The Glimmer Palace
Read The Glimmer Palace Online
Authors: Beatrice Colin
Tags: #Fiction, #Literary, #Historical, #War & Military
Table of Contents
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2008 by Beatrice Colin
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Published simultaneously in Canada
For a list of illustration credits, see page 403.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Colin, Beatrice.
The glimmer palace / Beatrice Colin.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-594-48985-3
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
For Veronica and Andrew
All that is transitory is only an image.
—GOETHE
The First Spark
B
erlin, a word that chimes in your chest like a bell. Berlin, a place so bright it pulls down the stars and wears them around its neck. Berlin, a city built on the scattered sand of circuses and the scuffed floorboards of theater spectaculars. Roll up, roll up to see the living photographs. Max Skladanowsky and his brother Eugen, still wearing black around their eyes, out of habit rather than necessity, present their electromechanical effects.The spectacle of the year, the highlight of 1895, guaranteed.
The houselights dim, and the air is filled with the sour taste of hot celluloid and blue smoke from a hundred burning cigarettes. A blond girl looms up suddenly on a white sheet. She laughs, a flickery shiver on the taut cotton; she seems to speak but her voice is mute, until, quite unexpectedly, a black patch appears where her heart should be and she disappears into the burning hole in seconds.
The audience gasps, and one child chokes on his chewed-up ticket. The couple in the front row insist it is a trick with mirrors; a woman in a red hat peeks behind the sheet but finds no one there. And all the while, trickles of kohl from India fall down Eugen’s ashen face as he comes to realize he’ll never again see the girl he left behind in Lübbenau.
Lilly Nelly Aphrodite was born in the final moments of the last hour of the nineteenth century
.
She was caught in a dark blue handwoven cloth threaded with real gold instead of the obligatory white receiving shawl and was declared perfect by everyone around the bedside, including the landlady and the Bavarian lover. Unfortunately, the dye, though a beautiful shade, was not fast and the cloth stained her creased and slippery newborn skin.
“She’s blue,” her mother cooed. “How novel.”
The Bavarian lover lit a cigar and looked at his watch.
“Happy NewYear,” he said through a mouthful of smoke.
As Champagne corks popped and strangers kissed, as the Bavarian lover started to sing and the mother reapplied her French cologne, the midwife, already packing up, suddenly snatched the baby back from where she rested serenely in her cot and began to spank her violently on the bottom.The baby was not just blue, everyone noticed at once; she seemed devoid of life.
And in that tiny eternity, while the bells tolled and a million glasses clinked, while the midwife swore and shook and smacked, and tears sprang to eyes so recently crumpled up with joy, the infant seemed all but dead. And then, as hope was fading by the second and the midwife’s palm struck her chilled behind with full force for a final desperate time, she jerked twice and gasped. Air rushed into her brand-new lungs, a blast of cool with a hint of cigar, her eyes opened, and she stared straight into the face of a clock. It was one minute past twelve. She took another mouthful of air and let out a high-pitched scream. Her skin was still blue but no one could doubt that she was now very much alive.
Although the date of her birth was officially the thirty-first of December, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite’s first breath was taken in the twentieth century. It was as if, the midwife said as she tried to console the child’s mother, she was determined to wait. A certain willfulness was noted. And when in the coming months she screamed and sobbed and could not be comforted no matter what, her mother blamed that night, that midwife, and that handwoven cloth that she had been so stupidly sentimental to accept from her stuttering Bavarian lover and that, he eventually admitted, he had been given by a former mistress who had traveled to Constantinople and been locked in a sultan’s harem for an entire year before she managed to escape with nothing but the dress she was wearing and a suitcase full of precious cloth.
Later, much later, while her parents finally slept, the new baby lay awake and stared out at the orange sodium night. In rings around Potsdamer Platz and all along the wiggle of the river Spree, a hundred thousand electric bulbs lit up in strings. Although it has been many places at many times, Berlin at that moment was a city not built but randomly piled around the provincial capital of Prussia. It was a metropolis where smokestacks exhaled and factories whistled, where telephone wires hummed and the tracks of the underground lines shrieked with excitement with each passing train. In 1900, Berlin was a place where workers flocked in their millions to live in crowded tenements in the newly constructed suburbs and commute by tram to work. It was a city where writers and artists rented garrets and starved themselves into shape. It was a city without memory, a city without tradition; in Berlin freedom came face-to-face with casual indifference and nobody minded what happened next.
Lilly Nelly Aphrodite was conceived in a
Wanderkino
, pitched in the Tiergarten, at a screening of Georges Méliès’s film
Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin.
Tantalized by the smell of canvas and libidinous clatter of this radical new invention, her parents watched the actress Jeanne d’Alcy turn from flesh to skeleton five times before they consummated their brief acquaintance in the darkened back row beneath his greatcoat.
The Bavarian lover claimed that he was a speculator about to invest his fortune in German topicalities. In fact, he had little interest in cinema and that day he had merely ducked into the tent to hide from a woman he had had an affair with a few years before. But fate, if you believe in it, had placed the man from the South in the seat next to the pretty young actress. And as the rain thrummed relentlessly against the fly sheet and the Frenchwoman disappeared into thin air all over again, it seemed suddenly as if death was much closer than either of them had realized and the moment, the flickering moment, was all either had to lose.
It was an illusion, of course, created within Méliès’s camera using stop-motion photography. By the time the pregnancy was diagnosed, it was much too late to halt it. Although he initially suggested otherwise, however, the philandering Bavarian wasn’t about to play the responsible father to his illegitimate offspring. Likewise, the actress wasn’t ready to be a mother to anyone.
The baby’s first home was a cramped apartment two blocks south of the Kurfürstendamm. Her mother, a writer, actress, and occasional member of a cabaret group in the vein of Munich’s own Eleven Executioners, was seldom home by bedtime and seldom awake by lunch.When the two were together, her mother smothered her with kisses but had little patience for games of peekaboo or catch. At first she had tried to write the opus that had been sprawling in her mind for years while her daughter clambered on her lap and screamed for milk. Ink was spilled, manuscripts rendered illegible, and white dresses were ruined. And so in homage to all the creativity that had been wasted, and faced with a spoiled set of clothes, she decided to dye the lot and dress her baby in black. “I’m sorry,” people would mutter as they passed her in the street, thinking the infant the victim of some awful tragedy or other. “Me too,” replied the mother through the twisted corner of her crimson-painted mouth.