The Glimmer Palace

by Beatrice Colin

  Es ist nichts, she would tell herself. It is nothing.

  “It is nothing,” Archduke Franz Ferdinand repeated as he lay bleeding to death beside his pregnant wife on the floor of his carriage in the middle of Sarajevo in June. But of course, on both counts, it was not nothing.

  Lilly and Hanne met outside The Blue Cat on her next day off. In Lilly’s pocket was an envelope heavy with notes, and the word Pitman’s written on the front.

  “I have two hundred marks,” she said. “Will that be enough?”

  “Should be,” said Hanne.

  They took a tram and Hanne pulled the chain when they turned into Dragonstrasse. When she recognized where she was, however, Lilly hesitated.

  “I’m not sure if I can get off here.”

  “You have to. Unless you want to fly there. Come on.”

  Hanne took Lilly’s arm and pulled her down the stairs. They paused at Otto’s block.

  “Come on,” Hanne said, and pushed open the heavy wooden door.

  “Wait a minute,” said Lilly. “You know the lady, right?”

  “I know her,” said Hanne.

  “What’s her name, then?”

  “Frau . . . Lindt . . . no, Lundt . . .”

  “Licht?”

  “That’s it,” said Hanne. “Frau Licht.”

  Lilly sank down to the stone step. She covered her mouth. She felt as if she were about to vomit.

  “I can’t,” she said.

  “You have to,” Hanne said. “You’re here now. Besides, it’s nothing special. I know a girl who’s had three in the last year.”

  Hanne had already had one abortion, the product of a short-lived but frantic relationship with the Bulgarian. Frau Licht gave her plum brandy to quell the pain, and she was so sick the next day that the whole episode took on the hallucinatory feel of a bad dream.

  “It’ll hurt and then it’ll be over,” said Hanne. “And then you’ll be back to normal again. Go on. I’ll wait for you outside.”

  Otto was a little surprised to find Tiny Lil at his door. He had just blown an entire week’s pay packet on an American who missed her train and let him pay for her hotel in return for nothing more than a peck on her cool Bostonian cheek. And now he was waiting for Frau Licht to ask if he could pay double next week. He had some news that might back up his case. He was about to enlist in the military again, this time voluntarily. The kaiser was gathering his troops. Everyone said that the war, when it came, would last no more than six weeks. And as wave after wave of heavily armed soldiers marched through Berlin, the air was full of hope. It was common knowledge that the German naval fleet, financed partly by a tax on Champagne, was one of the best in the world. The army was well equipped with the most modern in combat machinery. Otto wanted to be part of it, to be issued a brand-new gray uniform and sent to a training camp on the Rhine. He was also going to hand her his notice.

  They sat in the parlor and he poured Tiny Lil coffee. It was true he had meant to go back and see her at the orphanage, and several times he had found himself strolling in that direction. But something had always distracted him—a pretty girl, a bar he had not noticed before, a rainstorm—and he had put it off. And now, she told him, it had closed anyway. Tiny Lil was more sober, more somber, than he remembered. She explained that she had a job as a servant. He expected more. She didn’t continue.

  “So, you want to go out dancing?” he asked.

  Lilly finally caught his eye.

  “Not dancing in a bar but in the Tiergarten,” he continued. “You can dance beneath the stars on a Saturday all night.”

  She swallowed and looked away. In the pale sunlight, her skin was translucent and her eyes were the color of granite. He took her hand and kissed it. And then he wanted to kiss her face, her cheek, her lips again.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said, aware that it was not completely untrue.

  For an instant Lilly glimpsed another future, one with Otto. But just as quickly as it appeared, it suddenly vanished. The front door slammed. Otto pulled back just as his landlady walked in.

  “Your friend said you were here,” she said. “You’d better come through.”

  Otto looked from Lilly to Frau Licht. He knew what his landlady did, even though he pretended he didn’t. He had never seen any of the women. But he had heard them.

  Lilly felt her shoulders descend despite herself. Otto seemed to shrink back a step. And so she made herself look up at him; she made him look back at her.

