The Glimmer Palace

by Beatrice Colin

  Inside, a Negress in a white dress mashed out tunes on a piano. A dozen waiters stood with trays of perfectly balanced glasses of Champagne. Although the light was soft and inviting, the décor was everything but: a screaming-red bar, silver sculptures of maidens and horses, painted monkeys swinging from the ceiling—as if, someone said, in the lines and colors, twisting and clashing, banging and clanging, racing and crashing, beauty herself was undergoing a radical reinvention. It’s modernism, someone pronounced; Cubism, another argued, Futurism, Secessionism. No, it’s Marguerite Carréfrom Bourgeois-Paris. The theater, for one night only, had been doused in French perfume.

  The privileged invited took their seats in the auditorium; and then, as the lights lowered and a hush descended, they realized as one that the Marmorhaus, for all its glory, was only the portal.The curtains parted and a film started to roll.

  Lilly saw Kaiser Wilhelm II for the first time on a Thursday in February 1912. A thick fog had been lying across the city all morning, and by mid-afternoon there was the taste of snow in the air. She heard the military procession long before she could see it. Marches played on brass instruments lifted above the rooftops, and drums, the distance throwing them out of beat, boomed along the gutters, sending handfuls of indignant pigeons into the sky. Lilly reached the Unter den Linden just as the kaiser’s open-topped automobile was approaching. As the car passed, she glimpsed his face, his huge dark mustache, his withered arm, and the sweep of his pale hair.

  Of course, Lilly had seen him before on the cinema screen, walking with the empress and Crown Princess Cecilie in the palace gardens, opening regattas and launching warships. Wilhelm II was so fond of “film art,” as he called it, that he would turn toward the lens, give that famous smile, wave that informal wave, or tousle a child’s already tousled hair at the smallest prompt. That afternoon there were no cameras to focus on his smile, but he smiled nevertheless: at his subjects, at the huge crowds, at his city. Beside him, on the soft gray leather seats, sat a dignitary with white whiskers and a slightly morose expression.

  “Hooray for the kaiser,” a young man shouted from a lamppost. “And hooray for Franz Josef, the Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary.”The applause was spontaneous, the noise almost earsplitting, the emotion palpable, as both men reached up, touched their hats, and set their decorative feathers aquiver.

  A few seconds later, there was a small explosion, followed by the skittering somewhere close behind of horses’ hooves. The royal car slowed down and stopped. The kaiser and the emperor both turned and peered back. But it was nothing. A child with a firework, that’s all, the whisper went through the crowd.

  Franz Josef had come to Berlin to talk to the kaiser. He was worried about the Balkan states’ plans to form a league with a view to taking on the Turks over Macedonia. And so, when Lilly stared into the face of Wilhelm II, as if she could make him return her gaze by willpower alone, his mind was most likely on politics. His eyes glided across the blur of a thousand citizens and the flutter of a hundred flags and he did not see the face of Lilly Nelly Aphrodite, now just eleven, even though in his later years he would have given anything—well, almost anything—to catch that gunmetal gaze just once.

  The brass band began another tune and the royal parade, first the kaiser in his brand-new Daimler, then the mounted infantry, and finally the goose-stepping cavalry, moved on and headed toward the Brandenburger Tor. As the car approached the stone arch, the procession slowed—this time on purpose—and stopped. On the top of the arch the Goddess of Victory rode in her chariot. Down below, the once king of Prussia, now ruler of Imperial Germany, stood up in his seat. A pair of guns fired. A clutch of swans honked. A horse farted. For a fraction of a second Berlin held its breath. And then Wilhelm cleared his throat twice and saluted. The crowds cheered until they could cheer no more. Dozens of hats were thrown up into the white sky and many were lost forever.

  It would be six years before Lilly saw the kaiser again, in a train station at midnight. He missed his chance to meet her gaze at that moment too. His eyes, you see, would be too full of tears.

