There is a single photograph of Lilly Nelly Aphrodite, or Tiny Lil, as she was known then, as a child. Third from the right in the second row from the front, she wears a gray dress and her dark hair has been braided and arranged over the right shoulder.While many of the children’s faces that surround her are rendered illegible by the smudge of movement, Tiny Lil stands perfectly still and stares out of the frame as if her name has just been called. Her enormous eyes are glassy clear and her mouth is resolutely closed. Her left hand clutches the pocket in her dress to hide its contents. Inside is a dead mouse that she has been trying, in vain, to bring back to life.You can just about see, if you look closely, that her knees are caked black from all the praying.
At the back, in the center of six rows of twenty children each, is Sister August. Her image is ghostly and transparent, the result of joining or leaving the group between the moment the photographer pressed his button and the twenty seconds later or so that the shutter fell. Through her chest, the open door to her office behind is clearly visible. It is filled with the pale dusty sunshine of childhood memory. The date, written in longhand in faded brown ink on the back of the print, is the twelfth of February, 1906.
“Useless,” shouted the photographer. “Is there time for one more?”
But there was not. A bell rang and the children dispersed up stairs, down corridors and through doorways until none was left except one.
“Sister says I’m to show you out,” Tiny Lil told the photographer.
He let the little girl look at his lenses while he packed up his camera. She held up a fish-eye and stared at the vaulted glass ceiling.
“Mind you, don’t drop it,” he told her.
The world was beveled. Golden light fell in wide shafts from the cupola and threw the rest of the hall into a rich, gilded darkness. Although she knew the reality was otherwise, it became the kind of space where angels and archangels or even the Virgin Mary with her beloved bundle might appear.
The photographer, a boy of seventeen who had recently set up in business and had offered to take the orphanage photo for nothing to add to his portfolio, held out his hand and waited for her to give it back.
“Everything looks different,” she said.
He glanced around the main hall. The glass ceiling was cloudy with dirt, the walls were painted a dark, shiny green, and the marble floor was dull and streaked with the gray residue of industrial-strength disinfectant. It couldn’t, he considered, look any worse.
“You can keep it if you like,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“Tiny Lil,” she replied. “Want to see my cot?”
Noting his hesitancy, she continued.
“It’s all right.They’ve all gone to Mass. I don’t need to go, because I went this morning. And besides, it’s on the way.”
Tiny Lil led the photographer through the orphanage. The hallways and stairwells were so multiple and nondescript, so dimly lit and featureless, that the photographer soon began to suspect that he was being led around in circles, which he was.Years later he would be reminded of St. Francis Xavier’s when, lost at Verdun in a maze of trenches, he turned left and right, then left and right again, as if led by a little girl wearing a gray dress. He did not hear the mortar launched by a mason’s apprentice from Aberdeen a quarter of a mile away, and the last image that raced through his head was a memory of the afternoon sun streaming onto two dozen identical cots.
“Guess which one is mine,” said Tiny Lil.
He could not.They were, you see, all the same.
After she had shown him the front door and the photographer had climbed upon his bicycle and ridden off down the driveway, Tiny Lil pulled the dead mouse out of her pocket and dropped it down a drain.Then she took out the photographer’s lens and held it, heavy, in her palm.
he certainty that her parents would come and soon collect her had taken some time to fade. The doll with the wind-up smile, however, was stolen the day after she arrived by an eight-year-old girl with a harelip. After several inconsolable hours, she snatched a small brown woolen bear from a six-year-old who had also just been admitted after losing both parents to diphtheria. Earless and eyeless, with one leg coming loose, the bear was the only toy that the bereaved child had been allowed to bring. Hugging the substitute to her chest and finally able to sleep,Tiny Lil breathed in the germs that for some reason the toy bear’s owner was immune to, succumbed to diphtheria herself, and nearly died.
