The Glimmer Palace (18 page)

“Leave me,” the Countess whispered through cracked lips. “I want to die.”

She tried to lie down but two arms prevented her. She looked up into her maid’s eyes and instantly registered that she would not be able to swoon into oblivion as she had hoped.

“You can’t just give up,” said Lilly.

Maybe the girl was right. Maybe she wasn’t so sure she wanted to die anymore after all.

“Call Dr. Storck,” the Countess whispered.

The doctor came immediately.The Countess did not die.The penniless poet went to the casino and spent two hundred marks.

You can’t just give up.The bruises on Lilly’s wrists gradually faded. The insomnia continued and never entirely went away. The poet left early every morning and came back after midnight. The house was filled with doctors, specialists and psychiatrists, healers, and even a couple of priests. There was talk of the Countess going to the country, to recuperate in a spa, but she refused.Then Dr. Storck was back again and one by one he drew the curtains.

It was weeks later when the poet sought her out again.This time he was brandishing a new anthology of poetry as if nothing had happened.

“Read it! You will agree that it is absolute drivel,” he said. “Because you, my Lilly Nelly Aphrodite, have a poet’s soul.”

And with that he reached out and, with one hand on her waist, pulled her close to him, so close that she almost stumbled, so close that the smell of the cologne he had splashed on his face that morning was overpowering. He swallowed and then he ran his finger along the line of her cheek. His mouth was only an inch or two from her throat. His body was hard and hot as it pressed into hers. And then he caught sight of her face.

“Anyway,” he said, letting her go. “Come and find me when you’ve finished it.”

She knew he was sitting in the summerhouse at the end of the garden, smoking a cigarette. She could smell his tobacco; she could see a single pinprick of burning red. It was early summer, and although it was late and the sky was dashed with the black skitter of bats, the air was luminous. The Countess was drugged and resting. Dinner had been served and cleared. No visitors were expected.

The summerhouse was open on all sides but raised from the ground by three wooden steps. She took them one by one until she stood on the edge of the top step, directly opposite him. He did not appear to see her at first. He was reading an article about a new wine restaurant in Leipzig. She coughed and he looked up. A single newspaper page fell to the floor, where it rustled and flapped in the breeze. The poet leaned back, completely placid, the glow of his cigarette flaring up and dying down as he inhaled long and slow.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Don’t move,” he replied.

And then she noticed that beside him was a large black object on three long legs. It was a moving-picture camera, a Leica, a gift for himself after the paper-knife incident.

The film he took of his wife’s maid was hugely underexposed; he had no idea about shutter speeds or flashbulbs. Against the darkening sky and the even blacker density of the summerhouse, a faint silver hourglass with a face on top shivers in the dusk. It takes a moment or two to work out that the shape is in fact a girl, a girl with long dark hair, which seems to vibrate around her head like static. And then your eye is drawn to her face; her lips are black, her eyes two black holes pinpricked with white. Despite the poor quality of the photography, Lilly looks unearthly, like a vision or a spirit summoned up from the night.

And when the poet watched it several months later, before almost destroying it in a projector that had not been set up correctly, he wondered quite seriously if he had been mistaken about his vocation. He persuaded several more girls to pose for him, but nothing he ever made again came close to the one-minute-and-twelve-second moving picture
Lilly in the Summerhouse, May 1914.

The evening air was chilly. She could stand it no more. She turned her back to his camera.

“Enough,” she said.

He stopped cranking and stabbed out another cigarette in a geranium pot. And then he started unscrewing the legs of the tripod. She took a step forward.

“Marek,” she said.

He glanced up and could not hide the slight displeasure he felt when he heard her say his first name.

“What is it now?” he snapped.

“You shouldn’t have done what you did,” she said. “I’m in trouble.” The penniless poet sighed with irritation, as if she had just told him she had smashed a window accidentally or broken a dish.

“How inconvenient for you,” he said, and continued to unscrew the tripod.

Lilly waited for him to go on. He didn’t. And as the seconds passed, she realized that he would do nothing, admit nothing, contribute nothing.

