On the eve of his departure, Ilya promised Katya that he would return and marry her. They both knew their love was tempered with both gratitude and guilt. But it was still love. And so she accepted.
The war and then the revolution, however, kept them apart. He would have returned to Russia had her letters not urged him to go to the West, to wait for her there. She would leave St. Petersburg, she promised, when the time was right. And so he was waiting, working, saving up for the day that Katya and her daughter would join him. At first her letters came regularly, but then she told him that the situation in St. Petersburg had become much worse. She had decided to leave everything and head south, to the Crimea. From there she had heard it was still possible to buy passage on a boat and head West. And then, she promised, she would make her way to Berlin, to him, to her fiancé.The letters had then stopped.
And so Ilya had remained faithful to a woman he had not seen for five years. The camera, he told himself, was a membrane through which he could not pass. He could look, but the glass of the lens would always separate him from any woman. And that was the way, he told himself, it had to remain.
He worked nights to edit Letters of Love, and sometimes his assistant would find him asleep next to his splicer, Lidi’s face caught in a glance over her shoulder, perhaps, or her eyes unfocused and her mouth slightly open. And yet, if he were ever challenged, he would hotly deny his feelings were anything but professional. But the evidence to the contrary was clear for all to see: it was in her eyes; it was in his cut; it was in every single frame of every single scene she appeared in.
Lilly continued to live frugally on a fraction of the money she had made from the film. The rest she put into a savings account. She worked on what she could, typing up scripts for writers she had met at the film company, but she knew this kind of work would barely cover the rent once her savings had run out. And although Hanne always seemed to be working, she never seemed to have any money. She should never, Lilly told herself, have signed that contract. Also, she hadn’t seen Ilya since the last day of the shoot. He had taken her from the typing pool and dropped her again. She had been foolish, willful, vain. Sister August would have been ashamed of her. But despite all of this, she still felt the undeniable afterglow of blue inside.
And then, without a premiere and with the minimum budget for publicity, Letters of Love was released.
“Lidi’s gift is such,” said one review, “that she renders all others on the screen to cardboard. Her face is an instrument of a truly rare and unique substance.
“Even though this story of urban despair is a little slight,” the review went on to state, “the results are spellbinding and the tragic climax heartbreaking.”
Lilly had just come back from the studio, where she had dropped off a typed manuscript for a producer. She had picked up the newspapers on the way from the station. As she unlocked the door, she noticed that the air in the room was stale and smelled of perfume and something else, something that Lilly recognized but couldn’t immediately place. Hanne was sitting at the window painting her toenails.
“My film got a review,” she said.
“Any good?”
“Kind of,” Lilly said. “Do you want to read it?”
Hanne shook open the newspaper and then, after crumpling the pages until she found it, scrutinized the review.
“Did you sleep with him?”
“The journalist? I’ve never even met him,” Lilly replied.
Hanne handed the newspaper back. Lilly carefully folded it up again, smoothing it down.
“You won’t be living here for much longer at this rate,” Hanne said.
“What rate?”
But Hanne only snorted through her nose and looked out of the window.
“Listen,” Lilly said. “It doesn’t change anything. Let’s go out dancing, let’s go to the Café Josty and order Champagne, real Champagne, and then move on to the Friedrichstrasse. Let’s dance all night just like we used to. Come on, Hanne.”
“I’m working at the Marmorhaus,” Hanne replied. “Late showing.”
And then she pulled on her shoes and coat and left without another word.
It was a lie. There was no late showing that night. The smell that Lilly recognized but couldn’t place was Eva’s: her soap, her sweat, and her lust. She had spent the afternoon in bed with Hanne. Slowly, patiently, after many weeks of secret rendezvous over coffee, of small gifts, of longing looks, of pecks on the cheek, she had finally unpeeled Hanne’s clothes. At last her fingers had lingered over her scars; her mouth had sought out the nape of her neck, her nipples, the triangle of golden hair between her legs. And after such patience, such sweet procrastination, the payoff was an incredible release for both of them.