The bear was burned and the doll was buried by its harelipped thief, who intended to dig it up later.Tiny Lil never saw the six-year-old again; she had been adopted by a distant relative from Hamburg who instantly presented her with a brand-new bear that he had bought that morning in Hertzog’s department store. But Child 198, as she was labeled on her arrival, spent six weeks in isolation in the orphanage infirmary. There were times when it was proclaimed that she would not last the night. Last rites were read no fewer than three times. And yet, with what the doctor could only put down to constitutional irregularities, Child 198 recovered despite the odds stacked against her. As she recuperated she insisted on lemonade every day. When it was decided that tap water would be adequate, she lapsed back into a critical condition, forcing the doctor to prescribe her favorite drink on demand.
Later, all she could remember about her illness were the upside-down clouds that raced across a clean blue sky, the smell of damp cotton sheets, the sharp tang of lemons, and the sweetness of her own sick breath. It was here, however, that she started to suspect that the specters of her parents might never become fully realized again after all. If so, why hadn’t they come when she cried for them? Where were their cigar-scented kisses and long-fingered, perfumed hands when she had needed them the most?
“What’s an orphan?” she asked the nurse one day.
The nurse, a woman who had six children of her own and was unshakably unsentimental, explained.
“Am I one?” she asked.
The nurse pretended not to hear the question. That was answer enough.
When she was completely well again, Tiny Lil, as the nurse had named her, was led back to the dormitory and given a cot at the very end of the room, opposite the bathroom.
“Your friends will be glad to have you back,” said the nurse with a pat.
She smiled and hoped it was so. But Tiny Lil did not have any friends. The other three-year-olds glanced at her with a mixture of schadenfreude and contempt. Who could forget the bear-snatching incident? And rumors about her lemonade habit had spread. Besides, everyone had a best friend—or the next best thing, a brother or a sister—already.
Tiny Lil lacked a partner for the compulsory two-by-two crocodile formation, she had no one to play with when the weather was fine, and she sat facing a wall at mealtimes. And so she spent much of her time alone or, if she was especially unlucky, paired up with a couple to make a threesome.
The thick black pipes rattled and gulped along the dormitory walls as she listened to one of the twins pretend to read the single book all three had been issued before bedtime.
“May I have a look?” she asked in her nicest voice.
“The Virgin Mary came to me in a vision and said only good girls are allowed to read the book,” said Isa, the twin with the book on her lap.
“You’re going to come to a bad end,” said Ava, the other twin. “Everybody says so.”
The first blow hit Isa smack on the nose; the second caught Ava across the cheek. Tiny Lil had both eyes screwed shut, was holding one thick blond plait from each twin in each hand, and was pulling as hard as she could when her fists were prised open by the nurse.
“That’s no way to behave,” the nurse said.
She opened her eyes. The twins were red-faced and yelling. The book was lying facedown on the floor.The nurse, with her cold hands and her soapy smell, was kneeling down in front of her, so close that the thought occurred to Tiny Lil that the rise and fall of the nurse’s soft padded breast was the perfect place to lay her head, if only for a
moment. The nurse, as if suddenly aware of what Tiny Lil was thinking, took her by both shoulders and shook her.
“If you ever do that again,” she said, “I’ll have to report it. Understand?”
Tiny Lil gulped a mouthful of air and leaned into the nurse’s grip, willing her to not let go, not yet.The nurse stood up and clapped her hands.
“Lights out. And stop making such a racket,” she told the twins.
Tiny Lil’s shoulder’s still felt aglow long after the nurse had strode out of the dormitory and switched off the lights. In the dark, the twins whispered their grievances to each other; three beds down, a girl climbed into bed with her elder sister; in the far corner, two teenagers sat up and shared a cigarette. And slowly the glow began to fade. Eventually, the “smokes” were stubbed out and the chatter stopped, but Tiny Lil couldn’t sleep. By the time that the birds started to sing and the room lightened, she had a plan. She would pair herself with the only other female in the building who did not have a partner: the other new arrival, the nun, the tall one.
