The Glimmer Palace (28 page)

The Last Train

T
he government has bought the film industry. Backed up by the GermanBank, they’ve taken over the Tempelhof’s Oberlandstrasse, those huge glass studios built for light, and renamed it Ufa. Now they need extra staff, canteen assistants, office cleaners, and wardrobe girls. The pay is peanuts, but as soon as word gets out they’re hiring, they have to hire staff to hire staff.

Today the trees are covered in catkins as soft and tiny as mink coats for mice. Inside, there must be more than a hundred women waiting.The walls are freshly painted and the floor is newly varnished, and nobody wants to lean or sit in case they leave a mark. Although they wear their best dresses, their smartest hats, and their jazziest shoes, if you looked closer you’d see that their stockings are still full of darns and their hems are edged with soot.

Only the older girls get the jobs. Or the quiet ones or the ones who don’t know the difference between Henny and Pola. The rest can’t understand it. They weep and demand to see the boss, and when politely refused, they stamp and shout. And then they go back to their stone-cold apartments, where there is nothing to eat, and pace up and down with their coats on before running out to the Picture Palace or the Mozart Hall just in time to catch the last showing.

The trains from the Western Front usually came into Friedrichstrasse Station after nine in the evening. Most of the carriages carried coffins, coffins made of splintery fresh wood that still smelled of sap. These trains were always met by a few clusters of round-shouldered relatives who watched the disembarkment and then hurried from box to box, examining the names and rank numbers too casually scrawled in charcoal on the lids. And then, when they found their own, their lips would tighten and they would haul the coffin onto a handcart and wheel it away. Only those who could pay for the transportation and whose son or husband or father was still relatively intact got the body back. The rest, the missing and the blown-to-pieces and the unidentifiable, were buried without ceremony in the fields of France.

It was late October 1918. Every night for the last week, Lilly had come to the station after her shift had finished. By this time it had already been dark for hours, an India-ink dark that seemed to saturate the night until the city and the sky blotted into each other. Inside the station, however, the light was a grayish orange color partly lit by the greasy filaments of the all-night café. Children, cocooned in blankets, lay top to tail in corners like nests of rats. Women as young as twelve and as old as sixty-five offered themselves without shame or reserve price, while on the street outside, or in Friedrichstadt, or in the city parks, hundreds of teenagers, so-called line boys, coolies, and doll boys, hung around dressed in sailor suits or morning coats.

“Going somewhere, miss?” they asked her.

Lilly averted her head and kept on moving. Sometimes she squinted deliberately up at the destination board and often she glanced nervously at the station clock, but if anyone had watched her, really watched her, they would have noticed that she never bought a ticket. Instead, she paced the marble concourse where it was most brightly lit, tried to avoid eye contact, and waited.

Someone at the munitions factory had a brother at the front. He had come back on leave with a story about meeting a girl with a broken tooth who had once been a ward of St. Francis Xavier’s in Berlin. Her name was Hanne. He went back to the front with a letter. A letter came back three months later written in a hand Lilly did not recognize. It informed her that Hanne would be returning to Berlin in the last week of the month. As Lilly read the letter for a second time, she had felt a familiar swell of relief: she had found Hanne again. And now she was restless and agitated with waiting. She couldn’t stand another day, another hour, without her. Hanne was coming home. Lilly was coming home, too, for Hanne was home, or the closest thing Lilly had ever known to it. But how could she tell her about Eva, about Stefan? Where would she start? And so she decided to wipe out the whole episode, just as Eva had wiped her out. It did not happen, she told herself; I was not there.

“Miss,” a policeman called out. “The station is to be cleared. The kaiser is expected.”

Beyond him, there was already the shiver of a disturbance. Shoulders jerked in coats and handfuls of damp jacket were pulled until their seams stretched and the cotton thread snapped. A man let out an angry yell, a woman swore, a baby began to cry. And then, although she couldn’t see him, she could hear the clipped footsteps of Wilhelm II and his entourage approaching.

