February 1916. The night is overcast, no moon or stars; only the roar ofthe Fokker E-type’s engine as it flies toward France.Tonight there’s an extra passenger on the airplane to watch the bombardment: a Film-Führer, as he asks to be called, with his camera mounted so it points through the hatch and his pile of film, which he stores in a metal box. Below, when their eyes adjust, they can see the ammunition trains, the roads crawling with gray, the soldiers in formation moving toward the front, even the new artillery, the Minnenwerfers, which can, they say, toss a bomb as big as an oil drum.
“Look!” the Film-Führer shouts. “Below!”
Like huge silent fish without eyes are the zeppelins. Heading toward Lorraine, toward Revigny, toward Verdun, they cross into enemy territory to chart British positions, their guns, their camps, their trenches. But then a shell, a shot, a shooting star of light, is fired up into the night. Two searchlights point their fingers into the mist, back and forth and back and forth again.The Film-Führer begins to pray.
The enemy catch a zeppelin in their prongs and start to fire. They hit. The airship tips, turns pink, and bursts into flame. Up in the Fokker they watch it fall through the sky below, a blaze of white, an arc of skeletal metal, a crumpled heap in a muddy field.The sky is lightening in the east.The other zeppelins begin to drop their bombs; the German guns begin to fire.The battle for Verdun has started.
The cart horse swayed and then sank forward to its knees. The boy with the reins in his hands and the sob in his voice started to shout, “Come on! . . . Gee up! . . . Move! Why have you stopped? Move! Please move?” He hit the horse’s ridged brown back with his whip, once, twice, three times. The horse flinched, showed the whites of its eyes, and then with a small moan, a letting out of breath, of steam, of life, it slumped and collapsed into a heap of angular bone and sagging skin.
Lilly wasn’t the only one standing on Mariannenplatz who was watching. No sooner had the horse’s head hit the cobbles than a dozen women appeared from doorways and alleyways armed with knives and bowls and cups.They ignored the boy’s cries, his tears, his laments, and began to butcher the carcass, sawing through bone and slicing through veins to let the spurt of warm blood flow into their bowls. One woman, her face splattered with red, tried to hack off a ragged haunch with a penknife; another pulled out the tongue. In minutes, what was left of the horse would vanish completely. Lilly pushed to the front. All she had eaten for months was turnip—raw turnip, since there was rarely any coal to be had. She looked down at the skin and bone that remained and tried to convert it in her mind into something edible. She forced herself to think of stew, of soup, of meat. It was so long since she had eaten any, she had almost forgotten the taste. And yet she tried to make the connection. Horse . . . food; food . . . horse.The thought filled her mouth with bile and she had to resist the urge to gag. There was someone pulling at her skirt. It was the boy.Tears were streaming down his face.
“My mother,” he sobbed. “What will my mother say?”
Lilly crouched down next to the bloody remains of the horse. An old woman was pulling out the horse’s innards. She had the liver in her hands.
“Give it to the boy,” Lilly said.
The old woman, whose apron was already full, hesitated. Her eyes swiveled round to look at Lilly, to see if it was just a ruse. The sound of the boy’s sobs was almost unbearable. Lilly held the old woman’s gaze. And so, with much shaking of her head and cursing of the government, she pulled a piece of newspaper from her bag, wrapped up the horse’s liver, and handed it over.
If anyone ever asked the silent film star Lidi—or Lilly, as she was known then—about the hardships in wartime Berlin, her eyes would glaze over and she would suggest that she had suffered, but not as much as most people. She would be vague with dates and places and specifics, so vague that it did indeed seem as if, like an accident victim, her subconscious had wiped her memory almost clean.
In fact, on that day in April 1916, she had been living in a hostel for unmarried Catholic women for a year. With only her orphan’s allowance to live on, Lilly had been allowed to make up the rent in cleaning duties. Every morning she would sluice out the latrines with scalding hot water and scrub the floor with carbolic soap. And every night she would do it all over again. And no matter how well she had done it the previous time, how scalded her hands had become and how many new blisters she had acquired, the floor was always filthy when she went down on her knees with her scrubbing brush in hand and the latrines were always caked with excrement and plugged with soiled newsprint.
