The Glimmer Palace (47 page)

Despite the weather, there were fewer people strolling in the streets or trying to catch the last of the sunshine than Lilly would have expected. Instead they huddled in groups, talking. At every street corner was a clutch of policemen. An army truck driven by a soldier in a green uniform passed by. And then another. She was suddenly apprehensive. Although the streets looked familiar, she didn’t know where she was anymore.

“Where are you going?” she asked the driver.

He glanced at her in the rearview mirror, and in that fraction of a second that their eyes met, she could see that he was scared too.

“To the Esplanade,” he said. “The Esplanade Hotel.”

He swung right and she recognized the raised platforms of Zoo Station. In heavy traffic, the car inched across the busy junction and accelerated into the Tiergarten. She sat back and made herself relax; she knew where she was again. It would be fine.

“That’s right,” she said. “The Esplanade.”

As they approached the burned-out Reichstag building, the number of military personnel grew larger.There was the smell of cordite in the air.

“Who are those soldiers?” Lidi asked the driver. He hesitated and glanced back at her over his shoulder before he spoke.

“The ones in green?” he replied. “Göring’s men.”

Whole streets were cordoned off and soon there were no civilians on the street at all, just soldiers and policemen.

“Von Schleicher and his wife have been shot,” he explained.

“The politician?”

The driver nodded.

“In the back of the head,” he added briefly.

And then he was silent, as if he had said too much and immediately regretted it.

“But you mustn’t ask so many questions,” he suddenly said, without looking back at her. “This isn’t America.”

The hotel suite was full of flowers, orchids and lilies in vivid orange and pale lemon yellow. One basket was from Goebbels, another from Mr. Leyer. The porter placed her bags beside the bed but wouldn’t accept a tip. And then, just after he had closed the door, came the unmistakable sound of gunfire. She jumped, despite herself.

It was the last day in June 1934. Hindenburg, the elderly president of Germany, was confined to a wheelchair at his country estate. He would be dead in a matter of months. At Nazi headquarters, there were rumors of a left-wing plot to overthrow Hitler by the party’s own army, the SA, or the Brownshirts. And so
Kolibri
, or Humming-bird, the code word had been given. Hundreds of men and women would be shot that night, half of whom had sworn allegiance to the Führer. Ernst Röhm, the chief of the storm troopers, was dragged from the bed he was sharing with a young boy, imprisoned for two days, and then shot in the chest at point-blank range after he refused to commit suicide. In Berlin, one hundred fifty of his deputies were rounded up and murdered by Hitler’s personal bodyguards, the SS, at the cadet school in Lichterfelde.

And there were more.
Kolibri.
The names on a list were to be eliminated one by one: Gustav von Kahr, who had opposed Hitler during the Beer Hall Putsch of 1923; Father Bernhard Stempfle, who had taken some of the dictation for Hitler’s book
Mein Kampf
; Gregor Strasser, one of the original members of the Nazi Party and formerly next in importance to Hitler; Berlin SA leader Karl Ernst, who was involved in torching the Reichstag building in February; Catholic leader Dr. Erich Klausener; and Dr.Willi Schmidt, a music critic who had no political allegiances with anyone but who unfortunately shared the name with someone who had.

But in the softly lit suite on the third floor of the Esplanade Hotel with its huge bed, marble-topped tables, and brocade-lined walls, as the day faded outside and the streetlights came on, humming with deep pink, Lilly picked up a card written in a familiar hand and opened it. And then nothing could have convinced her that she was not in the right place at the right time.

I will come at ten,
wrote Ilya Yurasov.
Wait up for me.

The deal had taken months to map out. She had employed an agent, and a lawyer recommended by Mr. Leyer. Finally, after screeds of correspondence by proxy with Ufa and the Ministry of Propaganda, she had requested a modest fee and a series of nonnegotiable clauses for one film with the option to make more.

