The Glimmer Palace

by Beatrice Colin

  “Who’d like sugar?” she asked them all. “Today it’s allowed.” rom the street, The Blue Cat looked so dark inside that most

  people assumed it was shut. Behind a nondescript marine-blue shop front, long purple drapes hung across frosted windows. It was the kind of place that opened early and closed only when the very last customer was so inebriated he had to be carried out. It was, in short, a fairly typical lower-class establishment. The drinks were diluted with tap water, the girls were all either under eighteen or over forty-five, and the entertainment was organized by a Bulgarian who played the clarinet and the piano, sometimes at the same time.

  The Blue Cat was always quiet in the early evening. Most of the regular clientele were home with their families or eating boiled beef and noodles in one of the many steamed-up restaurants on the Tauentzienstrasse. As Lilly waited for her eyes to adjust to the dark, a couple of men glanced over at her. But when they saw she did not greet them with a willing smile or a flash of ankle, they turned back to their drinks or tried to catch the eye of the endlessly obliging waitress instead. Lilly stood at the bar and studied the ceiling until the waitress had finished serving. And then, only when she had swiped the counter with a dirty rag, lit a cigarette, and poured herself a glass of ale did she nod in Lilly’s direction.

  “The manager’s not hiring,” the waitress said. “Come back in a week. And next time, use the back door.”

  “I’m not looking for a job,” Lilly said. “I’m looking for Hanne Schmidt. I think . . . she works here.”

  The waitress’s eyes narrowed.

  “And who are you?” she asked.

  “I’m . . . I’m her sister.”

  “Friend” didn’t seem appropriate somehow. The waitress let out two streams of cigarette smoke through her nose. She looked Lilly up and down and then raised her eyebrows.

  “Really,” she said.

  Lilly was directed to a door behind a curtain and then to a row of cramped clapboard cubicles beyond.

  “And tell your sister that she’s ten minutes late for her shift already,” the waitress said.

  Hanne Schmidt, tingle-tangle artist, was putting on her makeup. She wore a ratty old dressing gown and a hairnet. She was drawing on her eyebrows with a black pencil. One was finished and one was not, giving her an expression of ironic perplexity. She wasn’t particularly surprised to see her former friend from the orphanage standing behind her in the low light of The Blue Cat’s changing rooms. She had been expecting her. She was surprised only that she hadn’t come sooner.

  “Are my brothers behaving themselves?” she asked.

  Lilly nodded. She couldn’t speak.

  “I made them these. I meant to send them . . . months ago.” Hanne pulled a paper bag from under her mirror. Inside were three hats and three pairs of mittens, all knitted with scarlet wool.

  “Tell them to be good boys and to keep warm,” she said. “And tell them that I’ll come and get them very soon. Now be a dear and let me finish.”

  Lilly watched as Hanne Schmidt drew in the other eyebrow. She saw that, apart from the makeup, she didn’t appear to have changed at all: she had the same pale hair and circled eyes, the same frail arms, which she wrapped herself up with. But as she observed her, Lilly began to notice subtle differences: a waist so tiny that she must have pulled her corset laces quite brutally tight; a red mark, a burn maybe, on her arm; and something else, something newly sober in her manner.

  In fact, in the six months since she had been expelled from the orphanage, Hanne had been engaged to a Greek millionaire who had given her diamonds one night, only to take them back the next; her heart had been broken by a soldier who had sworn undying love on the carousel at the Luna Park and broken her nose on the ghost train; and she had to leave the family she had been boarding with when the father came into The Blue Cat “accidentally.” And so she had taken the only place she could find with no notice, a damp little room in a run-down pension in Kreuzberg. In six short months, she was beginning to suspect that she was the kind of person who attracted terrible luck, unstable people, and unwanted advances. And she was right. Her time at St. Francis Xavier’s seemed to belong to another, kinder life.

  “Well, sit down,” she said to Lilly’s reflection in the mirror. “And take your coat off.”

  Lilly laid her coat on the back of the chair and sat down. Hanne guffawed. She threw her hand across her mouth and for an instant she was the same old Hanne, the one whose eyes glimmered in the dark of the dormitory.

