The Glimmer Palace (20 page)

“Isn’t it exciting?” the woman said. “My brother’s an uhlan. He’s leaving next week for France. He’s in the Third Regiment; it was our father’s.”

Lilly had noticed the uhlans on the kaiser’s march. They rode horses and carried lances. Their uniform was more ornate than the ordinary cavalry, with red horsehair plumes on their helmets and brightly colored cuffs and chests. But there were no uhlans in this parade, just factory workers and farmers, laborers and postmen in hastily stitched gray, waved off by their wives and children and girlfriends with flowers and flags, and kisses and whispers in ears to wish them good luck, and the chance to use the guns they carried so proudly on their backs.

They had arrived in Berlin only slightly ahead of the storm. As they waited for the crowds to clear, the air turned yellow and then darkened as thunder crashed and sheet lightning lit up the sky. And within a minute or two, it started to rain torrentially, the drops cascading down on the cobbles as if each one had been individually hurled. Everyone ran for cover. The uhlan and his sister leapt out of the car and pulled over the canvas hood. Only the men in formation did not change their stride. The procession went on and on, the soldiers turning their faces up to the sky.

The jam dispersed as quickly as it had formed. The storm passed. And then they drove south, past Viktoriapark toward Steglitz, where there were flowers in boxes on window ledges and polished automobiles lined up in rows along the side of the street. Maybe, she thought, Otto had been right. Maybe she could be anybody now.

The uhlan glanced over his shoulder. “We’re home,” he said. “And I don’t think we even introduced ourselves.”

The uhlan’s name was Stefan. His sister’s name was Eva. Their apartment was on the first floor. The front door opened onto a hall that was almost a block long. Lilly was ushered into a drawing room, a room filled with heavy mahogany furniture and darkly rendered paintings. A maid was summoned and brought tea, ginger biscuits, and a bowl of warm water. Eva produced a pair of soft kid boots, “bought in a sale, a mistake for my coloring,” with low heels and two buttons on the side. They were pale blue. Although they were a little big, Lilly pulled them on, buttoned them up, and was surprised to find that she barely even felt them.

“Have them,” Eva said. “That is, if you like them.”

Lilly nodded. She couldn’t speak. She hadn’t known such beautiful boots existed.

“Good. The doctor is coming,” Eva said. “I have just called him on the telephone. And then we’ll drive you home or to the station, if that’s where you’d like to go. Don’t worry, we won’t tell. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must go and freshen up. You’ll have to talk to Stefan, I’m afraid.”

Stefan sat down on the divan beside the schoolgirl they had run over on a small, rarely used road in the outskirts of the city. A single drop of blood had dried on her eyebrow. She had hardly spoken a word since they had arrived. She quickly glanced across at him and he realized with a jolt that he had been staring. He looked around at the drawing room, which had once belonged to his uncle, and was suddenly filled with the urge to tell her none of it was his, not the ugly furniture or the dismal paintings of his sullen ancestors. She seemed disapproving, somehow.

“Your suitcase,” he asked her. “Have you run away from school before?”

She started, as if she was not expecting him to actually talk to her. And then she nodded.

“My sister used to run away all the time,” he said. “She eventually got expelled.”

He laughed. She didn’t.

“You’re going to France?” she said.

France? It was his turn to be startled. The war. For a moment he had almost forgotten about it. For a moment he had been a law student again. For a moment he had been a man alone in a room with a girl who was running away from algebra and geometry, from needle-work and piano lessons. But now his mouth filled with the metal tang of adrenaline and his heart began to race. And he imagined the sickening yield of foreign flesh beyond his lance and was filled with dread. And so he forced himself to think of his father, who expected it of him, and his mother, a woman whose photograph was all he had to remember her by, since she had been dead for most of his life, and he tried to make himself believe that death would mean they would all be reunited and that the worst thing that could happen might also be the best. He cleared his throat twice before he spoke.

“It’s what I’ve been trained for,” he offered.

He intended to be gallantly reassuring, but his words sounded like an apology. And so he self-consciously poured two cups of tea, which he sweetened with honey. As he handed one to the girl, his hand shook so much the china rattled. She noticed—how could she not?—but she took the cup and steadied it in her saucer.

“To the glorious Fatherland,” he said.

