Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The First Spark
Falling Light
Seven Hundred Kilometers
The Winter Garden
Tingle-tangle
The Blue Cat
The Countess
A Poet’s Soul
Thunder Clouds
In Arcadia
The Uhlan
The Last Train
The Screen Test
The Studio
The Russian
The Inflation
Kinetic
The Empty Chair
America
In Berlin
The Final Frame
Acknowledgements
List of Illustrations
RIVERHEAD BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Copyright © 2008 by Beatrice Colin
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Published simultaneously in Canada
For a list of illustration credits, see page 403.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Colin, Beatrice.
The glimmer palace / Beatrice Colin.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-594-48985-3
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
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For Veronica and Andrew
All that is transitory is only an image.
—GOETHE
The First Spark
Berlin, a word that chimes in your chest like a bell. Berlin, a place so bright it pulls down the stars and wears them around its neck. Berlin, a city built on the scattered sand of circuses and the scuffed floorboards of theater spectaculars. Roll up, roll up to see the living photographs. Max Skladanowsky and his brother Eugen, still wearing black around their eyes, out of habit rather than necessity, present their electromechanical effects.The spectacle of the year, the highlight of 1895, guaranteed.
The houselights dim, and the air is filled with the sour taste of hot celluloid and blue smoke from a hundred burning cigarettes. A blond girl looms up suddenly on a white sheet. She laughs, a flickery shiver on the taut cotton; she seems to speak but her voice is mute, until, quite unexpectedly, a black patch appears where her heart should be and she disappears into the burning hole in seconds.
The audience gasps, and one child chokes on his chewed-up ticket. The couple in the front row insist it is a trick with mirrors; a woman in a red hat peeks behind the sheet but finds no one there. And all the while, trickles of kohl from India fall down Eugen’s ashen face as he comes to realize he’ll never again see the girl he left behind in Lübbenau.
Lilly Nelly Aphrodite was born in the final moments of the last hour of the nineteenth century. She was caught in a dark blue handwoven cloth threaded with real gold instead of the obligatory white receiving shawl and was declared perfect by everyone around the bedside, including the landlady and the Bavarian lover. Unfortunately, the dye, though a beautiful shade, was not fast and the cloth stained her creased and slippery newborn skin.
“She’s blue,” her mother cooed. “How novel.”
The Bavarian lover lit a cigar and looked at his watch.
“Happy NewYear,” he said through a mouthful of smoke.
As Champagne corks popped and strangers kissed, as the Bavarian lover started to sing and the mother reapplied her French cologne, the midwife, already packing up, suddenly snatched the baby back from where she rested serenely in her cot and began to spank her violently on the bottom.The baby was not just blue, everyone noticed at once; she seemed devoid of life.
And in that tiny eternity, while the bells tolled and a million glasses clinked, while the midwife swore and shook and smacked, and tears sprang to eyes so recently crumpled up with joy, the infant seemed all but dead. And then, as hope was fading by the second and the midwife’s palm struck her chilled behind with full force for a final desperate time, she jerked twice and gasped. Air rushed into her brand-new lungs, a blast of cool with a hint of cigar, her eyes opened, and she stared straight into the face of a clock. It was one minute past twelve. She took another mouthful of air and let out a high-pitched scream. Her skin was still blue but no one could doubt that she was now very much alive.
Although the date of her birth was officially the thirty-first of December, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite’s first breath was taken in the twentieth century. It was as if, the midwife said as she tried to console the child’s mother, she was determined to wait. A certain willfulness was noted. And when in the coming months she screamed and sobbed and could not be comforted no matter what, her mother blamed that night, that midwife, and that handwoven cloth that she had been so stupidly sentimental to accept from her stuttering Bavarian lover and that, he eventually admitted, he had been given by a former mistress who had traveled to Constantinople and been locked in a sultan’s harem for an entire year before she managed to escape with nothing but the dress she was wearing and a suitcase full of precious cloth.
Later, much later, while her parents finally slept, the new baby lay awake and stared out at the orange sodium night. In rings around Potsdamer Platz and all along the wiggle of the river Spree, a hundred thousand electric bulbs lit up in strings. Although it has been many places at many times, Berlin at that moment was a city not built but randomly piled around the provincial capital of Prussia. It was a metropolis where smokestacks exhaled and factories whistled, where telephone wires hummed and the tracks of the underground lines shrieked with excitement with each passing train. In 1900, Berlin was a place where workers flocked in their millions to live in crowded tenements in the newly constructed suburbs and commute by tram to work. It was a city where writers and artists rented garrets and starved themselves into shape. It was a city without memory, a city without tradition; in Berlin freedom came face-to-face with casual in
difference and nobody minded what happened next.
