantage point, Franz could witness, with alarming closeness, how every few minutes Carin would slide her slender fingers through Wolf’s hair, the large sparkling yellow diamond on her fourth finger roving through his fine blond strands. A close-fitting velvet cloche covered her small shapely head, and the orange sequined flower pattern on the side of her hat caught the late afternoon light. Greta wore a similar cloche, but not quite as flashy, with beige felt appliquéd flowers. The brim of the hat nearly covered her eyes, but he could sense her peeking out at him, trying to read his thoughts, which even to him were vague and confused. Carin yelled over the engine about a sweet little operetta she’d seen the other night, a true relic of the fin de siècle, and how nice it was not to think too hard when going to the theater. Wolf wondered if she ever thought very hard, at which point she punched him in the arm, causing the Opel to swerve for a moment, nearly hitting one of the trees lining the road. Greta let out a stifled scream and clutched Franz’s arm. When he stiffened, she pretended not to notice, and with an insistence Franz thought unsuitable to her, she continued to coil her arm around his.

  What he couldn’t wrap his head around was how Wolf seemed perfectly happy with Carin today, and yet yesterday he was ogling the Czech girl who worked in the university cafeteria dishing out potatoes and schnitzel. Over lunch, he couldn’t stop talking about how he wanted to see her naked, how he would relish her scent of grease and sweat—the smell of work, he’d exclaimed. When he took up with a new woman, he told Franz all the details, almost as if he knew how much it both aroused and tortured him. Franz braced himself for when Wolf would inevitably describe the Czech’s full-bodied figure, her scrubbed rural face, how she’d complied with his every fetish. It sickened him that Wolf debased himself like this, when he had Carin and Franz. Carin, who fluttered on the margins of their conversations like a carefree butterfly, happy to retreat into the background when Wolf wanted to be alone with Franz. She was too concerned with redecorating their future apartment or buying gloves at Wertheim’s or throwing monthly soirees to interfere with the deeper, more serious bond between Franz and Wolf. And now with Greta, they’d reached a healthy equilibrium—he was no longer the pitied third wheel, and Wolf, it seemed, liked him all the more for it.

  They pulled over for a rest in the park. Spreading a blanket down on a sunny patch of grass, they lounged in their coats and hats, turning their faces to the sun. Greta pulled out a thermos of hot coffee, and Carin placed tea sandwiches made with mustard and pickles and ham onto individual embroidered napkins. Wolf sat back on his elbows and motioned for Carin to put her head in his lap. She held up a little mug of coffee and asked, “Don’t you want some?” but he only smiled back at her, an intimate knowing smile. Franz tried not to watch them relaxing on the blanket so casually, as lovers are prone to do, and instead stuffed his face with sandwiches. At least Wolf no longer asked about Vicki, which he had found particularly distasteful. Wolf lost interest after Vicki repeatedly ignored his calls. Then he started bringing Car
in around, and now proclaimed he was utterly in love.

  Greta watched Franz eat, cupping her hands around a mug of coffee and making passing comments about the weather predicted for the cycling races upcoming and what a shame it would be if it rained.

  Franz continued to eat, nearly choking on a piece of ham. “Yes, it’s a real shame,” he said, stealing a glance at Wolf, who tickled Carin’s nose with a fallen leaf. As if she could feel his gaze, Carin glanced over at Franz. Their eyes met. She nestled closer into the gabardine folds of Wolf’s trench coat. “No need to turn all gloomy on us, Franz. The sun is shining as we speak.”

  Wolf grinned. “I actually see a black cloud hovering over his head.”

  Franz nodded, feeling the weight of the food, his throat tightening. Carin lightly kissed Wolf on the lips, and he buried his face into her neck. She laughed loudly, and then Wolf looked up, speaking to no one in particular. “Isn’t she just the bee’s knees?”

  Despite feeling bloated and repellent—his fingers were greasy and crumbs had fallen on his trousers—he reached for a slice of marzipan tart. Greta sat as still as a statue, passing Franz long doleful looks. She wanted him to charm her, to make jokes and flirt, but instead, he stolidly ate and drank and didn’t bother to wipe his hands. He was being a perfect barbarian, but what did it matter anyway? Wolf and Carin’s limbs were entangled at this point—her long, slender leg encased in silk twined with his tweed trousers—and Franz felt as if he were witnessing the creation of some mythical Chimera. They cooed and whispered and tickled each other while Franz imagined vomiting over the tartan blanket. That would certainly ruin this little love nest. At night in the bathroom, Franz occasionally stuck a finger down his throat, disgusted by the sheer amount of matter he’d ingested. Afterward, he felt light and pure, his throat tingling and burning from the acidic backwash, a not entirely disagreeable sensation. Perhaps I could do it now behind the bushes, he thought.