Her bed, one bunk in a room of four, was damp and full of fleas. Since many of the other women didn’t believe in bathing during winter, the smell in the room at night was suffocating.There was a single stove for the whole floor, and when there was enough fuel, each woman was allocated fifteen minutes. But it was loosely policed, and as all cooking was prohibited after nine, Lilly often waited all evening for nothing. Nobody spoke to her and she spoke to no one. She developed a hacking cough and at night the other women begged the Virgin Mary to either let her die or get better but make it quick.
She was more likely to die in there, she assessed quite unemotionally, than recover. The price of food kept rising and the queues for food kept growing longer. Living on stale bread and raw vegetables, she had barely enough energy to do much more than simply get through the day. It was as if a large part of her had shut down and the only visible remaining part of her was the part that ached, that was always hungry, that would do almost anything to survive.
Lilly turned back to the horse. She pulled out her water pail and quickly began to pick up what she could find: a bone, a rib, a stringy piece of flank. And then she was aware that someone was watching her. She looked up. A woman was staring at her over the remains of the dead horse, a woman wearing clean white gloves and holding a camera. Without warning, she raised the camera to her eye and took a photograph.
“Don’t,” Lilly said, shielding her face with her hand. But it was too late.The picture was already taken.
“Still reading poetry?” the woman asked as she wound the film. The remark was so incongruous that Lilly barely took it in.
“You’re the Luisenstadt girl?”
The woman seemed oblivious to the pandemonium around her. An old man squeezed in front of Lilly and started to spoon up the horse’s spilled innards from the filthy cobbles with a battered ladle, splashing her dress with blood. Wash day wasn’t until the weekend. Her eyes swam. She tried so hard to keep clean, to look respectable. What was the point?
“You don’t remember me?” the woman continued.
The woman did look vaguely familiar. But most people had become ghostly facsimiles of who they had been two years earlier, and unless you were sure of someone’s identity, it was better to glance away than to be mistaken.Without answering, she turned and began to make her way back through the crowd.
It was late afternoon and the rush hour had started. A tram was at a standstill behind the horseless cart and was blaring its horn. As a traffic jam began to grow in both directions and a group of women squabbled over what was left of the carcass, as the boy sat on the curb with a lump of bloody newspaper in his hands and watched as someone made off with the horse’s head on his shoulder, the woman with the camera appeared at Lilly’s side.
“My brother and I ran you over on the road to Potsdam,” she said. “Don’t you remember? It does seem such a long time ago.”
Lilly stopped and stared at the woman’s face, at the flint-colored eyes and the wide cheekbones. Now she remembered her.
“I gave you some boots, which I see you’re not wearing. Not that I blame you: they were an unfortunate shade.”
The woman smiled at her expectantly. As she stood there with her filthy dress and her pail full of warm horsemeat, Lilly was ashamed: ashamed of how she looked, ashamed of what she had done, ashamed of who she was.
“Can I take your portrait?” the woman asked suddenly. “We could do it at the apartment. I’
m putting together a series.”
For an instant Lilly thought she was making fun of her.
“I don’t think so,” Lilly replied.
“I’d pay you,” the woman quickly countered. “I haven’t got that much, but if you name a figure, I’m sure we could come to some arrangement.”
Lilly felt her cheeks begin to color. She had heard those words many times before, always from men. A figure, she could name a figure: ten marks, twenty. She could do it, she would tell herself, what did it matter? Hanne could. Thousands of other women could, so why not her? Think of the money. Just think of the money. And yet, as soon as the decision was made, she would remember the clatter of metal instrument on metal bowl, the suffocation of a hand across her mouth, the memory of her body starting to split and bleed, and she could not.
“No, thank you,” she said, and started on her way again.
“I’ll make you dinner, then.”