Lilly Nelly Aphrodite was conceived in a Wanderkino, pitched in the Tiergarten, at a screening of Georges Méliès’s film Escamotage d’une dame au théâtre Robert Houdin. Tantalized by the smell of canvas and libidinous clatter of this radical new invention, her parents watched the actress Jeanne d’Alcy turn from flesh to skeleton five times before they consummated their brief acquaintance in the darkened back row beneath his greatcoat.
The Bavarian lover claimed that he was a speculator about to invest his fortune in German topicalities. In fact, he had little interest in cinema and that day he had merely ducked into the tent to hide from a woman he had had an affair with a few years before. But fate, if you believe in it, had placed the man from the South in the seat next to the pretty young actress. And as the rain thrummed relentlessly against the fly sheet and the Frenchwoman disappeared into thin air all over again, it seemed suddenly as if death was much closer than either of them had realized and the moment, the flickering moment, was all either had to lose.
It was an illusion, of course, created within Méliès’s camera using stop-motion photography. By the time the pregnancy was diagnosed, it was much too late to halt it. Although he initially suggested otherwise, however, the philandering Bavarian wasn’t about to play the responsible father to his illegitimate offspring. Likewise, the actress wasn’t ready to be a mother to anyone.
The baby’s first home was a cramped apartment two blocks south of the Kurfürstendamm. Her mother, a writer, actress, and occasional member of a cabaret group in the vein of Munich’s own Eleven Executioners, was seldom home by bedtime and seldom awake by lunch.When the two were together, her mother smothered her with kisses but had little patience for games of peekaboo or catch. At first she had tried to write the opus that had been sprawling in her mind for years while her daughter clambered on her lap and screamed for milk. Ink was spilled, manuscripts rendered illegible, and white dresses were ruined. And so in homage to all the creativity that had been wasted, and faced with a spoiled set of clothes, she decided to dye the lot and dress her baby in black. “I’m sorry,” people would mutter as they passed her in the street, thinking the infant the victim of some awful tragedy or other. “Me too,” replied the mother through the twisted corner of her crimson-painted mouth.
As for her father, his supposed speculations took up all week and most of the weekends as well. And so Baby, as she was known briefly, was taken to theatrical auditions and abandoned in the stalls. She rapidly perfected a high-pitched screech that nobody, apart from her mother, could bear for more than a minute. Eventually arrangements were made and Baby was cared for by the landlady or, if she wasn’t available, the philosophy student on the third floor. The landlady had too much experience with infants and used to stick her in a high-sided clothes basket from which Baby could not escape. Once, exhausted from screaming, she fell asleep, was covered up with soiled sheets, was carried all the way to the laundry, and was just about to be thrown into a cauldron of boiling water laced with starch when someone noticed her faint but dainty snore.
The student, on the other hand, had too little experience and spent many hours pontificating on the pitfalls of humanism and dangling his silver watch chain just out of her reach until, intoxicated with the schnapps he drank to help him concentrate, he would fall asleep and leave her to crawl around his filthy floor and eat the crusts, cigarette ends, and single beads from ex-girlfriends’ dresses that he had never bothered to sweep up. It was a miracle that she survived at all.
Her mother didn’t. The Bavarian lover shot her when he came back unexpectedly and discovered her in bed with the philosophy student. The philosophy student, quoting Kierkegaard, grabbed the firearm and shot him back. Baby slept through the entire episode. She was one and a half.
Somebody from the cabaret group knew someone who knew someone else whose child had just been killed in a perambulator accident. Baby was the same sex, same age, same size—the same in everything, it was said, except in the color of her hair, which was dark instead of fair. And so, still dressed in black, which was now deemed appropriate under the circumstances, the child was shipped off to the suburbs to grow up in a dead girl’s set of clothes and renamed Dora.
The new father worked as a foreman in a factory and, at forty-three, had waited until he could provide a suitable home for his wife before he would allow her to conceive. But only once, he had clarified at the time, for reasons of safety. The house was sparsely furnished, with just a few ornaments brought from another, poorer life, that had been rationed one to each mantelpiece. Stepping inside felt like trying on a coat a few sizes too large.
Dora’s new room had a cot, a wardrobe, and a small, threadbare rug. Despite an almost tangible sense of sadness, it was always meticulously clean. Her new mother fought a daily battle with dust and the thick black dirt that was pumped out of her husband’s factory and fell on every surface like gritty rain. Each morning, after fastidiously scrubbing the floors with scalding water, she was visibly satisfied when the newfangled carpet sweeper her husband had bought for her birthday failed to pick up a single mote.