Sister August, real name Lotte von Kismet, was six-foot-two and had been so since she was fourteen. Socially marooned by her height and consequently rendered invisible to the opposite sex, her long limbs and large feet were invariably too big for the styles her mother had once ordered from Paris, no matter how many times they were altered.
“She looks like a man dressed up,” her father had carelessly commented when he thought she was out of earshot.
Despite the fact that her skin was perfect, her face finely drawn, and her eyes the color of bluebells, Lotte’s heart had been broken more than once by young men who simply failed to notice her. She began to believe that she was sexless, unfeminine, inelegant, and that she would never produce any children of her own. It wasn’t just her own experience; several maiden aunts of a similar height had spent their lives stooping or permanently sitting down, dressed up in altered clothes, waiting.
When she reached the age of eighteen and despite the fact that she had been brought up as a Protestant, Lotte was struck by the certainty that she must become a Catholic nun. Looking back, she guessed it was partly an act of revenge against her father, a military adviser to the kaiser, who regarded Catholicism as an enemy of the empire. Against her family’s wishes and after having learned, by letter, that she would inherit nothing, Lotte was admitted into the Sisters of St. Henry, an order based in Munich, whose mission included sheltering disgraced women and abandoned orphans.
It was a huge relief to take off her corset, throw away her stockings, and put on the novice’s white shift. She wore men’s shoes, which were comfortable and flat. She tucked her hair into her wimple and, because she wasn’t obliged to twist it painfully in rags, slept well for the first time since childhood. And when she took her vows, she didn’t feel subjugated but liberated.
After ten years in the convent office, stamping papers and stuffing envelopes, Lotte had been posted to Berlin. She started on the first day of spring, 1904, at the St. Francis Xavier Home for Orphaned Children. Before she arrived, she had visualized the institution situated in a leafy suburb. She had half imagined herself surrounded by an adoring crowd of pretty blond children, a ministering angel in a starched white apron. As she approached the blackened building with its gloomy wooden door and filthy glass, however, a dead swallow plummeted onto the gravel in front of her. A window on the third floor was wide open. Coming from inside, she could hear the sounds of adolescent laughter and the ping of rubber stretched and then released.
“You!” shouted Sister August as soon as a boy appeared at the window, even though she was not entirely sure that he was the one who had fired the makeshift catapult and killed the bird. “I want you down here—now!”
There was something in the tone of her voice, maybe directly inherited from her father, that demanded obedience. In under a minute the boy was there, with his head bowed and his cap in his hands. He was about eight, with huge ears that glowed red in the light and a ring of grime on his neck.
“I want you to bury this bird,” she said. “And then I want you to find out everything you can about swallows and come and tell me.”
The boy looked up at her in amazement.
“You mean you don’t want me to say one hundred Hail Marys?” he muttered.
“Not today,” she replied. “But first I want you to have a bath.”
The memory of Sister August’s arrival never left the child who was known as Tiny Lil. From the moment she had hung up her coat, the nun ruled over the orphanage with a bar of green carbolic soap in one hand and a bunch of keys in the other. The nun whose position she had been sent to fill had spent most of her time fretting and scolding in a tone of voice to which nearly all the children had grown deaf; any notions of discipline or hygiene had been systematically unheeded. Food had gone missing on a daily basis from the kitchen, there was never any soap in the bathroom, and anything that was small enough to fit in a pocket rarely remained in the orphanage for long.
Decades later, Tiny Lil could picture Sister August as she presided over bedtime. Scrubbed so clean their faces shone, with their hair combed and their prayers learned by heart, the younger children looked almost too good to be true. Likewise, with the pale northern sun framing her face and turning her eyelashes gold, the nun looked as if she were an actress playing a part.
In reality, as she marched up and down the hall with her key chain swinging and her face set into an expression that revealed that she would rather die than admit defeat, the new nun seemed to have more in common with the real Joan of Arc than the actress Renée Falconetti, who was to play the doe-eyed martyr in the film version in 1928.