Instead of working, as she had claimed, Hanne was going to meet Eva at her favorite bar. She wanted more, more of the wine that Eva always bought her, more of the kisses that, compared to Kurt’s, were so soft they were barely kisses at all, more of the gentle adoration that she was under no compulsion to return.That afternoon, Eva had suggested that she move out of the boardinghouse and move in with her. She still had some of her mother’s jewelry to sell, she said; she still had limited funds.
Hanne Schmidt, like many girls of her generation who had survived the war, the flu epidemic, the food shortages, and the bitter Berlin winters, understood almost instinctively that when one avenue of opportunity closed, you had to immediately search out another. Leaving lovers, children, jobs, apartments, without apparent remorse—at least, not of the debilitating kind—they were perpetually moving on, casting off, starting out afresh, their eye on the as yet uncaught ball. There is always tomorrow, their actions seemed to say.There is always another way.
Maybe Hanne left the matchbox on the sink deliberately. Or maybe she did it subconsciously, taking away the potential awkwardness of an unavoidable confession. Certainly, although she had done so since the night of the masked ball, she didn’t like deceiving Lilly, she didn’t like lying to cover up her increasingly frequent meetings with Eva. Lilly picked up the matchbox and turned it round in her fingers. Verona-Lounge, it read, The Love Domicile for Girl-Friends. She opened it. Inside, a message had been hastily scribbled. Until tonight, it read. Love, E.
It had been raining and pavements were illuminated with the reflected scribble of electrified shop signs, traffic lights, and the headlights of passing cars. Lilly ran all the way to the cinema, splashing through pools of silver and yellow, amber and violet, only pausing once to let a tram pass. Hanne wouldn’t lie to her, would she? Not after all that had happened, not after all they had shared. Lilly would find her there collecting tickets and selling chocolate as usual, and then she would explain that she had come to make up, to insist they go out dancing later, to show Hanne how much her friendship still mattered to her. Lilly’s footsteps only began to falter when she approached the foyer of the cinema.The Marmorhaus was closed.
Lidi’s first film made a respectable amount of money, and Mr. Leyer offered her another with Yurasov as director. They started shooting almost immediately. This time Lidi was given the lead role as a millionaire-turned-con-man’s destitute daughter who is in love with a priest. She cries to order, Mr. Leyer boasted at the end of the first week, real tears every time. Ilya Yurasov nodded but did not comment.
Although they still lived in the same rooms, Lilly did not confront Hanne. She did not question her duplicity. Maybe it was because real life had somehow become unreal. Lilly had begun to feel that the only reality she could grasp was the reality of the film set. Only here could she make sense of who she was, what she was feeling, and why; only here could she follow a script. The rest of her life—the salary that she never had time to spend, the chauffeured drives to and from the set, the dressing rooms with their permanently fresh flowers that just appeared every day as if by magic—all seemed to belong to a dream life, to a sham that could collapse, like the German mark would do, almost overnight.
No, to Lilly, as she was still
known by Ilya, the film set was home and the crew was like family, at least what she imagined a family would be. And every morning when she came onto the set, he would be there. And every day she would feel that phosphorescence inside. As he kissed her cheek and wished her good morning, she momentarily forgot that the world outside was chaotic and filled with the destitute, the starving, and the dispossessed, and she ceased to feel like a refugee fleeing from the scene of a disaster. And, for just a moment, she imagined he was hers.
After Letters of Love, Ilya Yurasov’s name was regularly mentioned by the critics. His directorial style, so it was argued in Café des Westens, was mercurial, his technique deceptively simplistic. Pola Negri sent him a bunch of orchids and a card suggesting her people talk to his people. Asta Nielsen invited him to lunch. He failed to respond to either offer.
Years later, Ilya told a former lawyer in the next bunk at Dachau that he had loved Lilly the moment he first saw her. He described a young girl in a Berlin boardinghouse, the way her dark hair shone in the pale sun and her large gray eyes were shot through with silver.
“I loved her,” he told the former lawyer. “I loved her for years but couldn’t tell her.”
