The Empire of the Senses by Alexis Landau Read Free Book Online

paneling along the walls, belonged to Uri and his gang. The boys huddled together, protecting their loot of fallen Greek statues, heads broken off, wielding the torsos as if they’d found swords. They eyed Lev suspiciously.
    Polina’s tiny hand swept over the long grand hall. “This is where they had parties.”
    “Yes,” Lev said, “it must have been spectacular.” He looked up at the chandeliers, broken in so many places, and at the oil portraits of the Vichniakovs’ ancestors in gilded frames, each one sliced through with a blade. A lanky boy, his fiery hair like a torch, sprinted down the hall wearing a brocaded drape slung over his body. “Come back here,” he shrieked to no one in particular.
    Polina shrugged and then she continued to lead Lev through the rooms, each with its own vibrant color, as if passing through a prism of semiprecious stones. The emerald room. The sapphire room. The crimson and the canary-yellow room. After a succession of rooms, a smaller one stood at the end of the hallway. A diamond window let in some dull light, but otherwise, it was shadowy and decrepit.
    “My room,” Polina said, gesturing to the canopy bed with silk pillows in the shape of logs positioned at the foot and the head. The canopy bed was missing its canopy. Lev immediately thought of the boy tearing through the hallway, and how he must have ripped off the blue silk canopy from the wooden carapace, which appeared barren and desolate. One salvaged portrait, of a little girl holding a gray poodle in an oval frame, hung next to the bed. Her rosy cheeks gleamed with health and her lips curled into a faint smile. The poodle’s gray curls tickled her dimpled chin. Polina tucked her legless baby underneath the soiled bedcovers. She patted the baby’s chest. “This is where we live.”
    Lev knelt down to her level. “What about your parents?”
    “I don’t know them.”
    No parents? Would Vicki say the same when asked about her father? What if she was forgetting him—his face, the sound of his voice? He felt his lungs shrink, his throat tighten. “But you mustn’t sleep here—”
    She rolled her eyes. “We don’t really live here. Even though the cowlives inside with us, my aunt’s house isn’t terribly bad.” She wrinkled her nose.
    “Oh,” Lev said, sighing.
    In the meantime, Polina had busied herself with rearranging the baby’s bed and feeding the baby an imaginary piece of apple and brushing the baby’s imaginary hair. “Now, now,” she whispered, “don’t cry. I have to brush your hair; otherwise it will be a horrible mess in the morning.”
    Lev watched her, both saddened and cheered by her playing. He noticed the peeling wallpaper, a pattern of interlocking garlands, and how a few of the wooden floorboards had been pulled loose, and the general destruction of the room, and then he had an idea. He tore off a bit of wallpaper and held it between his fingers, reminded of Vicki’s dollhouse, an opulent three-story one he bought her for Christmas last year, and how she loved it, peering inside the rooms, tinkering with the furniture, tracing her finger along the brocaded wallpaper, looking in on the nursery with motherly concern. Yes, that was it! He would build Polina a similar dollhouse. Of course it would not be as professional, but he had all the materials he needed right here, in this abandoned estate—the fabrics, the wood, the scraps for those little details he knew would bring her such delight.
    He told Polina his plan, and she listened with rapt attention, her dark eyes alight. Tomorrow could she bring him some ribbon? Yes, yes, she said, I will get ribbon! But then she brooded over what color. Lev, to humor her, said red or blue would be best, but anything would do. Yes, yes, she said more to herself than to him, red or blue. I think I can snatch it from Anna. Perfect, Lev said, as he peeled off a swath of wallpaper and stuffed it into his pocket.
    Over the next days and weeks, Lev amassed