While the two sides were battling out the deal, the days and weeks and months had dragged past until she could hardly bear it, until she would have signed anything if it had been offered. And then she could wait no longer and against her lawyer’s advice she bought her train ticket, headed from California to LaSalle Street Station in Chicago, and then, after a wait of two hours, boarded another train for New York’s Grand Central. But the trains, despite the fact that they were advertised as “express,” took five days to travel from one coast to the other.To Lilly, they seemed to crawl inch by inch across the wide, flat plains of America, loitering at red lights in the middle of nowhere and languishing in dusty provincial stations, even though no one ever climbed on and no one ever disembarked, as if they had sensed her irritation and were conspiring to vex her. After another wait, another restless night, she had boarded an ocean liner and spent ten days watching the sea boil and counting the minutes as they slipped past, her body aching with impatience. And now, finally—finally—she was back in Germany with a special visa from the Ministry of Propaganda and a contract pending signature.

Berlin rolled out beneath her, the wide expanse of Potsdamer Platz, the newly constructed multistory department store beyond, the brightly lit avenues, and the wide
Strassen
that radiated so confidently north, south, east, west, into acres of shadow. And then it started to rain, lightly at first and then so heavily that it was almost as if the whole city had been thrown out of focus.

part from the crumpled bunch of mimosa, nothing about Ilya was the same. It had been more than six years. His beautiful dark curls had been cut close to his head and were now flecked with gray. His face was so thin that his cheekbones protruded and his lips seemed fuller. He had the stubble of a beard. And there was something static in his manner that was new, a kind of inner stillness. He was also soaked to the skin.

Lillushka—she was always Lillushka with him—was the opposite: she couldn’t stop moving, as if all that traveling had left its mark on her and she was still in motion despite herself. She closed the door, took his coat, poured him a drink, took the flowers—which, compared to the rest of the blooms that filled the room, were embarrassingly modest—and started to rip off the outer leaves. Her hands, she noticed suddenly, had become wrinkled from the American sun.

“I’ve never seen such rain . . .” she started to say.

Ilya gently took the flowers from her and put them down.Then he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her neck, her throat, her mouth. And the years telescoped and meant nothing.

“Ilya,” she said, and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Ilya.” To Ilya Yurasov, Lilly, his Lillushka, looked exactly the same. He experienced the same sweet note in the belly when she looked at him, the same cantering of his heart, and the same constriction of his chest. Her clothes smelled different, of soap powder and sunshine, but her skin, her lips, tasted just as they had all those years before. He pulled back and looked into her large gray eyes, the gray eyes that in recent years he had gotten to know so well from her films, the films that he had threaded up and watched over and over; and although he was an atheist, in his head he thanked God several times over.

“You shouldn’t have come,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.”

“I couldn’t wait any longer,” she whispered. “I can’t wait any longer. But look at you, you’re soaked right through. Take off your wet clothes.”

“Always so impatient,” he replied. And then he laughed out loud and she saw he had barely changed at all.

As Ilya lay in Lilly’s bed and waited for her to join him, he hoped nobody had seen him in the lobby.The situation had changed since his last letter. Most of the Russians in Berlin had already moved on, to Paris, to New York, to London. Since the Nazis took over, he had been watched. He was an anomaly; could he be a Communist agitator? A militant Jew? He refused to join the Reich Film Guild, and when precensorship had been introduced a few months before, and every single process from screenplay to edit had to be examined, he had been given a list of conditions that he knew he couldn’t meet. He had been dropped from his own project.

Without an income, he had lost his apartment and moved on to Mr. Leyer’s floor. He had been offered work in Paris by the Alliance Cinématographique Européenne, but his exit visa had been denied. And then he received the telegram.

Coming home stop,
it read.
Arriving on June 30 stop. Love your Lilly stop.

His Lilly paced up and down that overblown, overheated hotel room still fully dressed. She was suddenly nervous. Had she aged? Was she still desirable? Did he still find her attractive? He was watching her with a look of such peace on his face that she never forgot it.

“I feel as if I’m dreaming,” he said. “Prove to me I’m not.”

She pulled her shoes off, unbuttoned her clothes, let them drop to the floor, and lay down beside him until there was not an inch where his body did not touch hers, and finally she was completely still.

“Welcome home,” he whispered.