“I suppose,” she said.

Through an open window across the room, a trumpet started playing a military waltz, badly. The uhlan offered a biscuit, then picked a speck of lint from his cuff.

“Oh, it’ll be all over by Christmas,” he said.

“So they say,” she replied.

“In that time I’ll be lucky to actually see any action. It’s only a matter of months.”

She glanced away.

“But some months,” she said, “are longer than others.”

He smiled, but his hands suddenly felt cold.

“What do you mean?” he asked, although he knew what she meant.

She raised the teacup to her mouth and blew to cool it a little. And then she composed herself, looked over at him, and held his gaze. Her eyes, he saw now, were gray.

“I mean,” Lilly continued, “that time . . . time doesn’t always appear to pass at the same speed. At least, not in my experience.”

She smiled and glanced away. He could never understand how every day that she had worked had stretched and stretched so much that time itself seemed to sag, while her days off raced by so fast that she felt cheated. He wasn’t the type who had ever needed to work.

But if she were Stefan, would she run away or volunteer to fight, would she wait for the rent of bullet or blade through her body, or would she charge ahead, shoot, and thrust at the enemy without any regard for her own safety? She guessed that in her present state of mind it would be the latter.

“You leave next week?” she asked.

“Next week,” he replied. And then they both turned away, raised their cups to their mouths, and each took a small lukewarm sip.

“Does it hurt?” he asked, indicating her head.

She pulled back a fraction of an inch.

“It really is nothing,” she said.

“Would you mind if I ... ?”

She shook her head. The uhlan moved until he was beside her. He dipped a clean white handkerchief into the bowl of warm water and very gently washed away the dried blood. The girl stared straight ahead. Her eyes were of the clearest gray, almost luminous in the pale light of the afternoon. In his mind he tried to frame her, to hold on to her image, to the here, the now, to the charged air after the storm, anything he could keep in his head.

“Do you have brothers in the military?” he asked. “Your father?”

“My father’s dead,” she replied. “And I don’t have any brothers.”

The girl’s mouth twisted slightly to one side.The uhlan felt a lump rise in his throat. He and the girl had more in common than he had first assumed. Carefully he dabbed the cut with a dry corner of his handkerchief. And then his gaze moved from her eyebrow to her eyes, where it lingered just a fraction of a second too long. Suddenly the door burst open and his sister Eva hurried into the room.

“Where has she put my pearls?” she said. “Honestly, you’d think she hides them deliberately. It was either her or one of your girlfriends.”

Stefan pulled back. Lilly turned away. Although Eva was oblivious as she bustled out again, they were both aware that the intimacy of the previous moment had been broken.

“My sister is at art school. She’s going to join the Red Cross,” Stefan said when she had gone again. “You could do the same. They’re looking for nice girls like you.”

“I don’t think so,” she said.

“But why not?” he insisted. “Don’t you want to be part of the war effort?”

“I can’t stand the sight of blood,” she replied.

She turned and looked up at him again. He had none of the penniless poet’s easy charm. He was awkward, stilted, in awe of her. Nothing of my past shows in my face, Lilly told herself. He has no idea.

“Sorry?” he said.

Her words hadn’t registered.

“I can’t stand the sight of blood,” she repeated.

Lilly smiled. Finally, Stefan laughed.Then his sister called him not once but twice from the next room.

“I am summoned,” he said. “Have another cup of tea.”

Two or even three rooms down, Lilly heard Eva’s voice. Stefan cried out in mock agony. Eva was teasing him, and although Lilly couldn’t make out the words, his voice was full of indignation. The maid came in with a plate of cake. Her step slowed when she saw Lilly. They regarded each other. In his bedroom, Stefan hit his sister with a pillow. Eva hit him back. The doorbell rang. It was the doctor.

“Where is she?” Eva asked the maid. “The girl who was here with the cut?”

But the maid simply shrugged her shoulders and began to clear the plates.

illy could hear The Blue Cat long before she reached it. Inside, the place was busier than she had ever seen it. Groups of enlisted men were singing, drinking, and calling out for entertainment. The air smelled of damp wool and hair oil. Although they hadn’t seen each other for some time, Hanne’s eyebrow was only slightly raised when Lilly kissed her, as if she had left just five minutes before.