The war still pounded on in the East and in the West. Lilly read in the newspaper that negotiations with the Russian delegation had broken down when Trotsky had walked out. At home, a million workers in twenty cities had gone on strike, and the Spartacists were said to be plotting more demonstrations. Street battles between the reds and the whites were a daily occurrence. And then there was the influenza, the so-called Spanish flu, which came not at all from Spain but from the U.S.A., brought over by farm laborers turned soldiers. At first it was the old who died, or the very young, or the very poor. But then another strain took hold, more aggressive than the first, and wiped out scores of the young and previously healthy. At this point it had been put to the kaiser, in terms less delicate than he was used to, that the army was collapsing, that the men could no longer be trusted, that Germany was losing the war. Wilhelm II, however, would not give up. He suggested the German naval fleet might save the day and secure the country’s honor. And he insisted on a final push, another stab on the Western Front. Join the army, then, his increasingly skeptical advisers advised him. See for yourself.

Although Lilly may not have guessed it as he bowed his head and pressed a handkerchief to his eyes against the filthy air, Wilhelm II was close to breakdown as he climbed aboard the royal train, which was bound for Spa in Belgium. He did not see the young woman who watched him from behind the raised arm of a policeman. He did not know that his hasty departure from Berlin would not be brief, as he anticipated, but would in fact be permanent. And as he settled himself into the royal compartment, the train started to move forward, and he poured himself a cup of English breakfast tea, he felt a little better. He watched the blackened city hurtle by and wondered if his valet had brought biscuits.This would, however, be the last time his silver train would ever glide above the silver Spree, past Museum Island, Zoo, and Charlottenburg, and down through the Grunewald. Only a few months later, eighty wagons headed to Holland loaded up with his furniture and pictures, photographs and movies, helmets, and, in a carriage all to themselves, his three dachshunds.

Another coffin train had just pulled in on Platform Three, filling the station with steam and soot and the sour smell of hot metal. A few passengers disembarked: a couple of officers, a half-dozen white-faced nurses, and, right at the back, without a coat, Hanne Schmidt.

“Tiny Lil.” Hanne’s voice cracked and she started to cough. “Don’t kiss me, I’ve got a cold.”

When her coughing had subsided, Hanne looked around, at the squalor of the station, at the homeless, at the coffins. But she did not seem to see any of it.

“Berlin,” she said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

Lilly gave Hanne her coat, took her bag, and then guided her to the S-Bahn. And as they sat on the train as it rattled its way through the city, Lilly could not stop looking at Hanne, the way she sat with her eyes closed and her face angled toward the dull, dirty compartment light. Hanne turned and gave her a half-smile. But Lilly did not look away. If she stopped looking even for an instant, she suspected, Hanne would disappear again.

Gudrun was not pleased to see Hanne. She took in the heeled shoes, the scuffs worn almost through, the bulging carpetbag, the silk stockings, and the dress cut above the knee. She noticed the way Hanne stood with her weight all on her left leg, her right turned out just a little so the light stroked the inside of her thigh. It was obvious she was not a nurse, as she so casually claimed, but she did not take in the flush of her cheek or register its significance.

“You can stay for tonight,” she told her. “But that’s all.”

Hanne glanced around the tiny room divided in two with a blanket.

“I wasn’t planning to,” Hanne replied. “Is there anything to eat?”

“No,” said Gudrun.

Hanne sighed. And then she put her hands into the carpetbag and brought out a package wrapped in brown paper. Inside was a loaf of rough bread, some real coffee, and a couple of bashed tins.

“What’s in the tins?” Gudrun asked.

“Pâté de foie gras de Strasbourg,” Hanne replied.

“Where did you get it?” Lilly asked.

“Don’t ask,” she said as she opened the tin with a penknife. “Don’t ask.”

And so Lilly didn’t ask about her time at the front. One day, Hanne supposed, she would tell her how it had been, how she had risen quickly through the ranks to become the highest class of whore, servicing officers and generals for hard currency instead of coupons. It wasn’t unusual. She was young, she had been certified free of venereal disease by a doctor, she could carry a tune, and, after a few weeks of decent meals, she had started to put on weight. Look at what would have happened to her if she had taken Sister August’s advice, she told herself. She would have looked like Lilly and Gudrun: starving, jaundiced, poor.

