The Glimmer Palace (7 page)

On the day she arrived, Hanne Schmidt, with dry eyes and a flat tone, had confessed that her father had spent the rent and bought her the clothes and the makeup and the shoes for a musical act, which she had performed in a local beer palace. But when the money didn’t roll in fast enough, he suggested she perform little extras with the customers after closing time as well.When she refused, he hit her. Or touched her. Or threatened to tell her mother. Eventually her mother, who worked all day in a factory, found out anyway. Nobody slept that night. As soon as the trams started to run, her father packed his bags and left. Her mother, deserted, broke, and with four children to feed, drank a bottle of rye vodka and took the easy way out.

“How old are you?” Sister August had asked.

“Almost twelve,” she had replied.

The girl had stood up and was on the point of leaving when Sister August suggested what might happen to her if she did. She spared her no details; she read out articles in the evening paper that chronicled murders, rapes, and dismemberment and then suggested that she should reconsider. Hanne Schmidt, who was by that time visibly flushed in her heavy coat, sat down again.

“What about my father?”

Sister August carefully folded up the newspapers before speaking.

“God punishes the wicked.”

Six months later, as the cabaret group, still in their costumes and greasepaint, filed out in the direction of her office, Sister August rubbed her face with her palms. She wished she still believed it was true, that the good were rewarded and the bad punished.That morning she had received a letter from the office of her order requesting that she come immediately to discuss her position. She had been at St. Francis Xavier’s for seven years. She knew that in that time the orphanage had become a major drain on the order’s limited resources. It was time, her Mother Superior wrote, to move on.

anne. Wernher Siegfried heard the name. So it was not her. He scanned the room once more. And then he saw a girl he had missed before, a girl in the back row with dark hair pulled tightly into two pigtails, her eyebrows clenched, and an expression that he recognized as matching the one on the face of the actress in the boat-house all those years before, when he had declared his undying love. This must be the girl who could be—he paused to check himself— his daughter.

“Please come this way,” said the red-eyed nun who ran the place. “The tea will be getting cold.”

As she poured him a cup of tepid English breakfast, the actor, writer, and occasional director offered to teach the children once a week, no charge. Sister August told him she would have to think about the idea carefully. She was not so naïve as to believe he wanted to do it out of the goodness of his heart. He must have another agenda. But when he went on to suggest that it could lead to a performance by the children, which could be the centerpiece of a fund-raising event, she saw that maybe this was just what she needed after all. If she could indeed raise a considerable amount of money, maybe this would prove to her order that her calling was there, in Berlin.

“But aren’t you busy?” she offered. “You must have engagements, rehearsals . . .”

“Not every day,” he replied. “I mean, I have a little time at present. You know how it is in the world of the theater. But we’ll need a budget: nothing big, just about three hundred marks.”

Sister August hemmed and hawed, she offered more cups of tea, but it was clear even to the actor that she had made up her mind. And so before she had even formally consented, he had fixed a date, the second Wednesday in January at four in the afternoon, to take the first class of a series in dramatic arts.

Wernher Siegfried smiled and slicked back his hair. He always placed a few coins in the box at the orphanage gate every time he passed on foot. Granted, it was not very often. But every time he took the elevated train along the river Spree, he thought of the actress and the baby she dressed in black and wondered how she had turned out.

His reasons for offering a class were, however, motivated mostly by self-interest. When he had gone to visit his mother that summer and found her dead and buried—he’d left no recent forwarding address—he felt suddenly and absolutely alone. He had been an only child with an elderly father, who had expired an inconsiderably short time after his birth, and a mother who had no interest in acquiring another husband or having any more children. The loneliness and longing he had felt as a child had come rushing back in one huge and engulfing wave. And then he remembered the orphan. Lilly Nelly Aphrodite could be the closest thing he had to a living relative. No wonder he had decided to seek her out, to befriend her, and then, if the circumstances were right, to unmask himself as her real father.

Tiny Lil had given up any fantasies of being claimed. Her anger had subsided but now she felt doubly bereft. Since visiting the general, Sister August had barely glanced in her direction. It was as if she had simply stopped noticing her, as if she had become someone not entirely there, invisible.

