The most shocking thing as they neared the center of the city, however, was the sheer number of people. Hundreds and hundreds of men in suits and women in heels were striding along the pavements and swarming at the intersections. It was amazing, she thought then, a miracle that out of two or even three million she had been discovered; she had been found at last. And she tilted her chin up as they sped through an orange light.
Almost everyone had a newspaper. Almost no one spoke. The tram smelled of cigarette smoke, warm leather, horse dung, and something unfamiliar, a sourness that stuck in Tiny Lil’s mouth like a bad taste. One man with a huge curly mustache winked. Would her relative or foster parent look like him? She stared at him until he cleared his throat and went back to his newspaper. Another woman’s eyes traveled up and down her length, took in her worn-out boots and darned stockings. Her eyes, heavy-lidded and shadowed with black kohl, finally settled on her face. Tiny Lil looked away this time.
As the tram turned the corner into the Kurfürstendamm, a large woman with a huge bag stuffed with clean laundry stood up. She joined the shoving crowd at the exit doors and then hauled herself and the bag down the stairs. The bell rang and the tram pulled off. Tiny Lil watched the woman pick up the bag from the pavement and heave it onto her head. As the tram sped away, the woman took a step into the road and the bag toppled and fell, spilling her laundry all over cobblestones.
Sister August and Tiny Lil rode down the boulevard to Charlottenburg. The bell rang again and the tram rapidly came to a halt. Sister August took her hand again and they climbed down onto the street. Almost at once they set off at such a fast pace that Tiny Lil had to run to keep up.
The street was lined with shops and department stores, each window more amazing than the one before: mannequins with floor-length fur coats and feathered hats; a toy monkey twirling a trapeze while a dancing bear spun to a silent waltz; a stack of satin boxes in reds and blues and greens topped by a single tray of chocolate-covered cherries.
“Murder in Berlin North!” shouted a boy on a bicycle, a huge bag of newspapers in his basket. “Man slays his whole family with an ax!”
“What did he say?” Tiny Lil shouted up at Sister August. But her voice was drowned out by a hurdy-gurdy that was playing outside a tobacconist’s.
“Keep up,” the sister commanded. “And jump over the puddles, don’t wade through them.”
Tiny Lil jumped, but her feet were already wet.
The music of the hurdy-gurdy overlapped with the wheeze of an organ. On the other side of the road, on a vacant lot, two girls of about her age rode round and round on the horses of a painted carousel. Maybe, she thought, she would do the same, maybe even later that day. Farther along, on a construction site, men with cloth caps and vests were digging sand and nailing wooden struts together. The rhythm of the hammer was briefly in time with a passing horse and trap. Everything seemed to be moving, escalating, rising. Even the new apartments, which were being constructed on the next block, seemed to grow an inch as she passed.
“Excuse me,” said Sister August to the woman with a grubby hem who was strolling at half the speed of everyone else. The woman turned and by the look on her face it was clear she was about to say something rude. But then she saw the sister’s habit and moved aside.
“God bless you,” she muttered, and rapidly crossed herself.
They paused at an eight-sided green pillar covered in advertisements for theater shows, magazines, and exhibitions while Sister August checked her leather-covered notebook. Then she snapped the book shut, turned on her heel, and took the first street on the right. As a girl, the nun had been taught to march by her father, and now—even when she wasn’t aware of it—she stepped to a strict one, two, one, two.
Halfway down the street was the garrison of the Third Grenadier Guards.Two flags on poles flapped in the wind. Men in uniforms with hats under their arms strolled down the curved marble steps in twos and threes, and from deep inside came the slow and uneven tick and ratchet of an inexpert typist.
“I’m expected,” said the sister to an elderly man behind a small ornate desk.
He pulled out a fountain pen and very carefully made a note in a large gilt-edged book. Women weren’t usually allowed entry to the garrison, only grieving mothers and, on special request, daughters under the age of twelve.
“The first floor,” said the man. “And then straight ahead.”