  “What are you wearing?” she asked.

  Lilly’s face fell. Her skin prickled. She was wearing a dress that had come to the orphanage in a bundle of donations. It was thick green serge with a high lace collar, a little girl’s dress, the only thing that would fit her. She stared at the floor, at the mouse hole in the skirting.

  “I’m sorry. Are you in trouble? Is that it?” she asked. “I know a lady.”

  Lilly was suddenly furious.

  “Hanne, I’ve been looking for you,” she said. “For months. I thought you were dead. I found your card in the gutter. . . .”

  “But I’m fine,” she replied with a smile. “As you can see.You needn’t have worried.”

  Lilly took a deep breath.

  “And I have some bad news,” she said.

  Hanne turned back to her reflection. Lilly caught her eye as she lined it with kohl. And in that single second she saw that makeup couldn’t disguise her apprehension. Whatever it was—and Hanne could think of a dozen awful things that could have happened—she did not want to know, not then, not yet.

  It was at that precise moment that the Bulgarian shouted out Hanne’s name round the curtain. She took a deep breath and turned.

  “Then stay,” she said as she took Lilly’s face in her hands. “Stay and tell me after.” And with one cool kiss on the cheek, she was gone.

  “I knew a man with a great big . . .

  Dick was his name. . . .

  And I could say that he hung

  With the crowd like the best of them

  Forget the rest of them

  My great big Dick had a great big . . .

  Heart. . . .”

  Hanne barely moved onstage. The hat from the photograph was on her head, her shoulders were bare, and she wore a short pink frilly dress, a pair of suspenders, and pale pink striped stockings. At first her voice was a mere whisper. And while her body appeared moribund, her knee twitched at twice the tempo of the song. At her side, the Bulgarian was pumping out the tune on an old piano with a huge grin pasted on his face. A trickle of sweat fell down his cheek. He threw Hanne a look, his eyes wide, his teeth bared. Hanne’s face blanched beneath her powder and her voice trailed away. She looked out at the audience and spotted Lilly. And then something seemed to click.The knee stopped vibrating. Hanne narrowed her kohl-rimmed eyes, she stuck out her somewhat meager chest, and she formed her mouth into a perfect O. The Bulgarian whooped. Hanne winked and began to sway her narrow hips. And then, with her chipped tooth and her low voice, she started to sing again.

  “If you want to tickle my fancy, take me down to Wannasee . . .

  If you wanna see a little action, that’s the beach for me. . . .”

  I can’t take them,” Hanne said. “It’s impossible.”

  Lilly stared at Hanne in the mirror as she reapplied her lipstick. Her face was flushed and feverish.

  “I could sneak them out,” Lilly suggested. “We’ve got a week exactly.You could find a place to live, for all of us. I could sell roses. At least we’d all be together. Hanne, I’m sure it could work.”

  “You’re not listening,” Hanne repeated, pressing both lips onto a handkerchief, which she then used to dab her eyes. “I can’t take them. I can barely look after myself.”

  “Hanne, you’re all they have,” Lilly said. “Couldn’t you take them for a little while?You’re old enough now.You’re fourteen.”

  Hanne Schmidt drew a large breath and stared at her reflection.The makeup
is a mask, she told herself, no one can read me. It had been her mantra in the years when she had sung for her father. It still worked.

  “It’s impossible,” she said, and stood up.

  Lilly stood up too. And then she took Hanne by both shoulders and shook her, just as the nurse had shaken her all those years before.

  “Listen to me.They might be split up.”

  For an instant, Hanne leaned into her grip. Lilly stared into her face, daring Hanne to look back at her. But when she did it was with complete impassivity.

  “I have to work now,” she said quietly, pushing Lilly’s hands away. “Tell them I’ll send for them when I can.”

