The Glimmer Palace (26 page)

When she went back to the spot in the forest where she had left the basket and found Lilly and Stefan gone, she was a little puzzled. At first she walked back and forth along the bank of the lake shouting their names. She looked for them for more than an hour and then walked back to the S-Bahn station alone. At this point she assumed that one of them had become ill and had had to return without delay to the city. She was not angry. It simply did not occur to her that they would hide from her deliberately.

Lilly and Stefan heard Eva’s calls but didn’t reply. They sat out of sight of the path in a small hollow that overlooked the lake.

“Sometimes I need complete silence,” Stefan whispered. “And my sister, though I love her dearly, does go on so. . . .”

“STE . . . FAAAN!”
Eva shouted nearby.
“LIII . . . LLY!”

“We shouldn’t be doing this,” Lilly whispered.

Lilly was about to stand up when the uhlan took her wrist and held it.

“Please,” he said. “Please?”

His eyes pleaded with hers. His grip around her wrist slipped down until he held her hand. He smiled, a half-smile that softened the sharp new angles of his face. Eva’s calls grew more distant; she was walking swiftly back down the path, away from them, toward the station. Lilly stared out across the lake.

“Don’t feel bad,” he said. “I’ll take the blame.”

The schoolgirl—Stefan still called her that in his head, even though he knew she was no longer one—the schoolgirl brushed a strand of dark hair from her face. He had occasionally thought about her when he was at the front. When the enemy was firing and the barbed wire was snaking in the air above his head, he had found himself going over his life in minute detail. And he vividly remembered the way the car had spun around the corner as the figure of the girl in the middle of the road had come hurtling toward him; the way his foot had pushed into the floor as if pressure alone could prevent them from hitting her; and, afterward, the way she had looked up at him, shoeless, ragged, but still defiantly alive.

And now she was real, she was here, and he realized that he had barely taken her in at all. Her wrists, her lower arms, her tiny hands were so fine, so flawless. She was wearing a pale blue dress that, despite the fact that it had a high collar and long sleeves, clung to her, revealing the slender body beneath. As the occasional leaf began to drift down from the trees and the heat haze began to rise, she sat and stared out across the lake. He would not let thoughts of the war, of what he had seen, come into his head. He was alone with the schoolgirl with a whole beautiful day ahead of them. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else.

The uhlan stretched, a long, languid, glorious grasp of air and space. She had almost forgotten how men were: their different scale, their limbs longer and their movements more generous. He pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth and handed it to her. She hesitated and then held the bottle to her lips and drank. And while she did so, his eyes never strayed from hers.

“Would you like some?” she asked. She handed him the bottle but he didn’t drink.

“How is your eye?” he said.

Lilly was momentarily puzzled. And then her hand flew to her face.

“My eye? It was nothing,” she said.

“Can I take a look?” He traced her eyebrow very gently with his little finger.

“You have a scar,” he said.

“It’s nothing.”

“I never thought I’d see you again,” he whispered. “But I came back . . . and there you were.” She held his gaze.

“Kiss me,” he said.

Without hesitation, trepidation, or guile, she kissed him. Stefan let go of the bottle and it rolled down the gentle slope toward the lake and began to spill its contents in slow dark gulps.

Afterward she pulled back and stared at the uhlan’s face. Ever since he had come back from the front, she had had trouble sleeping. She felt as though she had helium in her blood. Ignore it, she had told herself. It won’t happen. But it had. It was happening. She touched his cheek and ran her finger along the blue graze of his skin. His mouth was so, so soft. There was nothing hard about him, nothing brittle or flinty or cruel. He was not Marek or Eva or Otto. He was Stefan—a name that sounded like a secret, whispered.

The uhlan had come to the conclusion that his life would be short. He had decided he would never have children, become a partner of a legal practice, as he had once planned, or take his grandchildren to the park. When he looked up and saw Lilly at the front door of his uncle’s flat, he was instantly sure that it meant he would die within the year. Why else would this young girl he had fantasized about be there—a girl who seemingly had no sweetheart, no family, no one. And he did not resist. He offered himself to his fate with an open heart and a distinct lack of guilt. He wasn’t the only one.The city was full of the newly wed and the newly widowed, half dressed in white, the other in black.

