“I didn’t fancy horsemeat after all,” shouted Eva from the bathroom. “So I threw it away. I hope you like turnip?”
She threw away the meat? Was she mad? Lilly’s eyes filled with tears of both relief and sorrow: for the horse, for herself.
“I made it into a stew,” Eva said. “But I had no idea what I was doing.We were taught to draw and dance and play the piano and read poetry, but nothing practical. I can’t even darn a sock. Oh, and I had a little sausage that I added.” And then she laughed.
That night they ate sausages and turnip in broth. Although it was watery and the sausage was mostly gristle and fat, Lilly ate every last scraping. Eva produced a small pat of butter to go with Lilly’s rolls.
“I’ve been saving it,” she said. “I’ll cut you a large slice. It’ll go off if somebody doesn’t eat it soon. Go on. Have some.”
Lilly hesitated and then took the knife. She put the knife blade in her mouth, closed her eyes, and let the butter melt on her tongue. Few things would ever taste as good as that slice of yellow butter in Eva’s kitchen. The week before there had been riots in Wedding and Friedrichberg over the price of butter. Shopkeepers were tripling or even quadrupling the price. “You can’t afford butter?” one grocer was said to have quipped to the women in the queue. “Then spread shit on your bread.”
It wasn’t only the dairies that had their windows broken, it was the butchers too. Hundreds of women had started to protest on the streets to demand butter, bread, meat. But Lilly knew that Eva had no need to queue for food. She had money. And although all food was rationed, it was well known that shopkeepers weren’t averse to a little manipulation of the scales for “regular” customers. And there was always the black market.
“I queued for it,” Eva insisted. “Like everyone else.” But judging from the size of the slab and its freshness, Lilly knew that was unlikely.
It was already nine o’clock. She stood up and began to pull on her coat. If she hurried, she would reach the hostel before the curfew. She didn’t let herself think further than that.
“Why not stay here tonight?” Eva said. “I have plenty of room.”
As soon as Eva said it, Lilly realized that it was what she had been longing for.
“That’s very kind of you,” she replied. “But I can’t.”
Eva must have sensed that her reply lacked conviction. And so, to reinforce her invitation, she moved herself squarely in front of Lilly, blocking the doorway.
“You’re not leaving,” Eva said. “Listen, it’s not altruistic. It’s a purely selfish act. Since we dismissed the maid and Stefan went to France, I’ve been living in this huge place all on my own.”
“But you don’t know anything about me,” Lilly said.
“I don’t know what’s happened to you, Lilly,” she said. “It must have been bad, since you are still here, in the city, whereas everybody else left months ago. People like us should stick together.”
Lilly took a deep breath in, out, and in again. Should she tell Eva the truth: that she was not like her at all, that she had nothing, nowhere to go, that if she left she would probably have to spend another night on the streets? And yet, maybe, she told herself, they were more alike than she had first realized; her own father had been a baron. But why was Eva doing this?
“Stay,” Eva said. “Please?”
She reached out and touched Lilly very gently on the arm. Lilly glanced up and in an instant read her and knew what it was she wanted from her after all.
Eva Mauritz had discovered she liked girls one summer at the family estate when she was fourteen. Although her neighbor, a young officer with floppy blond hair and bad skin, swore his undying love for her at a midsummer party, she fell for the stable manager’s daughter, a spry sixteen-year-old who had kissed her in exchange for her pony and then promptly told everyone.The indignity took some time to fade, but the knowledge of her sexual orientation did not. She was expelled first from school and then from the young ladies’ division of the Red Cross for so-called inappropriate behavior.
Of course, she could have had no idea at that point that the latest in her series of ill-advised and rash invitations would inadvertently save Lilly’s life. A month later, there was an outbreak of typhus in the Catholic hostel and more than half of the women died. That night, however, as the fire lit up Lilly’s face and turned her lips a deep, dark red, Eva leaned over and kissed her, a firm kiss on the cheek, a sisterly, nonsexual kiss. But her hands shook and her heart was full of sparks.
“I’m so happy,” she said. “Aren’t you?”