Sister August was determined to stand against the complacency of the establishment and do what had never been done before at St. Francis Xavier’s: put the children’s interests first. Thus, to protect her charges from themselves, she introduced communal prayer time, installed locks on every exit and cupboard, and slept with the keys beneath her pillow. God and prayer had their place, she had privately decided, but so did propriety, a clean environment, and a decent diet. With all opportunities and temptations eliminated, the incidents of theft dwindled to almost zero, and the food budget of three hundred marks a month went much further.
And every single pfennig was desperately needed. St. Francis Xavier’s was a holding bay for an ever-increasing number of children who were too old or unruly to be considered for adoption. Infertile couples in search of the child they desired but could not produce did occasionally come in for a look, but they all usually headed over to St. Mary’s Hospital in Alexanderplatz, where the babies were new and untainted by tragedy or neglect.
Located just off the Altonaer Strasse, between the river Spree and the Tiergarten, St. Francis Xavier’s backed right onto the elevated lines of the S-Bahn. Commuters shivered as they thundered past its sooty walls. Occasionally they caught a low-wattage glimpse of children lining up for baths or a meal and vowed to place a couple of coins in the box provided at the gate next time they passed on foot.
Five stories high and built on a swamp, the orphanage was squat and barrel-chested despite its size. Constructed for the purpose by an altruistic factory owner who had nowhere to put all the bastard children of his employees, St. Francis Xavier’s was originally designed for a smaller number of children on a much larger plot of land.
Tiny Lil used to wonder why the garden stopped so abruptly only a few meters from the back of the building. Sometimes she imagined that it would almost be possible to leap from a window, land on a train carriage, climb inside, and be carried off to another life.
The reason for the S-Bahn’s proximity, however, was that in 1878 Otto von Bismarck had given the go-ahead for the elevated railway, which would, he planned, run right across the factory owner’s plot. He offered reasonable compensation and promised that the factory owner’s name would be immortalized forever as a station. By the time the line had been built, however, Bismarck had changed his mind and the fac
tory owner was dead. But his name lived on anyway, as a type of orthopedic corset.
The owner of the underwear factory had been a man of his age and, rather than staffing the orphanage with a motley crew of cleaners, laundry girls, and kitchen maids who might only end up adding to the problem, had installed brand-new appliances such as a sewing machine, an electric stove, and a wooden-tub washing machine.
And they worked—most of the time. No one would ever forget the night when the lights went out and all the fuses were found thrown in the garden. Or the day that the washing machine flooded and it was discovered that it had been filled up with newspaper. Even the electric range with its heavy black plates and greasy knobs wasn’t immune. A series of baked toys was blamed for its tendency to malfunction. And one day Tiny Lil was caught urging Little Franz to climb in with a blanket.
“What would have happened,” Sister August had pointed out, “if cook had switched it on?”
“He might have warmed up a little,” she had replied.
Tiny Lil spent much of her first year at the orphanage sitting in a chair in silence as punishment for bad behavior. She ate hundreds of meals alone in the dark and had been beaten more than once with a leather slipper by the director. At night, as the light from the carriages of the elevated train, next stop Bellevue, lit up her face in flickering strips, Tiny Lil kicked off her blankets, shoved away her pillow, and lay shivering in the cold. Soon Sister August will come, she told herself; soon she’ll come and find me dead. And then she’ll be sorry. She didn’t know it but she had inherited her father’s temper and her mother’s impulsiveness. Neither, however, had been subjected to the severity of Sister August’s regime.
If the nun ever came and checked up on her, however,Tiny Lil was never awake to witness it. And if her blankets were tucked in the next morning and the pillow wedged firmly underneath her head, she never suspected that it was anyone other than her own sleepy self who had remade the bed and doubled up the layers to ward off the night chill.
The Glimmer Palace Page 2