The Empire of the Senses by Alexis Landau

under his boots from the roads and that was now crusted on his pants. He caught the sour scent of dried sweat from her armpits. So different from pine and soap and lavender. The policeman and the other soldiers had peeled off their shirts, their bare chests shining with sweat, small crosses dangling. They clapped in time with the music. Flushed women danced around them, their hands on their hips. The men playfully slapped the women from behind, and the women threw back their heads. The musicians stomped their boots on the wooden floorboards. Lev wondered absently if one of the women belonged to the accordion player.
    Hermann nudged him in the ribs. “Coming upstairs?”
    The bare-chested men stumbled toward the dim stairwell with their women in tow. They sang in unison, an old drinking song. A song from home. The women struggled to sing along, their voices bending to the German.
    Hermann added, “They have three rooms up there. Five marks for both.” He looked at Lev savagely, his jaw slack from too much drink.
    The women cooed and pressed their soft bodies against them. Lev felt his groin tighten, a building pressure. He tapped his boot methodically on the floor, frustrated by his hesitation. Again, the image of the sleuthing rat crouching alongside the road came to mind—why could he not emit a simple yes to pleasure? What did it matter if it was base? They were all, at bottom, base creatures. The thundering guns continued—so close, and yet such amorous activities continued as if it was a Saturday night in Berlin and all they cared for was plentiful schnapps and the feeling of a woman moving beneath them.
    “Are they safe?” Lev whispered hoarsely, stalling.
    “Hoffman was here last week. Inspecting the cleanliness of the”—a slyness enveloped Hermann’s face—“merchandise.”
    “Are you certain?”
    “The officers are terrified of disease spreading. They wouldn’t take the chance.”
    Lev imagined himself walking back alone with the rats. He stood up from the table. “All right.”
    Hermann threw down a few damp bills. The women quickly stuffed the money into the front of their dresses, the bills disappearing between their milky white breasts.
    If anything, it was a wonderful sensation, the taking of a woman. She did not stiffen or recoil. To plunge into the formidable darkness and not feel resistance but a lukewarm flow coursing between them. His thumbs pressed against the insides of her soft forearms, which were splayed above her head, her auburn hair radiating outward on the filthy pillow. At first, he heard Hermann grunting and a light muffled laughter in the next room, but then his own breathing overtook him like the rush of ocean inside a shell, and he forgot how close the war raged, and how the floorboards creaked, and how the heavy moon hung low and bloody in the black sky, illuminating her freckled, downy stomach. He forgot everything except his sex churning through her, and her surprising fluid receptiveness was a womanly quality he had not experienced for a long time, for it had been so long since sex was not a conversation where he was always trying to convince, dissolving pleasure and exhausting him.
    Lev now held his palm over this woman’s mouth, and her eyes glittered, apparently wanting to be silenced. He could not believe that she invited such shadows of brutality, that she preferred his improvised force.
    After they finished, her face set hard and stony in the moonlight. She closed her eyes, closing out the image of him, as if the curtains in a theater swiftly met, and with it, shut down the openness of her body. The performance of pleasure was over.
    At four a.m., Lev and Hermann walked back along the muddy road. Lev’s limbs worked loosely and freely, his lungs expanding, opening to the cool dawn. They walked with their backs to the sound of thunder. Or guns? Thunder or guns: that was always the question. The rumble from the front layered with the chorus of birds vibrating through