“Shouldn’t you be working?” he said eventually. “That is, after all, what you are paid to do.” s the bullets were poured and metal helmets forged, as rifles

were oiled and the Schlieffen Plan presented to the kaiser, Lilly developed an insatiable appetite. And that was where the poet would sometimes accidentally stumble upon her, in the kitchen with her finger in the cake batter or dipped in newly poured jars of jam. He was formal with her now. He did not seek her out or ask her opinion on his poetry anymore.

“My tea was a little cold this morning,” he would say. “Could you make sure the water has actually boiled next time?”

And she would nod, because her voice would only betray her. When he was gone, her tears would roll into the sponge mixture and it would spoil.

Es ist nichts
, she would tell herself. It is nothing.

“It is nothing,” Archduke Franz Ferdinand repeated as he lay bleeding to death beside his pregnant wife on the floor of his carriage in the middle of Sarajevo in June. But of course, on both counts, it was not nothing.

Lilly and Hanne met outside The Blue Cat on her next day off. In Lilly’s pocket was an envelope heavy with notes, and the word
Pitman’s
written on the front.

“I have two hundred marks,” she said. “Will that be enough?”

“Should be,” said Hanne.

They took a tram and Hanne pulled the chain when they turned into Dragonstrasse. When she recognized where she was, however, Lilly hesitated.

“I’m not sure if I can get off here.”

“You have to. Unless you want to fly there. Come on.”

Hanne took Lilly’s arm and pulled her down the stairs. They paused at Otto’s block.

“Come on,” Hanne said, and pushed open the heavy wooden door.

“Wait a minute,” said Lilly. “You know the lady, right?”

“I know her,” said Hanne.

“What’s her name, then?”

“Frau . . . Lindt . . . no, Lundt . . .”

“Licht?”

“That’s it,” said Hanne. “Frau Licht.”

Lilly sank down to the stone step. She covered her mouth. She felt as if she were about to vomit.

“I can’t,” she said.

“You have to,” Hanne said. “You’re here now. Besides, it’s nothing special. I know a girl who’s had three in the last year.”

Hanne had already had one abortion, the product of a short-lived but frantic relationship with the Bulgarian. Frau Licht gave her plum brandy to quell the pain, and she was so sick the next day that the whole episode took on the hallucinatory feel of a bad dream.

“It’ll hurt and then it’ll be over,” said Hanne. “And then you’ll be back to normal again. Go on. I’ll wait for you outside.”

Otto was a little surprised to find Tiny Lil at his door. He had just blown an entire week’s pay packet on an American who missed her train and let him pay for her hotel in return for nothing more than a peck on her cool Bostonian cheek. And now he was waiting for Frau Licht to ask if he could pay double next week. He had some news that might back up his case. He was about to enlist in the military again, this time voluntarily. The kaiser was gathering his troops. Everyone said that the war, when it came, would last no more than six weeks. And as wave after wave of heavily armed soldiers marched through Berlin, the air was full of hope. It was common knowledge that the German naval fleet, financed partly by a tax on Champagne, was one of the best in the world. The army was well equipped with the most modern in combat machinery. Otto wanted to be part of it, to be issued a brand-new gray uniform and sent to a training camp on the Rhine. He was also going to hand her his notice.

They sat in the parlor and he poured Tiny Lil coffee. It was true he had meant to go back and see her at the orphanage, and several times he had found himself strolling in that direction. But something had always distracted him—a pretty girl, a bar he had not noticed before, a rainstorm—and he had put it off. And now, she told him, it had closed anyway. Tiny Lil was more sober, more somber, than he remembered. She explained that she had a job as a servant. He expected more. She didn’t continue.

“So, you want to go out dancing?” he asked.

Lilly finally caught his eye.

“Not dancing in a bar but in the Tiergarten,” he continued. “You can dance beneath the stars on a Saturday all night.”

She swallowed and looked away. In the pale sunlight, her skin was translucent and her eyes were the color of granite. He took her hand and kissed it. And then he wanted to kiss her face, her cheek, her lips again.

“I’ve missed you,” he said, aware that it was not completely untrue.

For an instant Lilly glimpsed another future, one with Otto. But just as quickly as it appeared, it suddenly vanished. The front door slammed. Otto pulled back just as his landlady walked in.