Stefan slipped his hand beneath the arch of Lilly’s back and pulled her down beside him. He could, he told himself, spend days, weeks, just looking at her throat; he was completely addicted to the clean, sweet scent of her; he was mesmerized by her voice. He wanted her so badly he ached.

“Stop,” she said on the banks of the Wannsee. “Not yet.”

Ten days later Stefan married Lilly in a private service in the side chapel of the Church of St. Michael near the Oranienplatz. He had found a Catholic priest who would marry them without notice. In the registry she signed her name in full. She was almost sixteen. He was twenty. Although he had sold a painting to a jeweler for a pair of simple gold wedding rings, they had neither the right forms nor their birth certificates. The priest ignored the paperwork: the soldier was returning to France first thing the following morning.

The rain started during the ceremony and didn’t stop. It streamed down the gutters and pooled in great floods on the street. Outside Stefan’s window, the leaves turned overnight. In shades of gold and amber, red and orange, they blazed briefly before being blown away by gusts of sodden wind.

As Lilly and Stefan lay naked in the reflected light from the window, their bodies seemed to be drawn with water, their skin shimmering with drops and rivulets and tiny tides. Stefan kissed Lilly’s face, her eyes, her ears, her neck; she was so fragile, so lucent. It was as if, at that moment, the rain that cascaded down outside was inside, too, in his room, in his bed, in his blood. He reached down and ran one hand along the inside of her thigh while the other found her breast.

Lilly’s body stiffened; she had to fight a rising panic in her chest. The last time, she told herself. Don’t think about the last time. She kissed his face, then found his ear and whispered.

“Teach me.Teach me how to love you.”

Stefan’s hands stopped. He was momentarily puzzled. Did she mean the emotion or the actual act itself? Although he would never admit it, he had no experience of sex; he only knew the bare mechanics from the filthy talk of the other men in his barracks. At the front he had been issued with a book of coupons, each of which he could exchange for ten minutes with a prostitute. He had waited in line, but when his turn had come he had taken one look at the elderly whore from Hamburg and lost any inkling of desire. And now Lilly was staring up at him, her breath fast, her eyes alight with expectation. He pulled back and sat up.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

Not Marek but the Gypsy. Lilly focused on the Gypsy and the way he had loved the child. It had looked so easy, so effortless. But now, as the rain poured down and the hours slid past too fast, her limbs, her hands, her heart felt as though they were made of wood. Although she had shed a skin with Eva, unwrapping herself on the inside was much, much harder.

For a moment neither of them moved. Then Lilly took a long, deep breath. A swell of sadness rose and then fell away. She focused on the back of Stefan’s neck, the nape, where the curve of his perfect head met the line of his spine. She reached up and touched him. He shivered.

“There,” she whispered.

She picked up his arm and ran her finger along the inside of his elbow.

“And there.”

But he still wouldn’t turn.

And so she took his large hand and held it within her two small hands and pressed it to her chest, to her heart, until he finally shifted round and faced her again. Speak with your eyes, the actor’s words suddenly came back to her. I have fallen in love with you, her eyes said. Believe me. And he understood and something within his face opened, capitulated, released.Without losing his gaze, she placed the hand over her breast. Then she reached and cupped her hand around his neck again, and slowly but firmly pulled him back down until he was lying beside her.

“I just need to learn you first,” she whispered. “All of you.”

In the half-light of the rain, Lilly explored Stefan’s body with her fingertips, from the tidemarks of sunburned skin around his wrists and his collar to the hair on his toes, from the pale angles of his shoulder blades to the conch curl of his ears. Finally she moved down the center of his body from his chest, to his belly, to his penis. Stefan’s eyes opened; he reached down for her.

“Come to me,” he whispered.

And then, with a rattle of keys and the moan of hinges, the front door slammed.

“I’ve got schnapps!” Eva shouted down the hall. “Three bottles of kümmel! A pint of Bavarian beer!”