  Hanne brushed past her as she made her way back into the bar. She picked up a tray and started to stalk around the room. As Lilly watched, she paused beside an elderly man, produced a postcard of herself in a bathing costume, and tried to sell it to him for one mark. He wasn’t interested.When he refused for a third time, she grabbed a glass of ale from his table and poured it over his head.

  he Adoption Society was located in a large gray villa in Charlottenburg. It smelled of disinfectant and expensive scent, and was staffed entirely by the wives of high-ranking military men who gave of their time voluntarily. Their attitude was a curious mixture of benevolence and condescension, and they dealt out children to anyone who wanted them with little real regard for what happened to them afterward.The highlight for all concerned was organizing the annual fund-raising ball, which gave them a chance to feel saintly and dress up in the latest fashions.

  Hanne’s brothers wore their red hats and mittens and would not take them off.They held one another’s hands and cuffs and arms, their legs and arms continually entwining. The eldest brother’s eyes restlessly scanned the room when they entered. The youngest brother walked with the bowlegged walk of the child who has wet himself.

  They had been told they were going on holiday to the country but only pretended to believe it. They had each been given a cardboard tag with a number written on it and instructed to sit on a wooden bench in silence until they were chosen. They did not have long to wait: boys were the first to go.There were plenty of farms in the surrounding countryside that had lost their sons to the city and needed as many hands as possible to pull turnips from the frozen winter mud or tug at the engorged udders of their dairy herds.

  Two ladies from The Adoption Society wearing rubber gloves and white coats inspected Hanne’s brothers for lice, fleas, and worms and then, when they were given the all-clear, gave them fresh sets of underwear and a new pair of shoes. The boys were predictably hard to separate, but the ladies from The Adoption Society had plenty of experience. Pulling hands apart and unlocking arms with sheer brute force, taking a good few blows and kicks in the process, they half dragged, half carried the boys out of the main hall and handed them over to their new guardians with a parcel containing a Bible and a loaf of black bread.

  “I’ll pass on your addresses and Hanne will write,” Lilly had promised each one earlier. But in all the commotion, nobody had bothered to record them.

  Later, Lilly stood on the stone steps with the cardboard suitcase that every orphan over the age of ten had been given. She, too, had been allocated a pair of ugly brown working shoes, a few sizes too big, which she had laced so tight the tongue creased. Can’t I take the boys? she had begged over and over. The ladies hadn’t even bothered to reply.

  It had stopped snowing but the ground was icy underfoot. A woman was running across the road toward the villa, a woman in flimsy shoes and a large hat. A car hooted, the driver swore loudly, a bicycle swerved and almost hit her. As she came closer, Lilly realized that it wasn’t a woman at all but a girl dressed as one. It was Hanne Schmidt: Hanne, with her ripped stockings, chewed lips, and a kohlstreaked face.

  “I’m here,” she called out. “I can manage. I’ll take another job. I’ll work days and nights. I went to St. Francis Xavier’s and they told me to come here. I missed one streetcar and had to wait an hour for the next. But here I am.”

  Her pace slowed as she reached the entranceway and she saw Lilly’s face.

  “Where are they?” she asked.

  Words formed in Lilly’s mouth but she could not say them. She swallowed and tried again. Nothing came.

  “They kept them together?”

  Lilly looked away. Hanne’s eyes crumpled. Her hand flew to her mouth. The hat tipped back and fell from her head. And then with a whimper she sank down to her knees and plucked something from the snow. It was a single red knitted mitten.

  The Countess

  Mathilde changed her name to Maisie and began to drink afternoon tea. She traded in her dachshund for a beagle and took English lessons every Sunday.Why? Because Maisie had fallen for an Englishman. Stuart Webbs, eagle-eyed detective, screen heartthrob of the day, wears a deer-stalker hat and tweed plus-fours. No thief can outsmart his deductions, no crime scene can fail to offer him that vital clue. And no woman—and here’s the clincher—can as yet resist his charming manners and his doleful smile.

  Arrest me, arrest me, breathed Maisie in her dreams. To be handcuffed and led away, to be charged and convicted would be worth any prison sentence. She could warm up his cockles, she would turn his frigid heart red-hot. She would commit a murder to be seized and held in custard, she tells her English teacher, who, purely for his own sadistic pleasure, fails to correct her.