  The parade ceremoniously processed into the park until, soldier by soldier and horse by horse, it gradually dissolved into the fog. On the Unter den Linden, the people watched until their eyes strained, until there was nothing more to be seen. And only then, when the procession was finally over, were the barricades pushed aside, the flags rolled up for next time, and handkerchiefs that had been waved used to wipe the faces of overtired children. Couples hurried home, their backs hunched in their coats, the smoke of their cigarettes floating behind them in dirty halos. Along Wilhelmstrasse and Dorotheenstrasse, the streetlights buzzed on, bright pink globes in the dusk. And with just a slight darkening of the sky, it started to snow, first a light flurry and then heavy flakes as big as five-pfennig coins.

  In the months following Hanne’s and the tall nun’s departures, a lull had descended on the orphanage. The building had been put up for sale and every day a new batch of prospective buyers wandered around, taking measurements or trying to visualize the dismally appointed dormitories as luxury hotel rooms, perhaps, or swanky new apartments.

  The orphans, suddenly released from all religious routine, never quite fell into a state of godless anarchy as was expected. Instead, out of respect for their beloved Sister August, the older children kept order, tucked up the younger ones at night, and stuck faithfully to the schedules and rules that she had devised. It was true that several packed up their nightgowns and made their beds for the very last time, but the majority decided to stay until the bitter end. The gates were open wide but there was nowhere, they realized, for them to go.

  Of the ones who stayed, nobody talked about the future. Nobody mentioned the coming sale. It was almost as if they could stave off the inevitable by just pretending it wasn’t going to happen.

  Since her spell in the infirmary, Lilly had seemed to have completely recovered. Back then she had grieved copiously and without inhibition for Sister August, for her friend Hanne, for the mother and father she couldn’t remember, for herself, until eventually she couldn’t cry anymore. And now she felt dried up, numb, barren. Tears would sometimes creep up on her unexpectedly, in the middle of reading a fairy tale to the younger children or cleaning her teeth, but most of the time she appeared, at least outwardly, to be fine. She rose in the morning, she ate her meals, and at the end of the day she fell asleep.

  One night, however, she woke up in the bed she used to share with Hanne and suddenly remembered the tin of rose money under the mattress. Most of the money was gone, but not all of it. Hanne must have expected Lilly to follow her. But the nights were so dark, the orphanage wall was so high, and the city outside was so huge that the idea of leaving of her own volition filled her with terror. She put the tin back under the bed and lay awake for hours, going over and over the old frames of her life until they became distorted, worn-out, drained of color, and finally she closed her eyes and prayed for the courage she so obviously lacked.

  In early December, after morning Mass, an old-fashioned hansom cab drew up at the gates. Three nuns climbed out and began to walk toward the orphanage, their black shadows spilling behind them. Lilly felt her heart start to race. Her temples throbbed and her knees felt as if they might buckle. The nuns must have found out how she had stolen roses and stayed out late.These were serious crimes.What would they do to her this time?

  But when the nuns’ gaze, taking in the gloomy orphanage and dripping overgrown gardens, happened to fall across a white-faced girl at the kitchen window, there were no thunderbolts or lightning strikes. She did not read disapproval in their eyes but pity.

  That morning, a special Mass was held at ten o’clock. At the end of the service, the children remained kneeling while they were informed that the orphanage had been sold. The buyer, a young man who had inherited his money from his family and was to blow the entire lot in one-tenth of the time it took to make it, planned steam rooms in the chapel and a row of tr
eatment rooms where the classrooms were.The children looked around at the dark green walls and the greasy cupola and tried to make themselves believe that they would be leaving. Most of them couldn’t remember living anywhere else.

  The health spa man had bought the orphanage on the condition that he start work in two months’ time, and since his had been the only offer, the nuns were in no position to negotiate. Twenty babies and toddlers were to be shipped to America, their passage paid for by a Catholic charity. Of the rest, it was decided that the youngest would be sent to the St. Catherine’s Orphanage in Munich, while the others would be handed over to a charity,The Adoption Society, which would place the children in households as farm laborers or domestics.