“Your friend said you were here,” she said. “You’d better come through.”

Otto looked from Lilly to Frau Licht. He knew what his landlady did, even though he pretended he didn’t. He had never seen any of the women. But he had heard them.

Lilly felt her shoulders descend despite herself. Otto seemed to shrink back a step. And so she made herself look up at him; she made him look back at her.

“The Tiergarten?” she said.

“The Tiergarten,” he replied. And then, with a closed smile, he shook her hand.

Olivia Licht performed her procedures in a small bathroom just off her bedroom. A narrow table was covered with newspaper. A white coat hung on the peg behind the door. The bottle of plum brandy stood beside a toothbrush and some tooth-whitening powder. She sprayed the air with eau de cologne and handed Lilly a stained cotton gown.

“How much?” asked Lilly.

“Three hundred,” she replied.

“Will you take two?”

“If that’s all you have,” she replied.

Frau Licht knew she was an inexpert practitioner. She had already been indirectly responsible for three deaths due to infection, but as the girls were always desperate and her success rate was around sixty percent, a steady stream of women traipsed up Dragonstrasse for so-called emergency procedures. She did wonder if it was her young lodger’s progeny that she went fishing for in Lilly’s womb with her Viennese contraption. But the fetus slipped away from her grasp, just as Otto had, for he had stopped sleeping with her several months before. She charged the girl anyway; if the baby survived, she could always claim it had been twins.

In fact, Lilly lost the baby in the third month. She started bleeding long before it started to hurt. And then, as cloth after cloth became sodden with blood and the cramps began, she realized that she had wasted her money.

The cook found her curled up in a corner in the kitchen and called the doctor immediately. To his credit, Dr. Storck canceled a whole afternoon’s worth of appointments to look after her. And while the Countess lay on her bed inhaling a new treatment, oil of bergamot, the doctor administered morphine by the spoonful and cooled Lilly’s brow with his handkerchief dipped in ice-cold water. He did not let her see the bloody bundle he wrapped in newspaper for him to take away. She did not know that he gave the fetus to the faculty of medicine at his old university, where it was preserved in a jar and placed on a shelf in the anatomy department of what is now known as Humboldt University.

A week later, a note appeared on the dining room table:
Please clean my room.

Lilly took a duster and a bucket of warm water and slowly made her way up the stairs to the Countess’s room. Windows faced north and south. You could see as far as Viktoriapark in one direction and Museum Island in the other.

“I cannot divorce him,” a voice said. Lilly jumped and swung round. She had thought the Countess was downstairs, in the drawing room. Instead she was sitting in the shadows. Only the line of her jaw was visible. Lilly was filled with apprehension. How much did she know? What had the poet told her?

“Because, like you, I am a Catholic.”

Her voice was low pitched and steady. All the life in her hands was gone.

“He has asked me to sack you,” she continued. “But you work hard. You are quiet, you do not gossip. But other people will.”

She sighed and swallowed.

“I’m sorry, Lilly,” she said. “Would you like me to write you a reference?”

ar was announced in July. The kaiser decided to take Paris by force. In August, after marching through Belgium with no opposition, the German army reached Reims.Three men in an open-topped car, one bearing a white flag, another his grandfather’s saber, and a third, who was an opera singer, a bugle, crossed enemy lines to ask the city to surrender. There had been some argument that it should have in fact been a trumpet, but the opera singer insisted that it was almost the same thing. A ritual is a ritual, insisted the captain with the white flag. In the end, however, when no trumpet could be procured, they agreed to compromise. And so, with the saber waving, the bugle gleaming, and the white flag fluttering in the baking sun, they drove toward the city.

The peace envoy had barely made it into the town square, however, when they were all arrested and charged with espionage. Spies with white flags and bugles, the Germans probably pointed out, spies who could sing all the tenor parts from Puccini’s
Tosca
. Maybe the opera singer even gave a rendition to prove it. Maybe the soldier with the saber, in stuttering French, told the gendarmes that his grand-father had used the saber against the Danish. Maybe the authorities in Reims believed them but locked them all up anyway. But what happened there was immaterial. Outside the city, both armies had fortified their positions and had started to dig a system of trenches. The Battle of the Marne had begun.