The night after the Christmas show, however,Tiny Lil recalled the effect Hanne’s singing had had on the nun. She had watched the way Sister August’s eyes fixed and observed the way her head rose and fell, just a fraction, to the melody of the song. Even though she tried to hide it, her brow was furled, her face was flushed; nothing could drag her gaze away from the girl on the stage; she was captivated, immersed, spellbound. And Tiny Lil lay and tried to imagine how it must feel to be at the very center of her focus.

At the other end of the bed, Hanne wasn’t asleep. Tiny Lil could tell by her breathing.

“Where did you learn to do that?” Tiny Lil whispered. “To sing?”

“Can’t remember,” Hanne said.

To be a child is to be absolutely without power. At St. Xavier’s, the children had no choice in anything, from the food they ate to the clothes they wore. The only capacity they had was in whom they chose to love. Tiny Lil’s shoulders began to shake despite herself. She sobbed silently into her pillow, her mouth jammed up against the cotton so that no one would hear her or tease her or tell on her.

“Don’t cry,” Hanne whispered. “She’s only a nun.”

But Tiny Lil wouldn’t or couldn’t stop. Hanne sat up, sighed, and blew her hair out of her face. And then she crawled up the bed and climbed in at the other end, Tiny Lil’s end. At first they lay back-to-back, spine to spine, until Tiny Lil’s sobs subsided. And then Hanne rolled round and laid her face against Tiny Lil’s shoulder and her arm across her belly and almost immediately fell asleep. Hanne’s cheek was warm and her arm was heavy. Tiny Lil lay as still as she could, aware that any movement might wake her and she would move away. And then, as she slowly succumbed to the rhythm of Hanne’s breathing and the heat of the body next to hers, she, too, slipped into a dreamless, subterranean state. They woke early the next morning in exactly the same position, neither one having shifted even one centimeter.

On the second Wednesday in January, twenty children aged from seven to eleven waited patiently in a classroom. The Shakespearean costumes hung limply on a rail. The room was cold, as one of the teachers, a philosopher who had spent all day talking about Hegel, had insisted on a window being opened. Time ticked by. At half past four, they realized that the actor wasn’t coming. Two bottles of brandy the night before with a dancer from Dresden had wiped clean his memory. He did remember three days later and made his way to the orphanage immediately with a scrawny bunch of daffodils and multiple excuses.

The following week ten children including Tiny Lil waited for the actor in the freezing-cold classroom. Although he was hungover, he was just ten minutes late this time. He looked at his possible daughter. She looked back.

“Well, well, well,” he said. “Anybody read any Grimm? Or maybe we should do a few musical numbers instead.”

It was soon clear that the cabaret artist had absolutely no experiencein teaching children. Although he was a member of a troupe, he took no part in devising anything, either. They spent the first class learning a song called “The Major’s Pants,” which he only half remembered. It was no fun for anyone.

“I don’t think Sister August would like us to sing about underwear,” said his possible daughter.

She had a disarming manner, he noted. Her large gray eyes seemed to bore a hole into his skull.

“She might think it’s funny,” he replied, and laughed.

Judging by the children’s response, that might not be so. He rubbed his chin with his hand. His possible daughter didn’t seem to like him.This was something he hadn’t foreseen.

“Well, if anyone has any suitable ideas, then please tell me,” he said.

The next week Wernher Siegfried had an even worse hangover, caused, he had decided when he woke up, by the anxiety of the situation.

His possible daughter was waiting for him, clutching a sheaf of paper.

“I think we should do a play,” she said.

“A play,” he said in a patronizing tone.

“Yes. I’ve written one,” said Tiny Lil. “But you have to promise me that it will be a secret.”

The day after his first visit, Tiny Lil spent the afternoon in the orphanage library, a room under the stairs that had been set up in the last century and rarely visited since. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for until she found it. But she did, at the back of a musty old volume, in a section where the pages had never been read and had to be torn apart with a finger.