But she did tell her one thing without prompting.

“I met Sister August,” Hanne said. “At the front. In a hospital. She asked about you.”

Sister August. The name gave Lilly a jolt. How long had it been? she wondered. Five years? Six? A vivid memory came back to her, a clumsy embrace in a corridor, the nun’s arms encircling her, a searching glance that seemed to read her inside and out. And she suddenly longed to see her again: her face framed by the wimple, her feet in men’s shoes. She longed to smell her clean almond smell and meet her blue-eyed gaze.

“How is she?”

“Well, she’s not a nun anymore,” Hanne said. “Now she’s just plain old Nurse von Kismet.”

Lilly tried to see Sister August in a different outfit, in civilian clothing. She remembered the night they had followed her to the Tiergarten. She had seemed like another person entirely then: an impostor, a sinister doppelgänger. But the world had turned upside down. Now Sister August didn’t exist, and the other woman did.

“The last thing I heard was that she was working on a hospital train. Somebody said it was bombed.”

Lilly’s eyes widened and two spots of color appeared in her cheeks.

“Bombed? But she’s all right, isn’t she?”

“People just disappear and you never know.” Hanne shrugged. “That’s the worst of it.”

And then she sneezed twice and spread the pieces of bread with pâté. Lilly claimed she had already eaten, but the truth was that she had lost her appetite. Gudrun and Hanne ate one, two, three, four slices, until there was nothing left but the empty tins and the inedible crust.

“That was the best meal I’ve had since my wedding day,” Gudrun said. “What did you eat on yours, Lilly? You must have had a decent meal when you got married.” And then she cleared her throat and wiped her mouth with a torn napkin, aware that she had said something she shouldn’t have.

“You’re married?” Hanne said, and looked around the room, almost as if expecting a husband to suddenly appear.

“When? Where? Who?” she asked. “And why didn’t you tell me?”

Hanne was staring at Lilly, waiting for an explanation. The room was quiet but for the small clink of plates as Gudrun began to clean up.

“He’s dead,” Lilly said simply.

It was the first time she had said the words aloud. But now that she had, there was nothing more to say. There was no body, no funeral, and no gravestone.There was nothing left but a cheap gold ring and a sharp twist of sadness. It was a marriage that had been over almost before it had even begun.

Hanne lit a cigarette, a strong, filterless French cigarette from a packet she had in her pocket.

“What was his name?” Hanne asked through curls of bitter gray smoke.

“Stefan,” Lilly said.

“I’m sorry,” said Hanne.

But it was clear by her face that she was not. Hanne had become numb to death, anesthetized to loss, hardened to stories of tragedy and misfortune. And if she ever cried for a soldier, a friend, or a lover who had lost his or her life, it was because this new bereavement stirred up memories of old, and she would find herself crying for herself, for the little girl who had lost her mother at the age of twelve.

“I’ll make the coffee, shall I?” Gudrun whispered.

tefan Mauritz’s position as a stretcher bearer had been filled by the time he returned to the Somme. Instead, he was sent to what was left of a small French town called Beaumont-Hamel as a reinforcement. The British bombardment of German positions had been relentless. Over a million shells had been dropped. The number of known dead on the German side was already more than half a million. His commanding officer hadn’t looked him in the eye when he gave him his orders. They both knew it was practically a death sentence.

When Cavalry Officer Mauritz arrived in September 1916, torrential rain had been falling on France for two days. It had comforted him at first: the memory of the rain on his wedding day was still fresh in his mind. But then when his uniform was soaked through and could not be dried, when everything—his clothes, his face, his food—was covered in mud, when the trenches, no-man’s-land, the world, was sliding with filthy water, he began to curse the rain and believe that it had become deliberately malicious.

One day, in the middle of the afternoon, the rain stopped and the sun came out. A blackbird started to sing. The churned-up fields, the pools of mud, the rubble of the town looked almost polished. And he noticed that the broken stones sparkled with particles of quartz. Maybe, the thought crept into his head, maybe I will survive this war and return to Berlin, to Lilly, to my wife.

“Attention,” the commanding officer hissed. “Enemy advancing.”