As they sped through the Tiergarten and she thought of the man with the mustache whom she had stared at on the way, a drop of hot salty liquid landed on her lip. It was a tear, her own tear, which she had wept without realizing. And so she turned around and wiped her face quickly with the back of her sleeve so that Sister August would not know or see or feel obliged to feel even slightly sorry for her.
The nun stared at the back of Tiny Lil’s head as the little girl wiped her face with her sleeve. Normally she would have chastised her for this, reminded her about the spread of germs and the cost of soap. But this time she said nothing. She was thinking about the general. She didn’t understand how it could have turned out this way, how he had managed to turn Tiny Lil against her. Maybe he was right. What did she know of life? And why had she chosen Tiny Lil? When she examined her motives, she realized that the girl had in fact chosen her first: from very early on Tiny Lil had singled her out. And despite what had just happened, she was flooded with love of the kind that she knew was inappropriate. This, she decided, had to change. It was a weak spot, a vulnerability. Besides, she could never be the parent that the girl so desperately needed. The tram began to slow; it was their stop. They climbed off wordlessly and walked back to the orphanage with a visible gap between them.
The general’s rose garden started an unfortunate trend.The economy was booming, and a number of wealthy benefactors followed his example. An industrialist bequeathed a full set of brass instruments. The director took up the French horn but could manage only the most rudimentary of Christmas carols. The rest of the instruments gathered dust in their cases; they couldn’t afford a music teacher.The orphans were also given a miniature train, a set of child-size Shakespearean costumes, and several dozen crates of a new kind of sweeteneddrink. Sister August was privately exasperated.They didn’t have the room for any more things. But after such relentless soliciting, they could hardly refuse them.
In December that year, a cabaret group came to St. Francis Xavier’s to put on a Christmas show for the children. It was the very same cabaret group that Tiny Lil’s mother had been a member of, the very same cabaret group who had sent her as a baby to the couple in the suburbs and who still felt vaguely responsible—the very same cabaret group who had sent her the doll with the wind-up smile that had subsequently been unearthed by one of the general’s gardeners and taken home for his daughter.
The visit had been organized by an actor named Wernher Siegfried. He had long black hair, which he swept back with olive oil; a large, forceful nose; and a weak chin, which he hid, when he remembered, with his hand. He thought he had been in love with the orphan’s mother and had once successfully consummated his infatuation in a boat hut on the shores of the Tegeler See in the early spring of 1899. While the rest of the cabaret group were drunkenly skating on the ice after drinking copious amounts of Liebfraumilch, he had coaxed the actress into the hut after she had twisted her ankle, not seriously, and was in need of sympathy and a shot of something stronger.
The Christmas show was a short musical play called The Chocolate Sailor. Set in a candy shop, its cotton-candy heroine was tied up with licorice laces by a greedy child. The highlight was a chase sequence, during which the cabaret group, dressed up as a box of chocolates, pursued the child—a small, middle-aged woman in a very short dress—with a huge candy cane through the audience.
Wernher cast himself as the sailor but spent much of the performance peering out at the audience and trying to work out which one was Lilly Nelly Aphrodite. His eyes fell on Hanne Schmidt, who looked about the right age. At the end of the show he marched down to the row she sat in and persuaded her to join him on the stage. He was unaware that Hanne Schmidt had not said a word since she had arrived and was less surprised than the audience when she took the stage, closed her eyes, and launched into the musical hit of a few years before, “Bower of My Heart,” unaccompanied.
Standing on her tiptoes, Hanne waved the ghost of a feather boa. She had a strong voice but sang without any hint of expression at all. And, sung at half its usual speed, the song seemed to ring with melancholy.
“Safe in the bower of my heart,” she sang, “a place strewn in blossom just for you, where always and forever, for all time and a day, the love I feel will never fade or be untrue.”
One of her front teeth was chipped and this made her consonants whistle. Her voice was low and just a little hoarse; when she hit the high notes, it cracked and threatened to break. But not until she had reached the last lines, The blooms may wither on the vine, but I know you’ll always be mine, did her voice trail off and her eyes open.
The applause was spontaneous and genuine. Hanne Schmidt barely even smiled in acknowledgment. She went back to her seat, picked at a patch on her orphanage dress, and seemed to be working on pulling out the stitching. Sister August did not move for more than a minute. She sat breathing in, out, in, out, as the children, the cabaret group, and even Hanne herself wondered if she was for the Turkish slipper.
“Thank you, Hanne,” she said eventually, and swallowed twice in quick succession. “Now, would you invite the actors into my study for tea?”
The bruises that had covered Hanne’s entire body when she arrived had long since faded. And although she was still thin, she didn’t look consumptive anymore. But there were still dark half-moons beneath her pale blue eyes, and her chipped front tooth meant that she seldom smiled. It was the damage that you couldn’t see, however, that Sister August worried about.
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 t
o 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.
&n
bsp; “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 Glimmer Palace Page 5