And so he didn’t tell Sister August that the orphans were not rehearsing a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm, as she had suggested, and were in fact working on a play written by Tiny Lil. For his part, Wernher was baffled and yet charmed by his possible daughter’s choice of material. And although he found her pious and uncooperative, stubborn and single-minded, he did his best to be helpful by donating props, suggesting staging, and even offering to play the part of the king.

It was also Wernher Siegfried who showed her how to use her face. Like her mother, she had high cheekbones and a small, determined mouth. But, unlike her mother, she had those eyes, eyes that could reveal everything, or nothing.

“Acting is a language,” he told her. “A silent language. Speak with your eyes.”

One stifling August afternoon eight months later, thirty dutiful adults sat on children’s chairs in the gym hall.The orphans who were not in the play filed in and sat on the floor in front of the stage. Sister August stood at the back along with the director and another brand-new secretary.

“So, which one of Grimm’s tales is it to be?” asked the secretary.

“I’m not sure,” the nun replied.

“You haven’t seen it?” she asked.

“It’s a secret. I wasn’t allowed to.”

Sister August stared at the red velvet curtain of the makeshift stage with only a little trepidation. She had grown to dislike the actor, but she had trusted him. Surely he wouldn’t let her down. She had been so preoccupied with the coming battle with her order that she had spent her afternoons writing out invitations and had not set foot in the class for dramatic arts. Here was the chance to prove that what she was doing in St. Francis Xavier’s was progressive rather than conservative, liberal rather than archaic, secular rather than religious.

The general and his entourage had arrived along with a delegation from the cathedral. So, too, had industrialists and businessmen, heiresses and minor politicians. A minute before the play was due to begin, a group of performers from the cabaret group hurried in and made a great fuss looking for seats.The general, much to his chagrin, was made to stand up and sit down three times.

In a broom cupboard that had been transformed into a changing room, Tiny Lil looked at herself once more in the full-length mirror. She wore a long flowing white dress, a pair of the actor’s old boots painted gold, and a cardboard crown. Her face was painted white and her mouth was a deep, dark red.

“I think it’s almost time,” said the cabaret man.

Wernher tried his best to find something he recognized in the girl in the crown. She gazed up at him and for a moment he saw an intelligence in her eyes that he knew neither he nor her mother had ever had. Her eyes settled on his chin. Instinctively he covered it with his hand. Now he wasn’t so sure she was his after all.

“Don’t be nervous,” she said.

But he felt extremely uneasy.

“In the absence of any printed matter that is the more usual means of presentation in the theatrical medium,” announced Wernher Siegfried as he took to the stage, a section of the gymnasium recently delineated by white paint, “may I present the stage highlight of 1911:
The Miracle of Saint Wilgefortis
.”

The audience, who had grown a little impatient in seats too small for their adult bottoms, sighed, squirmed a few times, and then settled down. They patted their checkbooks in pockets or bags and calculated the least they could get away with without embarrassment.

“Well, this is a surprise,” whispered the director to the nun.

Sister August didn’t appear to hear him. The curtains were pulled aside to reveal a painted castle wall. Tiny Lil took the stage in her crown and golden boots. For a few seconds she looked out at the blur of faces in the crowd and instantly forgot her opening line.What was she doing there? Why had she let the actor persuade her to take the lead part? And then the sun came out and a beam of light fell through the cupola above. Suddenly the actor’s words came back to her: Acting is a language; speak with your eyes. And so she took a deep breath, stepped into the light, and lifted her eyes.

“Oh, Father, don’t make me marry him!” she cried out. “He’s old, he’s ugly, and I am chaste.”

“What d’ya mean, chaste?” roared the cabaret performer, now dressed in a long red cloak he had borrowed from a production of
Henry VI
. “I am the king of Portugal and you are my daughter.You’ll do as I say.”

Siegfried, an actor of only moderate ability, hammed it up so much that Tiny Lil had to take a moment before she could continue.

“I am a Christian, sire. And I am married to God.”

The king laughed so long and loud that some of the younger orphans in the front row started to whimper.