Dinner: the word was as foreign as “picnic” or “luncheon.” Large white plates and linen napkins; plates of peaches and purple figs; legs of lamb and roast potatoes. She was dreaming; she often drifted away like this, her mind filled with images and tastes that she hadn’t even experienced firsthand, generic memories she didn’t even own. The woman’s small blue eyes had widened and she had reached out, almost touching her on the arm, making her stop.
“A deal?” the woman offered. “It’s Eva. My name, in case you forgot.”
The jam had cleared. The tram finally trundled past. All that was left of the horse was a large black stain on the cobbles. Finally, Lilly met Eva’s eye.
“I’d say it was the least you could do after last time,” Eva said.
And then Lilly remembered: She’d left suddenly, without thanking them or saying good-bye. Their maid knew; their maid could tell by the reddened chafe of her hands and the cast of her eye that she was not, as they had assumed by her dress, one of them.
But the war had changed everything.The social boundaries, which had seemed so watertight at the time, had become permeable. Lilly inclined her head, the tiniest nod.
“Wonderful. We’ll have to walk, I’m afraid. No more gas for the car.”
Eva took Lilly’s arm and folded it over her own, as if it was a natural thing, as if she did it every day. Nobody had touched Lilly like this for months. She had been jostled, pushed, shoved, and elbowed but never treated gently or affectionately. Instinctively, however, she pulled away.
“I have to be back before ten,” she said. “I mustn’t be late.”
The hostel had a strict curfew. There were, Lilly had been informed, a dozen women turned away every night, a dozen women who would and could take her place. And Lilly believed it. During that winter the first corpses started to appear on the streets. At first it was children and old people. But more recently she had seen girls her age. She could not lose her bunk.
Eva Mauritz had been on the tram on the way to the park when the horse had collapsed and died, blocking the road and forcing her, like the rest of the passengers, to climb off and investigate. She recognized the dark-haired schoolgirl immediately. She was thin but not hunched, skeletal and yet not pinched. Her face had been hollowed down to the bone, but it made her gray eyes seem bigger and more prominent in her face. In fact, she was even more striking than she had been on the day they had run her over two years earlier. Although she had grown a few inches, it wasn’t just a new maturity: there was something both vulnerable and strong in her that Eva had not noticed before, a translucency of spirit but an opaqueness of will. Poverty, Eva ruminated, seemed to suit her. And she wondered what terrible misfortune had befallen her.
The cherry trees were in blossom early that year, and pale pink blew in gusts over the off-duty soldiers who slept on park benches and around the ankles of the widows who solicited on the corners. It was a clear, cold day with an endless blue sky and just the occasional race of white cloud.
“Underwear,” said Eva. “Blossoms always remind me of thousands of tiny pairs of bloomers.”
And she laughed again, a free, easy laugh. As if it didn’t matter what anyone else thought; she was funny, she knew she was. The sun was on her face. The parks were still full of flowers despite the fact that there was no one employed to tend them. It was the kind of day where you could pretend that all was well, that all would be fine in the end.
It took an hour to walk to Steglitz. By the time they reached the apartment block, Lilly was exhausted; she had no energy to spare, few calories to burn. Inside, the apartment looked much sparser than she remembered. Some of the furniture had been chopped up for fuel and the rest was covered up with dust sheets. Eva explained that she often slept on a divan next to the fire in the kitchen.
“There’s only me,” Eva explained. “And it’s warmer this way.”
Eva had lost her maids, her cook, and most of her friends. People did not stay on in Berlin if they could help it. People did not want to fight for food or pay black-market prices if they had people they could stay with in the country. Her father, who had remarried, insisted that she come and live with him on his estate. Eva accepted but then postponed and kept postponing until he stopped inviting her. She could not bear the provinces, she said, the gossip and the rumors. But most of all, she couldn’t bear the new wife.
Eva brewed coffee with a mixture made from ground walnut shells. It was bitter and black, but at least it was hot.
“Is your brother all right?” Lilly asked. “It’s Stefan, isn’t it?”
“He’s stationed in France, next to a river called the Somme,” Eva said. “He says it’s rather beautiful, all rolling hills and meadows.”