A question hung in the air, unanswered. But it was not the one she had voiced.
Later, Lilly peeled off her clothes and climbed into a bath at Eva’s insistence. Her last bath had been in thirdhand water in a tin tub a month before. But here she lay with her whole body submerged, apart from the circle of her face, as steam curled up into the cold air. On the porcelain rim sat a dish with a bar of French soap. Lilly sat up, covered herself with lather, and scrubbed her hair, her skin, her feet, until she felt as if she had rubbed a whole layer of herself clean away. But even though her skin was raw and her body naked, she was still cocooned inside. She could sense Eva’s desire for her, but it left her untouched. Sooner or later Eva would sense her reticence and suspect she had been misled, but until then Lilly would offer what she had, even though she knew what she had would never be enough.
Eva had laid out some nightclothes and a spare toothbrush. Lilly dried herself quickly and then cleaned her teeth. A blurred face in the mirror looked back at her. She had almost forgotten what she looked like. As she wiped away the condensation, her reflection gradually appeared. She tried to smile, but her face, she noticed with a jolt, was one that had become configured for tragedy.
The next morning Lilly woke at five and lay awake as the room lightened. Eva had looked at her in the same way that Marek had, with the same hunger and giddy slide of her eyes. And once more she hadn’t resisted it; she had been complicit.
And so she got dressed and started to clean the apartment. There were balls of dust in the corners of the corridors and the rugs were gray with soot. As quietly as she could, she dusted, polished, and washed floors. Eva rose at ten-thirty. As soon as she saw the mop in Lilly’s hand, she tried to take it away.
“You don’t have to do that,” she told Lilly. “I’ve been meaning to get a lady.”
“But now you’ve got me,” Lilly replied. “Please, I’ll only stay here if I have something to do . . .”
Lilly’s grip on the mop was unyielding. And they both knew that Eva’s question had been answered.
“If you insist,” Eva conceded with a laugh despite the dip of disappointment she felt inside. “But it’s only because you want to. If you clean, I’ll cook. And I don’t know what happened to your wardrobe, but you’re welcome to have as many of my clothes as you like.”
“That’s very kind of you,” Lilly said.
“I’m a very kind sort of girl.”
Within a week, Eva commented later, it seemed as if Lilly had come back to life from the dead. They ate together, they danced together, they talked until late: about school, about clothes, about their childhoods. Although Lilly would remain tight-lipped about her recent situation, she hinted that it involved a father who wanted to marry her off to a much older, very wealthy man. And if Eva was ever suspicious that she had read Lilly’s anecdotes in a book or seen them on the cinema screen, she never let on. But Lilly always covered her tracks. While her tales about boarding school and balls and banquets were filled with convincing detail, she was always vague with places and dates. In fact, the only real person in her stories was her school friend Hanne Schmidt, whom she described with such affection that Eva became fascinated.
“Tell me again about your friend who worked in a tingle-tangle,” she would insist. And so Lilly would describe her friend’s shocking downfall from aristocrat to bar singer, and even sing a snatch or two of her songs, which Eva always foun
d hilarious.
“I know a man with a great big . . .
Dick was his name . . .”
“It’s like you’ve always lived here,” Eva said when she had finished laughing.
And so they settled into a routine of sorts, with Eva cooking and Lilly cleaning up, Eva observing and Lilly letting her, a symbiotic relationship in which neither admitted what was happening or questioned how it would end. Sometimes, without telling Eva, Lilly looked for a job. She paced the city streets, from Zoo to the Cölln and from Potsdamer Platz to Mitte, looking for notices in shop windows or cards on notice boards. But the city was full of unemployed female servants and the middle classes were unwilling, it was said, to hire again until the war was over.
Eva’s camera was put away and the portrait was never mentioned again. It was just one in a series of short-lived passions.The next was writing a novel. Every morning after breakfast, she set up a brand-new Remington typewriter on the kitchen table and stabbed out each word letter by letter, swearing loudly when she made a mistake.
“Is it difficult?” Lilly asked. “Typing, I mean.”