Sister August and Tiny Lil hurried up the steps and along a wide corridor. Here on the first floor, the walls were covered with portraits of tight-lipped generals, commanders, and captains of the Prussian army. At the end of the hallway a set of double doors was wedged open. A huge chandelier fitted with electric bulbs lit the room beyond. Cigar smoke drifted out, yellow and opaque. Tiny Lil noticed that Sister August’s hands were moist. She paused to wipe them both on a white handkerchief she pulled from her pocket.Then she smoothed down her face and stepped through.
Three soldiers were sitting on gilt chairs while a fourth was reclining on a velvet daybed. He was in charge, that much was immediately obvious. The others perched, balancing cups of tea on their knees.They were talking about how much money a colleague had lost at gambling. The nun and the orphan stood in the doorway and waited, the girl looking from one face to the next to the next to the next and finally back to the nun again.
“Gentlemen, we have guests,” said the fourth man. He stood up and the other three immediately followed suit. He took a step forward to shake the nun’s hand. He was at least six inches shorter than she. The flicker of his eyelid revealed that she wasn’t quite what he had expected.
“Do come in and sit down,” he urged.
Sister August and Tiny Lil sat down on the gilt chairs and were offered cups of tea.
“Thank you, no,” said Sister August, answering for both of them.
The three soldiers sat down again, on a desk, on a windowsill, and on the remaining chair. None of them, Tiny Lil suddenly realized, seemed remotely interested in her.
“Well,” said the fourth man, who had remained standing. “Let’s get straight down to business, then, shall we? To what do we owe the pleasure?”
The nun launched into the speech she had prepared in her head the previous evening. She started with facts and told them how the growing population had produced hundreds of unwanted children. She explained that despite increasing pressure on her resources, she had turned the orphanage around and was educating the children in her care to a much higher standard than before. She regretted that, although she had some money from the trust fund left by the factory owner, it was not enough.
“I know his name,” said one of the three soldiers who perched on the windowsill. “Wait, let me think.”
“I need more books,” she continued. “So that I can truly implement a proper curriculum. I will use any money you may generously offer to donate for this purpose.”
The fourth man rested one arm on the marble mantelpiece. His leather boots were polished a rich chestnut brown and his brocade tunic was covered with medals. As he listened, however, a bead of sweat appeared, then dripped down his temple. His finger tap, tap, tapped on the marble.
“You want us to buy you more Bibles?”
Sister August blushed despite herself.
“We have enough, thank you,” she said. “No, it’s textbooks we need.”
“But really, Sister, what kind of education are you going to give these unfortunates?” he said. “The lives of obscure saints, no doubt. Fire and brimstone. Heaven and hell. Rather irrelevant, don’t you think, in a modern world, in the twentieth century?”
“My superiors require that the school has a spiritual aspect, but—”
The general guffawed.
“But you know nothing of life, Sister. You know nothing of love, of passion, of loss.You are a woman and yet you are not. Is that not true?”
Sister August was so shocked she was momentarily rendered speechless. The silence was broken only by the dainty clink of thr
ee teaspoons on china.
“What’s your name?” the fourth man said.Tiny Lil didn’t immediately realize he was addressing her. Four sets of eyes gazed in her direction. “You, yes, you, girl.”
“Lilly Nelly Aphrodite,” she said very quickly. She glanced up and saw the puzzled looks on the soldiers’ faces.
“Tiny Lil,” she said a little louder, even though at eight she wasn’t tiny anymore.
“Well, Tiny Lil,” the fourth man proclaimed with a wave of his hand, “as my men know, I give to dozens of good causes: the poor, the sick, the dying. Even to poor little unclaimed and unwanted children like you. But although I deal every day with the mostly mundane, like our dear kaiser, I am an aesthete at heart.”
He hesitated.
“You do know what an aesthete is?”
“No,” she whispered.
“I am propelled by beauty. Moved by the sight of the first bud opening in spring. Inspired by the singing of a thrush. . . . I love the arts, painting, opera, horticulture.”