  “The Tiergarten?” she said.

  “The Tiergarten,” he replied. And then, with a closed smile, he shook her hand.

  Olivia Licht performed her procedures in a small bathroom just off her bedroom. A narrow table was covered with newspaper. A white coat hung on the peg behind the door. The bottle of plum brandy stood beside a toothbrush and some tooth-whitening powder. She sprayed the air with eau de cologne and handed Lilly a stained cotton gown.

  “How much?” asked Lilly.

  “Three hundred,” she replied.

  “Will you take two?”

  “If that’s all you have,” she replied.

  Frau Licht knew she was an inexpert practitioner. She had already been indirectly responsible for three deaths due to infection, but as the girls were always desperate and her success rate was around sixty percent, a steady stream of women traipsed up Dragonstrasse for so-called emergency procedures. She did wonder if it was her young lodger’s progeny that she went fishing for in Lilly’s womb with her Viennese contraption. But the fetus slipped away from her grasp, just as Otto had, for he had stopped sleeping with her several months before. She charged the girl anyway; if the baby survived, she could always claim it had been twins.

  In fact, Lilly lost the baby in the third month. She started bleeding long before it started to hurt. And then, as cloth after cloth became sodden with blood and the cramps began, she realized that she had wasted her money.

  The cook found her curled up in a corner in the kitchen and called the doctor immediately. To his credit, Dr. Storck canceled a whole afternoon’s worth of appointments to look after her. And while the Countess lay on her bed inhaling a new treatment, oil of bergamot, the doctor administered morphine by the spoonful and cooled Lilly’s brow with his handkerchief dipped in ice-cold water. He did not let her see the bloody bundle he wrapped in newspaper for him to take away. She did not know that he gave the fetus to the faculty of medicine at his old university, where it was preserved in a jar and placed on a shelf in the anatomy department of what is now known as Humboldt University.

  A week later, a note appeared on the dining room table: Please clean my room.

  Lilly took a duster and a bucket of warm water and slowly made her way up the stairs to the Countess’s room. Windows faced north and south. You could see as far as Viktoriapark in one direction and Museum Island in the other.

  “I cannot divorce him,” a voice said. Lilly jumped and swung round. She had thought the Countess was downstairs, in the drawing room. Instead she was sitting in the shadows. Only the line of her jaw was visible. Lilly was filled with apprehension. How much did she know? What had the poet told her?

  “Because, like you, I am a Catholic.”

  Her voice was low pitched and steady. All the life in her hands was gone.

  “He has asked me to sack you,” she continued. “But you work hard. You are quiet, you do not gossip. But other people will.”

  She sighed and swallowed.

  “I’m sorry, Lilly,” she said. “Would you like me to write you a reference?”

  ar was announced in July. The kaiser decided to take Paris by force. In August, after marching through Belgium with no opposition, the German army reached Reims.Three men in an open-topped car, one bearing a white flag, another his grandfather’s saber, and a third, who was an opera singer, a bugle, crossed enemy lines to ask the city to surrender. There had been some argument that it should have in fact been a trumpet, but the opera singer insisted that it was almost the same th
ing. A ritual is a ritual, insisted the captain with the white flag. In the end, however, when no trumpet could be procured, they agreed to compromise. And so, with the saber waving, the bugle gleaming, and the white flag fluttering in the baking sun, they drove toward the city.

  The peace envoy had barely made it into the town square, however, when they were all arrested and charged with espionage. Spies with white flags and bugles, the Germans probably pointed out, spies who could sing all the tenor parts from Puccini’s Tosca. Maybe the opera singer even gave a rendition to prove it. Maybe the soldier with the saber, in stuttering French, told the gendarmes that his grand-father had used the saber against the Danish. Maybe the authorities in Reims believed them but locked them all up anyway. But what happened there was immaterial. Outside the city, both armies had fortified their positions and had started to dig a system of trenches. The Battle of the Marne had begun.