“No.Yes, I admit it. It’s bloody hard.You want to try?”
Lilly sat at the table and Eva stood behind her. Lilly slowly bashed out the alphabet, letter by letter. Sometimes she hesitated and Eva would lean over her shoulder and point out a letter. And when she had reached Z, she typed up a sentence: Eva has Every Eventuality Evaluated.
Eva smiled and typed out a sentence in return: “ ‘My Little Lilly is a Lovely Lass,’” Lilly read.
“I have a guide if you want to learn,” Eva said. “I did a course, but quite frankly, I have no natural aptitude. Maybe you could pick it up, though.”
Lilly ran her fingers very gently over the Bakelite keys. Maybe she could. The book claimed you could learn in a week. It took Lilly three. She followed the exercises without any ink, since typewriter ribbon was increasingly hard to get hold of and she didn’t want to waste it. And then, when she could manage a page or two slowly and clumsily, she offered to type up the first chapter of Eva’s book.
“Oh, no. It needs another draft,” Eva said. “It’s not finished.”
“When can I read it?” she asked.
“Soon, soon,” Eva replied.
The next day Eva burned it.The typewriter, however, remained.
Eva’s status as a “regular customer” in her local shops was undermined by extreme food shortages. Although Eva and Lilly both had ration books, what was listed inside them was pure fiction.
“A loaf of bread a week,” Eva scoffed. “And a pound of meat a month.You know what he offered me? A cup full of flour and a pound of wormy apples.”
And so in June, Lilly and Eva decided to go on a foraging trip to the country. As they walked to the station, they noticed that the city was strangely silent. That spring, boys with ladders had climbed trees, raided nests, and then sold the birds’ eggs they found for fifty pfennigs each. Others had rigged up nets and offered starlings and pigeons, magpies and swallows, at one mark a pair.
Every weekend the trains left the main stations packed with people. At country stations, where there was little more than a church and a couple of houses, at least two dozen old men, women, and children would disembark carrying baskets and sacks. They had all heard that some farmers would sell eggs and milk—at a price. Others would chase trespassers away with a stick. But they couldn’t guard all of their crops all of the time, and so every potato field, vegetable garden, and grain crop was liable to have had some of its produce “liberated.”
The police, however, had grown wise to this and they patrolled the main stations in Berlin, arresting anyone caught with what they assumed were foraged goods. And so the foragers knew it was better to eat what you could in the country than to risk the prospect of the food you gathered, by honest means or not, being confiscated and left to rot on the platform.
Lilly and Eva bought tickets for the next train leaving, the nine-thirtyto Munich, and they climbed off about lunchtime at a tiny village. The fields around were planted with rye and the hedgerows were tangled with cow parsley and goosegrass. First they decided they would try to buy some eggs from a farm. Following directions from the stationmaster, they turned off the road and headed up a small grassy track. As they walked toward a long, low farmhouse, they passed a hen coop and a cow in a barn. A boy of about eight sat on the wall to keep watch.They smiled and wished him good day, but he simply stared at them.
They offered ninety pfennigs per egg, but it was not enough. The farmer’s wife, a tired-looking woman with thick, graying blond hair, watery blue eyes, and several chins, wanted two marks. From the open doorway came the smell of freshly baked bread and smoked bacon. She folded her arms and watched their reaction.
“That’s daylight robbery,” stuttered Eva. “Before the war you could buy six dozen for that price.”
“That’s what they cost today,” the farmer’s wife said as she started to close the door. “If you want eggs, get your own hens. Otherwise, eat turnip like everyone else.”
“Greedy lump,” said Eva as they walked away. “Fat old cow. . . . Even if I had the money, I wouldn’t pay that for an egg.”
From the farmhouse, they heard the farmer’s wife calling her son for lunch. Eva sniffed.
“I can still smell bacon in my hair,” she lamented.
They walked along in silence for a few minutes.
“I think you can eat dandelions,” Lilly said. “But is it the flowers or the leaves?”
It was Eva’s idea to liberate some eggs. Before they had a chance to change their minds, Eva was dragging Lilly back along the road toward the farm.