“I know the feeling,” the former lawyer said. “We went to the cinema a lot in those days. It was always lovely and warm in our local theater. She was one of my favorites, you know. Those films brought out this certain quality. . . . You must have had a hand in it.”
“It was all there already,” Ilya said. “And sometimes I wonder if we should have discovered her, exposed her, shared her. Maybe it would have turned out differently, for both of us.”
“If you hadn’t, somebody else would have,” said the former lawyer, whose pragmatic style had been famous in the courthouses of Cologne. “And anyway, how could you have known then? The future is unwritten.You couldn’t have predicted what would happen.”
As the night stretched and ached with cold, Ilya lay on his bunk in silence and remembered a day in the spring of 1921. It was a time when the cost of making a film in Germany was the cost of a secondhand car in Paris or Pennsylvania or Perth and when the films he cut were filled with apparitions and mirrors and the sets were imaginary landscapes constructed out of wood and paint and paper.
“I had no intention,” he whispered. “I never had any intention. All I wanted to do was make films and wait for Katya. That was my plan. And then . . . and then . . .”
Ilya’s hands trembled beneath the thin louse-infested blanket as he tried to recall every last detail of the first night he spent with Lilly. It came back in glimpses and blurred images and scents: a certain shade of red, the sun on brick against storm clouds, the smell of pepper mixed with mimosa. It was saturation and intoxication, it was an appetite that was never fully quenched, it was both an ending of boundaries and a realization of an insurmountable isolation. It was pure joy tempered with absolute despair—the sense of loss, even as he lived it, of the moment, of himself, of her.
It was the evening of the premiere of her second film, Girl of the Wind. The Champagne was all finished and the cinema was closing and Lilly, or Lidi, was hovering on the stairs as if she were waiting for someone. But then, he had noticed, even in the most crowded party she always looked alone. She was, he realized only much later, waiting for him.
“Didn’t your friend come?” Ilya asked her.
Lilly shook her head but did not explain.
“Shall we share a car?” he asked.
It was an innocent enough request. Only one studio car was idling on the street outside.
“I don’t want to go home yet,” she said as she climbed inside. “Let’s go somewhere else for a drink?”
He leaned forward and told the driver to go to Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. They climbed out and walked to a tiny bar he knew called the Cosy Corner. Of course she was recognized, but she was left alone. They were all actresses and directors at that time of night. Everybody was somebody, even if they hadn’t happened yet.
A small band was playing jazz for tips. Lilly was wearing a red hat. He remembered that now. She took it off and placed it on top of his coat. And then they started dancing, to that band, to that song “Tomorrow’s the End of the World.”
The man who cut in had a huge beard. Ilya stood back and watched him dance with Lilly. But the song went on too long. The band, who knew only a few numbers, had not worked out how it ended.And as he watched her, she caught his eye and gave him the look he knew so well. But this time there was no lens to diffuse it and it hit him in the back of the throat, in the chest, in the belly.There could be no doubt, he knew at that particular moment, no doubt at all.
Afterward they had walked, aimlessly, or so it seemed at first, down one street and under the S-Bahn, along one avenue and over a bridge. Suddenly she paused at a block of apartments between the river Spree and the park.
“I used to live here,” she said.
She ran her hand along the wall until she came to a small hollow just big enough for a foothold.
“This used to be my secret place,” she whispered. “Behind this wall.”
And then she told him about the orphanage, about Sister August, about Hanne. He knew it was somehow a gift, a gift of who she was. But it was more than that. For her, it was the telling of a story that she had never told before, a narrative that just through the telling could be reinterpreted, retold, reclaimed. They kept walking until they somehow ended up at his place near Alexanderplatz Station, and he didn’t need to ask because they both knew that she was coming in. And then she stood in the pale, pale yellow of the streetlight that reached into his room from the street below and let her dress, her slip, her underwear, slide from her body like so many gossamer skins.
Tomorrow’s the end of the world . . .