  Hanne’s brothers were five, six, and nine, with white-blond hair and big blue eyes. They still waited for their sister every day at the front door and had to be coaxed to meals with promises that, were she to return when they weren’t there, she would be sent straight to them. Lilly had assured them that their sister would come back to fetch them. But as the days turned to weeks, she gradually stopped believing it. And so, on the day of the nuns’ announcement, she had gathered Hanne’s brothers together and made them a promise: despite the dark, the high wall, and the ever-expanding city, she would try to find their sister and bring her back.

  The nights were darker, much darker than she had expected, the wall higher, and the city far bigger than she remembered. But the rose money helped to make her bold. As she took one tram and then another, rode the S- and U-Bahn back and forth, walked for miles through cavernous streets, Lilly learned that St. Francis Xavier’s was as calm, as perfectly still, as the dead center of a wheel. All around, Berlin was in a state of flux.You could sense it, taste it, smell it, from the mannequins in shop windows, whose outfits changed for the morning rush hour and again for the evening promenade, to the omnibuses, the cars, the bicycles, and the taxicabs, which raced round Potsdamer Platz from dawn until dusk. Nothing was fixed anymore. Nothing was nailed down. You could never guarantee, absolutely, that the spot in which you stood would look the same from one day to the next. Streets would be dug up practically overnight, landmarks demolished, and classical façades covered with tarpaulin, only to be unveiled a week later faced with bright new advertisements for chocolate or pianos or perfume.

  In shops and department stores, on street trolleys and street corners, Lilly examined faces and asked questions. She found dozens of girls with pale gold hair and bare arms that they casually wrapped around themselves. And they all knew a Hanne Schmidt—it was a common name—but only old ones, fat ones: a Hanne Schmidt with five children or a medical condition, a layabout husband or an invalid mother, never Lilly’s own fair-haired, rose-selling Hanne.

  Sometimes Lilly wondered if she had walked past her friend in the street and failed to recognize her. Sometimes she imagined Hanne in the poorhouse dressed in rags, her eyes red-rimmed from weeping, her long white legs blotched with sores. And sometimes she would dream she found her lifeless and blue, her body lying limp beneath a railway bridge, or propped up on the backseat of a tram, a knife pushed into her heart. The mornings after the nightmares were the hardest.The city she walked through seemed filled with dark corners and cold basements, places where a girl like her could disappear. But if anything happened, who would look for her?

  On the day of Franz Josef’s visit, the day when the kaiser had been informed of Russian involvement in forming the Balkan League and was concerned enough to call a meeting of the Grosser Generalstab, but not concerned enough to cancel the military parade, Lilly turned and walked through the crowds back up the Unter den Linden. She glanced from face to face as the people poured past her. She peered under hats and into car windows, she paused at cafés and stared through the glass, and occasionally she approached total strangers from behind and tapped on their unsuspecting shoulders.

  A blond girl in a red jacket and a hobbled skirt came out of a music hall and sauntered through the snow.With her handbag swinging and her heels clacking, there was something about her that looked familiar. Lilly followed her. For three blocks they walked one behind the other until the girl slowed down.

  “It’s fifteen marks,” she said over her shoulder.

  Lilly stopped abruptly.The girl turned round. For a moment they stared at each other. Neither was what the other expected. The girl, despite the lipstick and the swagger, looked about her own age. She composed her face and started to shout in an accent so thick that Lilly could barely understand a word.

  A man stepped out of the shadows. He was dressed smartly in a hat and a loosely cut suit.When he saw the two girls standing face-to-face in the snow, one shouting, one silent, he shook his head and lit a cigarette.

  “I’ll take you both for twenty,” he offered.

  Five blocks later, Lilly slowed to a walking pace. The streets were emptier now that it was getting dark. She passed a bar, a baker’s, a pawnshop. And then there was nothing, nothing but locked doors and shuttered windows. Snow swirled and raced and landed gently on her narrow shoulders, her eyelids, and her lips. The secondhand coat allocated to her the year before was too small. She pulled the sleeves down over her knuckles, held her arms crossed in front of her, and kept walking, but still the icy Berlin air slipped through the gaps.