  The three Germans were imprisoned for several weeks. And then a halt was called to firing and they were brought to the front line and pushed over the brink of a French trench.Tentatively they made their way across what would soon be known as no-man’s-land, with their polished boots and their shining buttons, the unsounded bugle and the rolled-up white flag, splattered and soiled by the freshly churned-up mud.

  Lilly saw Otto once more that year, on a temporary ice rink in an empty lot in late 1914. He was wearing a uniform and holding the hands of a girl with red hair and a purple muffler. As Lilly watched, Otto turned and started pulling the girl round and round the rink. And the more the girl screamed and told him to stop, the faster he skated. And then, digging the blades of his skates into the ice, he came to a skidding stop and the girl, with skates parallel and cheeks aflush, flew straight into his open arms.

  He was dead by Christmas. His boots were stolen from his body by a boy from Silesia who deserted and walked all the way home, only to be shot by his own father.

  Thunder Clouds

  Kreuzberg. The Palace Movie Theater. November 1914. The frontiers are closed. All foreign films are banned. No more Westerns, no more Charlie Chaplin or Tontolini. Just German films. The newsreel has started when Greta and her mother take their seats. On screen, the soldier holding the gun somewhere in France is young and blond. He bangs the door of a whitewashed barn with his fist. Five French soldiers come out of the barn with their hands upon their heads.

  And yet, and yet, the third French soldier looks familiar. “It’s Philip,” Greta whispers. “Don’t you see?” Despite the uniform and the hands across the face, it’s him, her brother. “Why would he agree to do such a thing?”

  Why did he walk down that lane in France, ten miles at least from the entrenchment known as the Front. Why? Because there was no mud, no blood, no gangrene or other bodily fluids, no death, no pain, no fear. Just uniforms taken from French corpses buttoned over stomachs still digesting the extra bratwurst each of them received in payment.

  Greta’s tear-filled eyes hold on to the roll of her brother’s shoulder, the stamp of his feet in polished boots, the back of his head clasped with those still-familiar hands, while the people in the audience almost cheer the roof off.

  “We’re winning the war,” they shout. “Our boys’ll be home before you know it.”

  Greta and her mother both leave before the feature.

  Years later, Lidi’s abrupt and unexpected exits were legendary. It was said that she could be halfway through a film or a dinner or a conversation, with a glass in one hand and a fork in the other, when she would suddenly hand them over to the nearest person and make for the door. And she would quite often leave without her coat.

  But in the early days of the Great War, after being sacked for alleged infidelities with her employer’s husband, Lidi’s exit was anything but glamorous. She packed her cardboard suitcase, folded the maid’s uniform, placed it back in the bottom drawer where she had found it, and put on the Countess’s daughter’s blue dress. And then she left all the books that the penniless poet had given her, except one, on the bedside table, opened the window with its view of a wall, and pulled the door to for the final time.

  Lilly, as she was known then, walked away from the villa where she had worked for so many months and did not look back. If she had, she might have noticed that from the outside the house seemed so still, so rigid that it was almost as if it had been sent to sleep forever. It did, in fact, stand virtually unchanged until 1945, when it was blown to bits by Russian shells.

  It was a hot, windless late-August day. In gardens full of blossom, women in pale dresses poured lemonade from tall glass jugs.The soft clink of croquet balls and the occasional whoop of drunken young men drifted from the far reaches of smooth grass lawns. An open-topped omnibus motored past, the top deck full of couples with picnic baskets and straw hats. A horse and cart from the country clopped along behind it, laden with baskets of strawberries. A distant church bell struck two.

  The doctor noticed the maid as he passed in a horse-drawn cab, but he did not stop. Earlier that day, he had spotted the kaiser’s motorcar racing through the streets to another meeting at the Reichstag. The German army had defeated the French on the Western Front. The whole city was full of flags. Dr. Storck’s excitement was such that he, too, would also enlist only a few months later. His role as a physician to a small group of wealthy ladies, however, did nothing to prepare him for the field hospital in Poland on the Eastern Front where he was posted in January 1915. Faced with small wounds oozing with gangrene that would rapidly kill otherwise healthy men, daily amputations, and a never-ending stream of horrific and usually fatal injuries, the doctor sometimes sat down, wept copiously, and had to be coaxed back to work by one of the nurses with hot tea laced with Polish vodka.