He thought she was sleeping. She lay motionless, her body curled into the crook of his arm. She had been there beside him for a whole night, getting up only to put a record on the gramophone. Several empty cups and glasses covered his bedside table along with a couple of books of poetry. Time, or so it seemed, had become unhitched, and they had slipped into a place where the incessant tick of minutes had been reduced to nothing more than the rhythm of the samba played in a basement bar across the street or the dripping of someone else’s bathroom tap.
Her skin was flawless. He brushed his lips across the slope of her shoulder and kissed the base of her neck. His fingertips ran down her belly until they reached the downy silk of her pubic hair. She shivered and with both hands she pressed his hand hard against herself. He moved behind her, fitting himself into her curves. And she turned her head and her mouth found his again.
Hours later, he woke. Outside it was light again, the early-morning sun as bright as a four-hundred-watt bulb on the dirty gray tenement buildings opposite. Her eyes were open and she was staring at the sky. He suddenly felt incredibly sober, incredibly certain that despite everything, despite his promise to Katya, Lilly was the only woman he wanted. And his heart seemed to sound with a single note.
Lilly’s memories of their first night together were played over so many times through the years that the premiere party, the bar, the band, the vodka, the walk past St. Francis Xavier’s, and finally Ilya’s apartment eventually took on the swimming confusion of a dream. Some images came back to her more clearly than others: his apartment, a place that looked hardly lived in but for the piles of books on the floor and the smell of black coffee; the way he looked at her with that long green gaze that seemed so penetrating she could barely stand it; his face in her hands as she kissed his eyes, his mouth, his lips; and then, as they lay down, the way the whole length of her fitted the whole length of him.The question that for so long had hung in the air between them had finally been answered. She could feel it in his body, in his warmth, in his voice, a voice with all its deep velvet resonance held back, turned into a whisper.
Yes.
When he gave himself away, he did it so completely that she believed that there was nothing betwee
n them, no deception or doubt or history. It was the first time, the first time she had so willingly yielded to anyone. After, when she lay with her head in the hollow of his arm, just listening to him breathe, feeling him wake just enough to find her hand and hold it, she finally admitted to herself that she had been starving for him, parched for him, craving him for as long as she could remember.
Lilly began shooting another film the very next day. If she was tired, she did not show it. Her eyes were so bright that the cameraman asked the director if he thought she might have taken laudanum. Without more than two coffee breaks, she worked for ten hours straight and filmed fifteen scenes.When Lidi and Ilya dined that night with other members of the cast to celebrate the first day of the shoot, some of them noted that she seemed particularly talkative while Ilya was strangely silent. Nobody, however, thought it was significant.
And as they lingered outside Kempinski’s, and two by two the cast and crew of Roses on My Pillow climbed into a row of waiting cabs, there was a moment when either Lilly or Ilya could have gone home alone. But although the words were in his mouth and hers, her eyes kept straying into his and he knew that he would ask her and he knew what she would say.
Yes.
The Inflation
The manager of the Ufa-Palast am Zoo stands on the lip of the front stairs and rocks back and forth. From here he can see that the queue stretches all the way to the station. “I’m sorry, we’re full. I’m sorry, we’re full.” He has two thousand seats and all have been sold out at three daily film screenings for more than a month. Berlin may be hungry, but an appetite for the kinky or exotic or scary is stronger. “I’m sorry, madam, we’re full.”
The houselights lower, the audience settles, the curtains part, and Lupu Pick’s Shattered starts to roll.
It’s winter; the snow is falling gently in the middle of a darkening forest. Werner Krauss is a railroad trackwalker who lives in isolated monochrome with his wife and daughter. When a railway inspector arrives out of a blizzard, everything goes haywire. First the poor daughter is seduced and then spurned, and then the heartbroken mother freezes to death. Finally the railroad worker avenges the family honor by strangling the inspector. In the last and final scene he walks along the tracks and stops the express train. His lamp radiates a brilliant, hand-tinted red.The snow, the air, the night turn crimson. He climbs aboard the train and speaks his only line: “I am a murderer.”
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