  She had planned to walk until she came to a tram stop and then take one or probably two trams back to Bellevue. A horse and carriage, a droshky, approached and she had to stand back, to push herself against a wall to let it pass. As it disappeared into the whiteness of the storm, she looked around and realized that she had no idea where she was. On both sides were wooden fences. Behind them were construction sites where heaps of bricks, mountains of sand, and stacks of metal pipes lay under a layer of snow. A little farther on, a vacant lot had been converted into a bicycle track, its circuit a perfect lozenge of untouched white surrounded on all sides by piles of black earth.

  Lilly turned left and came to a boarded-up alleyway. She turned right and right again and finally reached a wide boulevard that had once been lined with sycamore trees. Most of the eighteenth-century villas and majestic gardens that had once stood there had gone. In recent months, the cobbles had been torn up, the trees had been felled, and there was a huge trench in the middle of the street. The noise of iron striking iron and the intermittent boom of rock imploding came from deep within. Lilly walked across the mounds of frozen mud and peered over a barricade into the hole. A hundred feet below, she saw a shower of sparks and the dull glint of iron rails.They were building another subway line.

  She kept walking. There were no tram stops here. The wind howled and blew snow into her face, her eyes, her mouth. She was growing scared now, scared of the approaching night, scared of the cold. But nothing would make her look for shelter in those dark corners or basements, and so she kept going, her eyes tearing, her teeth clenched, her fists in balls. How would she ever get back? How could she go on?

  Lilly didn’t see the man until the top of her head hit the second button of his railway man’s coat.When he bowed and begged her pardon, she momentarily forgot the snow, she forgot that she was lost, and she forgot her search for Hanne Schmidt. It was Otto, Otto Klint. But before she had the chance to say a word, he had nodded, stepped aside, and continued walking. He didn’t recognize her.

  He could have kept on going, he could have faded into the weather, but he stopped and turned. Maybe he was aware that he could hear only one set of footsteps on the freshly muffled cobbles, and they were his own. Maybe he could feel her eyes on the nape of his neck, which his upturned collar didn’t quite manage to cover. Maybe he felt some tiny jolt of recognition, a yew tree, a shrine, a photographer’s lens.

  “Otto,” she blurted out. “Don’t you remember? It’s me. Lilly. From St. Francis Xavier’s.”

  He frowned.The snow still came down but more softly now.

  “Tiny Lil?” he said. “Is it really you?”

  She nodded twice. And then she rushed toward him and threw her
arms around his railway man’s coat. It was his face, a familiar face among thousands, and his voice, his voice saying her name or the name that she once had; it was Otto. For a moment she just breathed in and out as the warmth of his body began to seep through the coarse blue wool. It was Otto.

  “What on earth are you doing here?” he asked.

  In fits and starts she told him about Hanne.

  “I’ve been looking everywhere . . . in every café and bar in Berlin. And now I . . . I don’t know where I am. . . .”

  Her voice trailed off. She couldn’t trust her mouth anymore.

  “Well, you had better come with me,” he said. “Before you catch your death.”

  illy cradled a glass of hot wine in both hands.The walls of the tavern were hung with tarnished mirrors and heavy wooden carvings of hunting scenes. As the snow melted in her hair, it dripped down the back of her neck and she shivered.

  “Cold?” Otto said.

  She shook her head. She was warm. Otto sat opposite her. If she half closed her eyes, she could have been back in St. Francis Xavier’s again, back in the days before he had left with the promise that he would visit, back in the days when Sister August had loved her, back before Hanne had arrived and everything had changed. Like hers, Otto’s hands, cheeks, and ears were scarlet. As the spitting log fire lit up his face, she guessed he was now about eighteen.

  “Why did you never come back to see us?” she asked.

  He sighed and took a sip of his drink. He had no excuses, no answers, no reason.

  “Tell me again,” he said. “About your friend.”

  “Tell me again,” he said. “About your friend.”

  “Hanne? I think she may have been kidnapped,” Lilly said.

  Otto paused. “There are millions of people in Berlin,” he said eventually. “If you haven’t found her by now, maybe you never will. There are some things, some people, some places, that you just have to forget.”