“What happened to your eye?” she asked. “Was it a man?”

“No,” Lilly replied. “It was a Daimler convertible.”

Hanne threw back her head and laughed out loud. And then she opened her arms and the two girls embraced, arms around narrow waists and cheeks pressed against cheeks. And as the men in the bar started to chant and as the Bulgarian, sweaty but demonstrably elated, played an opening trill on the piano, they held each other as tightly as they could. Years later, when the details of Hanne’s face were fragmented and lost, Lilly could still recall that breathless, urgent clasp in the darkened wings of the tiny stage of The Blue Cat.

“Work here,” Hanne said after Lilly explained what had happened. “They’re hiring.”

The Bulgarian, who was bringing up as many kegs of beer as he could carry from the basement, took on Lilly immediately and ordered her to put on an apron and mop the floor. She placed her suitcase in the broom cupboard, pinned up her hair, and started to fill up a bucket.

At almost fourteen, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite, despite her long brown hair and small breasts, could pass for eighteen in gaslight. It was something in her expression, perhaps the way she held her head. And if you caught her eye she would not glance away, all eyelids and lashes, but would return your gaze, unsmiling. And within a few seconds, unless your intentions were perfectly honorable—and, let’s face it, you wouldn’t be drinking in a place like The Blue Cat if they were—you would be forced to unfocus your eyes and order another drink. Lilly made the Bulgarian more money at the bar than did all the other girls put together.

That night she moved into Hanne’s run-down pension in Kreuzberg, temporarily, and the landlady rather reluctantly supplied a pull-out bed. Lilly paid fifteen marks a week, a sum that, for all her bad grace, the landlady was nevertheless glad of, since two-thirds of her tenants had volunteered. She was, however, still fiercely patriotic. Cursing the French and the Russians, but reserving her crudest language for the English, she swore her allegiance every morning to the kaiser with a cup of coffee laced with schnapps.

The English had just begun blockading Germany’s ports and the country’s supplies of coffee, milk, butter, meat, and wheat were said to be dwindling. And so, although she had stocked her larder, her cooking, already poor, was tempered with frugality. The only other tenants, an elderly man and his sister, politely consumed what they were given without complaint. Sometimes a few slivers of gray meat were heaped on a plate of unseasoned cabbage. Or they were served a bowl of soup made of boiled carrots and a shaking of salt.

Their window looked onto a narrow airshaft. Down at the bottom was a pile of rubbish. Up above was a square of sky. In the morning, while Hanne lay in bed, Lilly often sat in the frame and read her only book. Sometimes the window opposite would be opened a crack and a young woman with black hair dragged into a bun would pull back the flimsy curtain and light a cigarette. Behind her a baby sometimes started to cry. The woman would cradle her head in her hands but would not move. And the poems would start to swim before Lilly’s eyes and she would stare at the same page until the cigarette was smoked and the baby was shushed.

At first, they had eaten soft white rolls with butter for breakfast every morning, with large cups of milky coffee. But then the coffee was served black and the rolls were no longer fresh but yesterday’s or those of the day before. One day there was no bread at all, and only watered-down coffee. Long lines had begun to form outside shops, and the landlady began to leave at six-thirty every second morning to make sure she didn’t miss out. She was usually back by lunchtime with a loaf of K-bread, which was an unappetizing color and made of potato and rye flour, and a block of lard.

Hanne, whose film producer friend still took her out for dinner in department store cafés, smuggled pieces of cheese and white baguettes home in her coat sleeves; most mornings they ate bread and cheese in bed before breakfast.

“The kaiser eats K-bread,” the landlady would tell them with her mouth full. “What do you mean, you don’t like it?”

Hanne and Lilly forced down what they could, but the landlady became increasingly suspicious. How could the two girls survive on so little and still have a bloom on their cheeks and a shine in their hair? They tried to make sure, however, that she never found any crumbs.

By December, there was hardly any fresh bread to be had in the whole of Berlin. Or potatoes. Or pork. The army had to be fed. And the wives of soldiers and munitions workers were given priority.The government will provide, the landlady pronounced. But soon she could not afford even pork drippings to spread on her week-old bread. And one day she queued all day for jam, only to find it had doubled in price in the time she had been in line and she could no longer afford it. She stopped talking about the war effort after that.