He paused to check on the impact of his words. The three men were nodding sagely. Sister August’s mouth was pulled taut.When his eyes fell on her, he smiled ever so slightly.
“And so, much as I am swayed by your wonderful work, Sister”— he picked up a letter from his desk— “August, I must . . .”
Sister August stood.
“I don’t think I made myself clear,” she said.
“I haven’t finished,” the fourth man said softly.
Sister August sat down again. There was a shuffle, a small general rearrangement of legs and bottoms and boots.
“Even though I am a Lutheran, a Protestant, as most of us are in the North, my dear Sister,” the fourth man said, “I would like to offer you a rose garden, a rose garden for the enrichment of the souls of all those unfortunate children. For what can be more illustrative of the pain and the beauty of human existence than the juxtaposition of rose petal and thorn?”
“Textbooks,” Sister August said, “would be a much more practical—”
“La Luna,” he interrupted. “A beautiful tea rose, bred by a Frenchman, I think, Gilbert Nabonnand. As pink as a little girl’s buttock.”
Sister August started to breathe more rapidly.
“Chinas, Damask Perpetuals—now, there’s a bloom. Cross the first with the second and you get the Bourbon Rose. You must have the Schneekönigin,” he continued, “an interesting variety although hard to cultivate . . . the Snow Queen—all white, of course, but completely lacking in scent.”
He looked pointedly at Sister August. Sister August looked back at him. Neither would look away.
“The Romans were fond, you know, of roses,” he continued. “They imported them from Egypt. I wonder if our dear Lord wore a wreath of Gallica thorns around his head at Calgary. Or Albas?”
The fourth man suddenly took three short strides and bent down on one knee in front of Tiny Lil.
“What an interesting face,” he said. “Let’s ask the would-be recipient of my charitable donation: What would you like . . . roses or textbooks?”
The room grew silent. Tiny Lil stared at the scuffed toes of her all-too-rapidly polished boots. There was a discernible pool of dirty puddle water brought in from the street on the parquet floor beneath her feet. A rush began to well up behind her face like an approaching sneeze; her eyes burned, her mouth pulled taut, her forehead creased. She gulped a deep breath and blew it out, slowly, through her nose.
“Tiny Lil?” Sister August said. “Answer him.”
The fourth man leaned forward a fraction. He was so close she could hear the almost inaudible clank of his medals jangling together on his chest. He was so close she could smell the extract of lavender in his soap. She glanced up. He was so close that she could see contempt only thinly masked in his eyes.
“Cat got your tongue?” he said, with just the tiniest hint of impatience.
Textbooks, textbooks, textbooks. Arithmetic and Latin. Literature and history. Sister August shifted in her seat and sighed out loud, as if this were only to be expected from an orphan. And Tiny Lil, who knew she wasn’t tiny anymore, was suddenly filled with fury. How dare she make her believe that she was about to claimed, to be wanted? How dare she bring her all the way to this room full of men simply to humiliate her? How dare she still call her Tiny Lil?
She looked up and she stared in turn into every pair of the expectant eyes except one.
“I think . . . I think . . . roses,” she said.
The fourth man laughed a short, mirthless little laugh.
“Orthopedic underwear,” proclaimed one of the three soldiers as he leapt to his feet. “I knew I knew the name.”
The Winter Garden
Glass film studios, sheer and clear and filled with sun, glazed edificeswhere beautiful women blossom and handsome men wilt. And the light floods in all day for free; all you have to do is catch it.
Asta Nielsen, Danish actress, eyes as round as saucers, hips as narrow as a wink, walking down a city street. All of a sudden—Hey there, stop him!—a handsome young ruffian steals her purse. He turns and runs but accidentally drops his misbegotten handful. And in that pause, that wafer-thin moment when he stoops and she grabs his sleeve, Asta’s expression changes from indignation to recognition. He’s her long-lost darling brother, fallen on hard times.