The next morning it was still raining, the sky the color of tin. As Ilya slept, Lilly listened to the sounds of the rush-hour traffic, of pneumatic tires on a layer of water, of the screech of the tram track and the whistle of a policeman overlapped with the rattle of a room service cart in the corridor. How could so many years have passed? It was inconceivable. But now, she thought, all that time seems no more than a blink.

“Lillushka, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

Ilya was awake now, his eyes open, his gaze serious.

“If you appear in their films,” he whispered, “it will look as if you condone all they do, as if you agree with all their policies, all their sanctions. And all the work you have ever done will fade into insignificance. This will be what you are remembered for: the actress who came back from America for Joseph Goebbels.”

“I’ll do one.We won’t come back.”

“One is enough.Your reputation will be ruined.You will be a Nazi by association. And even if you never make another film again, you might be vilified, demonized, discriminated against. Think about it, Lilly. Is it really worth it?”

“Some things are more important,” she whispered. “I’ve made up my mind.”

As the rain fell outside, Ilya watched its liquid reflection stream down the brocaded surface of the walls. And although he wanted so much to believe that Lilly’s plan could work, he found himself unable to. The Nazis were not fools.You didn’t strike a deal with Goebbels and expect to win. But to dream of another future, to be so close to such faith in the impossible, was transcendent. She had come back for him. And that was all that mattered.

“Thank you,” he said.

And then she kissed his tears away.

The marriage took place that evening in a tiny church in Schöneberg, a church that was blown to bits by a bomb in 1945. A record remains, however, in the registry in the city hall on Schloss-platz. Lilly wore a cream-colored satin dress; Ilya, a borrowed suit. Mr. Leyer was their only witness. After a swift glass of French Champagne, it was decided that it would be safer for both of them if they didn’t see each other until it was time to leave.

The Hotel Kaiserhof was on Wilhelmsplatz, opposite the Imperial Chancellery. She took the lift to the third floor. When the doors opened, a man was waiting for her with a clipboard. She was shown into a darkened suite at the very end of the corridor and invited to sit down. A pair of wooden doors with polished brass handles divided the rooms. The curtains were closed even though it was mid-morning. A white screen was hanging on one wall and below it there was a tray with tea and cakes. She poured herself a cup of tea but did not drink it. She picked up a cake but could not eat it. Within a minute or two she realized she was not alone. Suddenly the bedroom doors flew open and a small, dark man came through, adjusting his collar.There was something wrong in his gait and her eye was immediately drawn to his built-up shoe. It was Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin.

Goebbels had just heard that Hitler had personally commissioned two more films from the former actress Leni Riefenstahl, and Goebbels was in a cantankerous mood. She was going to produce and direct so-called film monuments recording the Nazi Party’s conventions. He couldn’t help feeling suspicious of the woman. Wasn’t direction and production a man’s job? And since he was minister of propaganda, why hadn’t he been consulted? But now he was bringing back a German film star from America. This was something the Führer couldn’t ignore. This would be his trump card, upstaging all Riefenstahl’s expensive triumphalism.

“What a pleasure to meet you at last,” he said. “Joseph Goebbels.”

Even though they had in fact met before, the minister of propaganda held out his right arm and shook her hand. In his left hand he held a scrap of paper and a pen.

“Would you be so kind?” he asked, and handed them to her.

She was so taken aback—by his appearance, by his enthusiasm, by his request—that she held the paper and pen in her hand for a moment and did not respond.

“I should really say that it is for my daughters,” he added with a smile when he noticed her hesitation. “But that’s not the truth and I’m sure you’d suspect otherwise. I am, I confess, a fan. If you would . . . an autograph?”

“Of course,” she answered.

Lilly was about to sign the piece of paper when he reached across and took her wrist. He turned it over and examined the white skin of her arm and her turquoise veins.

“You know, you look different from the way I remember you,” he said. “You are dark, not fair.You have large eyes, a small mouth, high cheekbones.”

Her heart started to race, her palms to sweat. And she was suddenly sure that it was a trap: that they knew she was half Jewish, that everything she had planned, all she had risked, was for nothing.