“We’ll leave some money,” she said. “Ninety pfennigs per egg. Which is still outrageous.”
The boy on the wall had gone. From what they had seen of the house, the kitchen seemed to be in the back. Quickly they slipped into the chicken coop. Half a dozen hens rushed toward them, expecting grain. Neither Lilly nor Eva had any idea where to look for eggs and so they floundered around, surrounded by a clutch of hens, searching in corners and under planks.They both heard the sickening crack when Eva stepped on two eggs by mistake. A child’s high-pitched scream came from the house. Without a prompt, both girls jumped over the fence and ran. They reached the turn of the road laughing and gasping for breath.
“Do you think anyone saw us?” asked Eva.
“I hope not,” said Lilly.
A squawk came from inside Eva’s jacket. It was then that Lilly noticed the bulge. Eva undid one button. As soon as it saw the light, the rooster started to crow in hoarse, clucking rasps. A door slammed in the farmhouse.
“What have you done?” said Lilly.
“I just grabbed it,” Eva said. “We’ll keep it in the apartment. I’ll send them some money. . . . How much do you think a hen costs?”
“It’s not a hen,” Lilly said. “It’s a rooster.”
“So?”
“They don’t lay eggs, Eva.”
“Oh,” she said.
The rooster started to flap its wings, to peck at Eva’s hands and face. She held on tighter.
“Let it go,” said Lilly.
“Absolutely not.”
Kickeriki. The rooster’s crow was almost as loud as the steam train’s whistle. Kickeriki. Eva pulled her jacket over the bird’s head, but it was too late.
“The rooster’s out,” shouted the boy back at the farm.
“Let it go, Eva,” Lilly repeated.
“Lunchtime, Chooki!” he shouted.
Eva giggled but it wasn’t funny anymore. From inside her jacket the rooster clucked and its feet started to claw at her arms.
“I left three marks on the hen coop. I paid for it. . . . Ouch.”
They could hear the rattle of the grain bucket as the boy walked slowly down the lane toward them.
“Come here, Daddy,” he shouted.
The rooster stuck its head out and opened its beak. Before it had a chance to cry out
, Lilly grabbed its neck with both hands. And with one swift turn, she broke it. Eva stared at her for a second, her mouth open. And then she looked down. The rooster hung limp in Lilly’s hand.
“What have you done?” said Eva.
Lilly quickly stuffed the rooster’s body into her basket, covered it with a cloth, and then, taking Eva’s arm, walked as briskly as she dared away from the farm.
The land opened out into fields and then closed in deep, dense forests. The road was sandy and infrequently used. And yet, though they were forty kilometers at least from Munich, the countryside was full of people. They passed several families scanning the ground and the hedgerows. One woman sat on a stool beside a small, slow-moving river with a fishing rod in her hand. She looked up nervously when she saw them coming, and her hand instinctively flew to a canvas bag at her feet.
The rooster grew heavier and heavier in Lilly’s basket, but she forced herself to carry it as if it were empty. If anyone they passed suspected they had something other than a few edible leaves in their basket, she was sure they would have no qualms about a little more “liberation.” Neither Lilly nor Eva spoke until they reached a cross-roads. The right fork headed back toward the village, the left into a wood.
“I’ve been thinking,” said Eva at last. “I think we should bury it and go back to the city. I feel like a common criminal.”
“What?” said Lilly. “It would be criminal not to eat it.”
“But if we’re caught with it in our basket . . . Lilly, if only you hadn’t . . . killed it.What are we going to do with it?”
Lilly didn’t respond. In the air was the smell of turned earth and wood smoke. She began walking again and took the left fork of the road. Eva followed a short distance behind.The smoke was billowing up from a small clearing on the other side of the stream. Lilly headed toward it.
“Where are you going?” called Eva. Lilly jumped the stream and scrabbled up the other side of the bank. She waited for Eva to follow and helped her up.
“Lilly,” Eva scolded. “Now my boots are all wet.”
The Glimmer Palace Page 18