  Walking her beagle one day, Maisie wrapped leads with a man with a dachshund. She turned and was about to keep walking when she noticed something familiar about the sausage-dog owner’s face.

  “Good afternoon,” she cried out in English. “I am thinking I am in love with you.”

  Ernst Reicher stared at the pretty, rich girl with the ridiculous dog. “Pick up your mutt’s poop,” he said in German, “or I’ll report you to the police.” The very next day Maisie changed her name back to Mathilde, gave away the beagle, and took up horse riding.

  Hanne Schmidt, who had arrived an hour too late on the day that the children of St. Francis Xavier’s had been “reallocated,” did not hang around. The light was fading in the winter sky. The rush-hour traffic was beginning to jam. She smeared her eyes with the back of her hand, replaced her hat, and then, without a word, turned and walked back the way she had come, her high heels dragging on the cobbles and her shoulders, in a coat that was too thin for the weather, hunching against the cold.

  Lilly could have gone to Leipzig. There was an orphanage with a space for an older girl. And then, if she had wanted, if she had the calling, she could have eventually moved to Munich to the Order of St. Henry. Suddenly memories of Sister August, the swish of her robes on the linoleum, the clank of her keys against her hip, flooded back. Lilly shook her head.

  One of the Adoption Society ladies had a sister-in-law who—and here she raised her eyebrow—needed a domestic urgently. Since Lilly was too young to start work in a factory, she had been given directions and an address and told to present herself as soon as she could.

  Earlier that day, another of the Adoption Society ladies had put herself in charge of the huge mound of paperwork that remained and, in a fit of domestic zeal, decided to give it away or bin it. Her overefficiency meant that dozens of children were permanently denied the details of their genealogy. This led to untold heartache, such as an episode years later when one mother tried to stop a man she was convinced was her own son, by the likeness to her former husband and the birthmark on his arm, from marrying her daughter. Because of the lack of paperwork, her appeal failed and all her grandchildren died before they were four.

  And so, just as she was about to leave, Lilly had been handed a tatty cardboard file. Her full name and date of birth had been scratched out in fountain pen on the top left corner.

  “Let’s have a look,” said the Adoption Society lady whose sister-in-law she was being sent to.

  “No,” Lilly said before shoving the whole unread file into her suitcase. “It’s private.”

  Eyebrows were rai
sed once more and doubts registered. But there was still so much to do, the leftover children to be dealt with and reports to be written, that nothing was said.

  After a ride on a tram and a short walk, Lilly arrived at a detached house in the southwest of the city. It was dark and a single lamp burned on the porch. She checked the address and then rang the brass bell. A man wearing evening dress and a top hat opened the door. Loud sobbing could be heard from behind him. He excused himself and stepped back inside, and after a few minutes the sobbing stopped.

  “Thank you for waiting,” he said when he returned. “Your arrival couldn’t be better timed. I’m Dr. Storck. Please do come in.”

  Number 34 Klausestrasse was a mess. Almost every inch of floor was covered in discarded newspapers. A grand piano stood in the corner, with piles of sheet music held down on the stool by a book; a wind-up record player hiccuped on the window ledge; dead flowers languished in half a dozen vases. As they passed a room off the hallway, the doctor pulled the door shut, but not before Lilly had had time to glimpse who was inside. A woman lay facedown, completely naked, on a table. Her back was covered in glass bulbs. The doctor smiled but did not comment as he led Lilly down a set of stone steps, through the kitchen, and past the scullery.

  “This is where the last girl slept,” he said.

  He opened the door of a room just big enough for a bed, a small wardrobe, a chest of drawers, and a sink, and switched on the light. A single barred window looked out onto a wall.

  “The last girl?” she asked. “What happened to the last girl?”

  “Oh, don’t you worry your pretty head about her,” the doctor said. “Did you bring a uniform?”

  “Was I supposed to?” she asked.

  He frowned and then started to open the drawers of the dresser. Eventually, from the bottom drawer, he pulled out a creased black dress and a stained white apron.