But by and by here’s a policeman running down the street with a lady. He sees the brother beggar. The lady points her umbrella and says the words “It’s him, it’s him.” Before he can run, the brother is arrested, and Asta can do nothing but plead with her hands, her mouth, her saucer eyes, to no avail. Her purse, still lying on the cobbles, is snatched up by some opportunistic street kid. And as if God knew the script, right at that very moment a cloud covers the sun.
“Cut!” the director shouts. “Cut, cut, cut!” The film was so nearly in the can, and now they’ll have to shoot another day. Asta Nielsen swears softly in Danish and calls for coffee laced with something stronger.
Hanne Schmidt, flanked by her three younger brothers, stood on the doorstep of the orphanage and asked Sister August if she could speak to her in private. She carried the youngest boy on her hip and slapped the other boys’ heads when they picked their noses or fiddled with their buttons. Her heels were high and she wore a hat with a feather on it, rouge, and a line of lipstick. There was a yellow bruise on her left cheekbone just beneath the eye. The nun led them in, gave the boys bowls of soup, invited the girl into her office, and closed the door.
The girl—who, despite the clothes, could not have been more than twelve—told the sister that her mother had leapt from the roof of the newly built apartment building in which they had been living for a low rent while the plaster walls dried. They had a couple more weeks to go, the walls were still damp, but the reason for her suicide was her husband’s desertion.
The story was verified in the evening paper, although there was no mention of the woman having any children. Sister August prayed for all four of them and tried to take them up to the dormitories where she intended to place them, sardine-style, in any available bed.
“Oh, no,” said Hanne Schmidt. “I’m not staying.”
Nobody was really sure what Sister August had said to her, but the girl didn’t speak again for six months. After washing off the makeup, she was given a patched-up orphanage dress, boots, and a pillow and instructed to share with the girl at the end, the small one.
Tiny Lil didn’t object when the new girl started to take off her boots and then climb under her very own sheets. Most of the orphans in her dormitory had been doubled up already, and some even claimed that it was much warmer in winter that way. And so she shifted as close to the edge as she could and tried to ignore the air that whisked beneath the blankets and the pair of small, dirty feet that the new girl had tucked beneath her pillow.
Lights had been out for at least an hour but Tiny Lil couldn’t sleep. And she wasn’t the only one. The liquid glimmer of the new girl’s open ey
es was clearly visible in the dark.
“I know you’re awake,” Tiny Lil whispered. “What’s your name?”
But the new girl simply sighed out loud and turned over.
Her silence did not crack in the following days, either. She sat with her head upon the desk in the schoolroom and ate her meals quickly and furtively, saving her bread or her potatoes to pass on to her brothers when she thought no one was looking. At bedtime she climbed into the bed they shared, but if any part of her touched Tiny Lil, she would immediately shift away as if stung by a rogue charge of electricity.
Sometimes when Tiny Lil woke in the middle of the night, the girl would be gone. She would lie awake for as long as she could, waiting for her to return. But when she opened her eyes in the morning, the girl would always be back, with smudges beneath her eyes and her pale hair hanging in strands around her face.
Hanne and her brothers were the last orphans that St. Francis Xavier’s accepted in 1910. There was simply not enough room for any more. As it was, some of the younger boys shared three to a cot. But the children didn’t stop coming. They came in rags and muddy clogs, in pairs and alone, dragging blankets or holding screaming babies.When she had enough to spare, Sister August gave them food. When it was all gone, she gave them a few pfennigs and blessed their filthy heads.
The general sent a couple of gardeners to tend the roses. Despite the poor soil and the lack of sunlight, they did exceptionally well.
Tiny Lil knew when they left the garrison of the Third Grenadiers that she had done something unforgivable. All the way home, the nun stared out the window and did not react when strangers crossed themselves or genuflected. At one point she looked down at her with an expression of such incomprehension that Tiny Lil would have howled an explanation at her had they not been surrounded by commuters on a rush-hour tram. And so she struggled to keep her face composed. Sister August clearly did not realize what she had done; she had no idea at all. And this hurt far more than accepting that she was just one more unclaimed, unwanted orphan all over again.
The Glimmer Palace Page 4