  On that hot summer day, however, when the whole country seemed to be on holiday as people sauntered and strolled and even promenaded, Lilly walked at a pace that suggested she was going somewhere, that she was even a little late. As she walked she tried to clear her head, she tried to work out what she would do and where she would go. First she would have to find a room in a boardinghouse. But that wouldn’t be easy: the rental barracks, as they were known, were overcrowded with workers from eastern Prussia. And then she would have to find another job. She was old enough to find work in a factory. Now that so many men had enlisted, it was rumored that they had started to employ more women. But why even do that? I am free, she told herself. I can go anywhere, do anything, and be anyone. I have no past, only a future.

  And then the idea occurred to her that she ought to try to find some of her relatives. And yet they had never tried to seek her out. They must have known she existed. They must have seen the newspaper article.The road surface changed beneath her feet from cobbles to twin tracks of dust. The houses were built farther apart here, and saplings had been planted in long lines along what would be the curb. The smell of rye drifted in from the fields where migrant Russians and Poles were bringing in the harvest. Lilly realized that she had been inadvertently walking away from the city instead of toward it.

  On a corner was a signpost. She was heading in the direction of Potsdam. On the horizon, anvils of gray cloud were looming up and rolling closer.The air was filled with electricity.The sun was too hot. Her shoes were too small. The suitcase was too heavy. And so there, just level with the signpost, as a pair of magpies flitted from fence to hedgerow and back again, she stopped. An image of Marek in the summerhouse came into her mind before she could prevent it. He had fooled her; she was indeed worthless, disposable. There was grit in her eyes, her mouth, her throat. No wonder she didn’t hear the car approaching.

  The Daimler convertible slammed on its brakes, its tires bit into the dust, but it did not stop in time. Lilly didn’t even raise her arms as a wall of polished chrome and painted metal came skidding toward her. It hit her so hard that she flew up into the air and over the hood before coming to land, hard, on the rough surface of the soon-to-be suburban road.

  When she opened her eyes, she was momentaril
y surprised that she was still alive. And then she noticed that she had lost her shoes. Her dress was torn and both stockings were shredded at the knee. The contents of her suitcase were strewn along the road. A drop of blood fell from her temple and landed on her hand. She sat up. Nothing seemed to be broken.

  “My dear girl,” a woman’s voice said. “I didn’t see you.”

  “You should have been looking where you were going, Eva,” a man’s voice scolded. “She could have been killed. Are you all right?”

  A couple had climbed out of the car. Both were wearing driving goggles.

  “Can you walk?” the woman asked Lilly.

  “Of course she can’t walk,” the man interrupted.

  He turned to her and held out his hand.

  “I knew I should never have let my sister drive a car. I’m so sorry. Are you hurt?”

  “I don’t think so,” Lilly replied.

  But they didn’t seem to be listening. Still arguing, they placed their hands under her arms and gently hoisted her up.The heat of the road burned her feet through her thin cotton stockings. Her head was spinning.

  “I think I need to . . .” Lilly said.

  “Sit down,” the woman ordered.

  Lilly sank onto the wide wooden running board of the car. Here, at least, there was some shade. And then the woman noticed Lilly’s dress.

  “Oh, you’re at Luisenstadt.” The woman pulled off her goggles, leaving two dark red rings around her eyes.

  The Countess had given her maid the unworn uniform of the expensive private school that she had wanted her daughter to attend. The blue serge was dirty and the hem was torn but the style was unmistakable.

  “Let me get your suitcase? . . .” She paused at the end of the sentence, as if expecting something else of her. The woman was only a little older than Lilly, with fair hair, a strong chin, wide cheeks, and small flint-blue eyes. She wore a gray linen dress with a hobbled skirt. She inclined her head. Finally Lilly understood: she wanted to know her name.

  “Thank you,” she said. “It’s Lilly.”