The uhlan. Lilly had often wondered what had become of the handsome young uhlan. With their red and blue uniforms and plumed hats, they had been easy to spot in the first few months of the war and sustained heavy losses. By Christmas, what few were left had been issued new brown uniforms and guns instead of lances. They were uhlans now in name only.
In her mind she saw him in the drawing room with a cup of tea balanced on his knee. As far as she knew, they were winning the war. But if that was so, why didn’t they bring it to a close? How long did the kaiser think they could go on like this?
Lilly picked up the coffee with her thumb and forefinger, careful not to let the hot cup touch her palms. Eva was watching her, her face tilted into a question.
“Do you have any ointment?” she asked. “I have a few blisters.”
“Jesus Christ!” Eva whispered as she dabbed the blisters with salt water and iodine. But she could tell by Lilly’s expression that it was better not to ask how she got them or where.
“Didn’t you join the Red Cross?” Lilly asked.
“Got kicked out,” Eva said with a sideways smile. She didn’t explain, either.
By the time Lilly’s hands had been washed and dressed, it was dark outside. Eva lit a gas lamp and piled up the grate with coal.The room soon filled with heat. Lilly felt her whole body start to relax. She had joined the queue outside the baker’s at five that morning. She struggled to keep her eyes open.
“Don’t let me fall asleep,” she said.
“I wouldn’t dream of it,” replied Eva.
When Lilly woke, for an instant she had no idea where she was. And then she saw Eva reading and remembered.
“What time is it?” Lilly said.
“It’s just gone eleven.”
Lilly leapt out of the chair and pulled on her coat.
“No,” she said. “Oh, no! Why didn’t you wake me up?”
“You looked so peaceful, I didn’t like to. Never mind. I was late every day for school. Didn’t do me any harm.”
“You don’t understand,” Lilly said with a hint of hysteria in her voice. “Why didn’t you wake me?”
“I’m sorry!” Eva replied in a voice that suggested that she was not. “What about the picture? And dinner? Your meat! Come back tomorrow and eat it. I’ll expect you at seven-thirty.”
It was several mile
s back to the hostel. Lilly ran most of the way. By the time she reached it, her bunk had been taken and her suitcase had been tagged and stored in the office.
“We have rules,” the warden told her. “I’m sorry.”
Lilly spent most of the night walking. Even in the middle of the night, the city streets were busy. Thousands of people got up in the dark to queue for food. Lilly joined a queue outside a bread shop and waited for four hours with the smell of fresh loaves in the air. There was none left by the time she reached the front, so she spent a week’s allowance on a couple of rock-hard rye rolls instead.
At seven-thirty exactly that evening, she rang Eva’s bell. No one answered. An old woman with a dog came out of the flat opposite.
“Are you expected?” she asked. Lilly nodded.
But she was aware that the woman was watching her, taking in her cheap boots and stained dress. She rang the bell again. Maybe Eva had assumed that Lilly would assume that the invitation was nothing more than a platitude. Or maybe she had changed her mind.The dog started to bark. The woman began to tap her keys against her palm. Lilly turned and started slowly down the steps. She had hidden her suitcase in the basement of the building. But now, with the woman watching her, she wouldn’t be able to retrieve it. Her situation was getting worse and worse. She had spent all day wandering in the park, lingering for hours over one cup of so-called coffee, taking a tram from one terminal to the other and back, and now she was so tired she couldn’t stop shivering. She would have to go to the hostel and wait until a bunk was free. That might take days, or even weeks. Her breath started to come quicker. Just walk, she told herself. But her feet were leaden and her head felt light.
Eva opened the door above, dressed only in a thin silk gown.
“Oh, it’s you. I was in the bath,” she explained. “I left the door on the latch. Didn’t you notice?”
Lilly stepped inside the apartment and closed the door behind her. Pools of water led from the front door to the bathroom. She listened as Eva climbed back into the water. And she realized that she had been slowly counting the hours, the minutes, the seconds, until this moment.
The Glimmer Palace Page 17