She didn’t do it deliberately, Eva told herself later. She loved her brother. She just wanted to celebrate. What is a wedding without a party, after all? And so, later, as the three of them sat round the kitchen table and Eva talked, Stefan started to drink, just as she knew he would.They carried him to bed at midnight. He was so drunk that he had passed out.

“Maybe if we’d had something to eat?” Lilly had said as she began to unbutton his shirt.

“I’ll do that,” snapped Eva. “He’s still my brother, you know!”

The uhlan was reported missing in action in November 1916. Lilly saw his name immediately. Stefan Mauritz—that was all: no details of his regiment or on what front he had been fighting. Her eyes ran over the list again just to make sure. But there it was: Stefan Mauritz. She would have to turn and tell Eva. Her heart thundered and her hands clenched and she could not. And then she felt a hand on her arm.

“There.There,” said Eva. “Didn’t you see it?”

They had come to the newspaper’s office for a first edition. The newspapers printed up the casualty lists before the Reichstag posted them. “You have to pay for bad news now,” somebody said. Every morning at seven, the pavements outside the
Berliner Morgenpost
office were thronged as people queued to buy their copy before the paper reached the newsstands. Eva took the newspaper out of Lilly’s hands and they pushed their way through the crowd. She headed across the Königsplatz and they walked west through the Tiergarten to the radiating circle of the Grosser Stern. One solitary motorcar chugged around the huge fountain and veered back toward the Brandenburg Gate. And then it was only delivery boys on bicycles, their baskets piled high with newspapers and brown paper packages, whistling or shouting out to each other as they sped along side by side.

Eva marched down the Siegesallee toward the zoo, and Lilly walked a few steps behind. Neither broke down. Neither wept. Neither spoke. They passed a small beer tavern, locked up for the war, and stopped a little farther on, on a bridge over a lake. They listened to the sounds of the animals from the other side of the perimeter wall of the zoo; the distant screech of parrots and the low blare of an elephant, the bark of a sea lion and the hollow howl of an ape. Then Eva picked up a rock from the ground. She hurled it into the water, where it shattered the smooth surface.

“Down with this war!” she shouted into the thick winter air. “Down with the government! Down with the kaiser!”

Lilly did not respond. Instead she started to shiver. She shivered as if she had been the lake’s surface, shattered by the trajectory of a rock. A young woman pushing a pram walked toward them. Her baby started to scream in huge drawn-out sobs. A lump rose in Lilly’s throat, and she concentrated on taking air into her lungs and letting it out again, on breathing. The young woman passed and the baby’s screaming gradually receded.

“It’s not certain,” Lilly said. “He might be wounded. Mightn’t he?”

“Why do you care?”

“He’s my husband, Eva.”

Eva let out a small exhalation of derision. And then she turned away. Lilly watched the slow flight of a swan above as it flew toward the river Spree. They had been married for six weeks, and in that time they had spent just one night together. What Eva clearly suspected was true: the marriage had not been consummated.

At first Eva felt that she had hidden her true feelings remarkably well. When her brother and Lilly had eventually come back from Wannsee, their faces flushed with the cold and their clothes covered in fragments of leaf and bracken, she had looked from one face to the other and immediately guessed what had happened. Although she insisted that she didn’t mind when they confessed where they had been, Eva felt, in fact, as if she had been garroted.

Of course, Lilly asked to borrow a dress for the wedding, and of course Eva obliged. But as she watched “that girl,” as she had now started to call her—that girl whom she had found scooping up entrails from the street like a beggar—marry her very own brother, wearing her very own favorite blue dress, she felt enraged, betrayed, heartbroken. How dare Lilly steal away Stefan? And how dare Lilly give away so easily the one thing she had withheld from her for so many months? Eva had loved her; she loved her still. And one by one she bit every single fingernail right down to the quick.

“Congratulations,” she had said with a forced smile after the ceremony. “You go home. I have something to do. I’ll be back later.”

When Eva had revealed what she had in her purse, she became a “regular customer” once again at the butcher’s. She was invited into the back shop, where she swapped her mother’s diamond engagement ring for the alcohol. And then she hurried back through the rain, against the wind and the falling leaves that danced in the air like huge pieces of dirty brown confetti, to spoil her brother’s wedding night with smuggled Polish schnapps.