Life as Dora was not bad, just uneventful. Nothing changed but the food they ate for dinner, and even that was on a weekly rotation. When Friday came again and her new mother placed a plate of mashed whitefish and cabbage before her, Dora did not even hesitate before she launched the whole lot onto the spotless floor.
It was not that her new parents were unkind to her: they gave her every form of sustenance they could, except one. Even as a toddler, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite was aware that something was not quite right. Why did her so-called mother sob when she brushed her long dark hair? And why did they look at her with eyes half closed, as if trying to see something or someone else dressed in her clothes? She knew instinctively that these people did not belong to her, or she to them.
It was not surprising then that her terrible twos started early and never stopped. She would refuse to get dressed, eat supper, have a bath, get undressed, get out of the bath—in fact do anything she was asked to do. She left sooty black finger marks on the pristine white walls and liked to run around naked whenever visitors came for tea. Her new parents took her to the doctor, who recommended a firm hand and a hard bed.When they told him that this only made matters worse, he looked at them with pity and a visible amount of scorn. Dora could not be sent back to the place she had come from. Or could she?
The new father wrote a check equivalent to ten percent of his earnings for the next five years and finally let himself and his wife grieve for dear little dead Dora the First. The St. Francis Xavier Home for Orphaned Children agreed to take Dora the Second at the end of the week. Lilly Nelly Aphrodite, as she was named on her birth certificate, stood on the main steps with a suitcase at her feet that contained nothing more than her personal papers in a brown manila envelope. The new parents, now former, had already walked away, just as she had insisted. She clutched a present that she had promised in a rare moment of sweetness she would open once she was inside. It was from her mother’s cabaret group, who, following her fate and feeling just a little responsible—but not responsible enough to take her in themselves—had all chipped in and bought a doll with a wind-up smile.
Snow was falling gently on the blackened building. The organization was running on a skeleton staff of one elderly nun who was rushed off her feet. A seven-year-old had tried to set fire to the director’s curtains. A ten-year-old had found the trapdoor to the roof and was encouraging as many as he could to follow him up the ladder. It was, in short, chaos.
After what seemed like hours, the new orphan gave up pressing her tiny finger on the large brass doorbell. A whistle followed by a loud bang came from somewhere nearby. She turned round and looked up. In the sky above the orphanage an explosion of light illuminated the falling snow. She didn’t know it, as no one had told her, but she had arrived at St. Francis Xavier’s on her third birthday, the thirty-first of December, 1903. Finally the mai
n door opened.
“Don’t just stand there. Come inside,” said a nun in a grubby cotton apron. “Do you want to catch your death?”
Lilly Nelly Aphrodite paused before she stepped through the main door and into the darkened reception hall of the orphanage. Could death be caught, like a cold? At that point in her infancy, however, the dead were still very much alive. A trail of French scent or the drift of a Havana cigar triggered vivid memories of the kind that young children are not supposed to retain: a long-fingered hand, the graze of a newly shaved chin, a kiss on the top of her head. And somewhere deep inside her subconscious was a long-held conviction that she had merely been set aside, stowed away, put in storage for collection by her people at a later date. A snowflake landed on her bottom lip but immediately melted. She sniffed twice: cabbage and disinfectant.The nun picked up the suitcase and ushered her in with an impatient wave. Lilly Nelly Aphrodite tentatively stepped across the threshold. The main door slammed behind her with a long, low boom.
Falling Light
Meet Oskar Messter, Germany’s first King of Film. His hair may be gone and his mustache may look like two black slugs, but his eyes are filled with the kind of energy that can only be electric. He’ll talk about his inventions without a prompt—the projector, the camera, the processor, and the reproducer. “I make moving pictures too,” he’ll say.
In Messter’s new cinemas the seats are cheap and filled with loafers and losers, shopgirls and shovelers, pimps and peasants, and at the very back where it’s so dark you can hardly see your own hand let alone anyone else’s, the lovers. And on the screen?Well-turned ankles, arms and legs and vigorous exercises: Lydia Was Not Dressed to Receive Callers; Clara Forgets to Pull Down the Blinds.
Everybody thinks that Messter’s cinemas are temples of ill repute and sin. And for now everybody is right. But there’s nothing like sitting in the dark watching the world in all its shades of monochrome flicker through his spectacular invention, the picture sequencer. When Messter proclaims it the medium of the new century, it would be churlish to disagree. Long live King Messter. And long live his glorious, illustrious, magnificent screen.
The Glimmer Palace Page 1