As the train speeds away from the dark forest still iced with snow, the audience, as one, lets out a sigh of satiation. What a trick, what an effect. A film with color, ingenious.
Lilly spent every night with Ilya, often lying awake until the dawn broke, talking, kissing, making love, unwilling to let sleep steal even a single moment. It was as if she could suddenly speak another tongue, a language of murmurs and moans and kisses that had been there in her heart all along but was incomprehensible until she met him.
“I’m so happy,” she whispered more than once.
And he would reply with a kiss or a sigh or a caress.
I am weak, Ilya thought to himself as he lay beside Lilly. But the guilt that he felt always passed like a shadow. All he had to remember Katya by was a framed studio photograph. But when he looked at it, he found that her strong features and posed expression seemed to belong to another era, to another life he barely remembered living. Maybe she had fallen in love with another man? Maybe she had forgotten him? Maybe she was dead? He had taken her photograph down from his wall, but he found he could not throw it away.
Lilly went back to the boardinghouse only to fetch clean clothes or pay the rent. She didn’t want to meet Eva; the situation was an almost exact reversal of what had happened with Stefan. She had been Eva’s deceiver and she had subsequently been deceived. But it was more than that: she knew that she loved Ilya in a way she had never been able to love Stefan.The brief courtship, the marriage, the wedding night had seemed in retrospect to be nothing more than a charade played out by children. And in her head Stefan would always be more boy than man as he rode, with lance carried aloft, into the hail of bullets that killed him.
Hanne, however, didn’t invite Eva back to the boardinghouse. They went to clubs or wealthy friends’ apartments or, if neither was open or available, to seedy bars in West Berlin. Eva’s invitation to move into an apartment together was rarely mentioned, and her small gifts had dwindled to almost nothing apart from the occasional bar of chocolate or pair of stockings. When Hanne finally brought it up, Eva admitted she had already sold her mother’s jewels. She had no funds to speak of; in fact, she didn’t have enough for a glass of wine, let alone a bottle. And then she laughed until her eyes watered and her side stitched.
“You still love me, don’t you?” she asked Hanne when she had recovered her breath.
But Hanne, her face stony, did not reply.
Eva Mauritz’s political convictions had waned since the heady days of the Spartacists’ uprising.The revolution on a Russian scale had not happened.The leaders of the party had been murdered in police custody, their bodies unceremoniously dumped.The city seemed to have absorbed the dissent and then quickly forgotten it, with only the pockmarks of bullet holes on streets such as Karlstrasse to show there had ever been any conflict at all.
She had returned to the apartment in Steglitz but found it occupied by a group of refugees from Galicia. She would claim that she was a Communist and therefore was bidden to share what she had, but when faced with the reality of shared ownership she changed her mind and asked them to leave many times over. They refused, and so she chucked an old woman out of her room and slept there, only venturing into the kitchen for hot water. Apart from the bare floorboards, the iron bedsteads, and the few pieces of furniture that were yet to be burned, there wasn’t much left in her uncle’s flat anyway. The paintings once so loathed by Stefan, the typewriter on which Lilly had learned to type, the hand-stitched clothes, and the soap from France were all gone, all stolen by a member of the Freikorps who broke into the apartment by smashing the lock on the pretext of looking for Communists, or Kozzis, as they were known.
Eva had not seen her younger brother for more than two years. In the devastation of their flat, however, she had salvaged a single, posed photograph of both of them, aged nineteen and seventeen. And when she was feeling depressed or overwhelmed or rejected, she would look at it and weep. And so when Hanne Schmidt, her lover, her adored muse, her darling girl, did not return her devotions, her mind was drawn back to that image of her brother. He had loved her, she was sure of it.
At that point Stefan Mauritz was living in lodgings near the An-halter train station. He had enough money in the bank to live on without working. If it was fair, he walked the city’s parks. If it was cold, he would buy a cinema ticket and spend the whole day snoozing and watching the same film sometimes four or five times over.
One day he fell asleep in a matinee screening of a film he had not noticed the title of. He woke with a start and there she was, her face the size of a shop window, her eyes as large as the moon: Lilly, his wife. And his heart soared and then dived as he suddenly remembered. He touched his face and felt his changed physiognomy, so alien to him still. And then he thought about Eva, his sister, and he started to bang the armrest over and over with so much force that the couple behind him moved to another row.
Hanne dropped Eva in March 1921. After they had made love in the women’s washroom in a tiny bar on Friedrichstrasse, she pulled down her skirt and fixed her hair as Eva pawed her body, wanting more.
“Good-bye, Eva,” Hanne said as she unlocked the door. “It’s over. I don’t want to see you again.”
“What are you talking about?” said Eva. “Come back.”
But Hanne would not.
“Very well,” she said. “Are you going to tell me why?”
“The truth? You disgust me.”
Eva stared at Hanne, her mouth slightly open. And then she regained her poise.
“Me, I disgust you?” Eva said. “You are nothing, no one, worthless. You’ve got the street written all over your face. You’re cheap, the cheapest I’ve ever had. Good luck, Hanne. But let me tell you something:you won’t even get more than a few marks out there. All those dreams of being an actress. Take a look in the mirror. You look haggard, used up, old.”
Hanne did not listen anymore. She walked out of the bar, her face blazing and her knees noticeably shaking. She should have expected it. She shouldn’t let herself care. But still her throat thickened and she had trouble breathing. And without warning his name came into her head again. She hailed a cab and without even a moment’s hesitation asked the driver to go to the barracks of the Freikorps.
Eva was shocked at herself. What was happening to her? Where was her private-school demeanor and well-read charm? The bar was full of young men with hungry eyes. She chose one and bought him a drink. And then she sat and talked until closing time about poetry and opera, about art and politics, until he grabbed her thigh and told her he’d do anything for the price of a loaf.
Lilly had come to collect the last of her things from the boardinghouse. The studio had insisted she move immediately to the Hotel Adlon, to a part of Berlin where their drivers didn’t get their cars scratched and their headlights stolen every time they came to pick her up. She had packed a couple of suitcases, written a note to Hanne telling her that she had paid the rent up front for the next six months, and propped it up on the shelf above the sink. As she took one more look around the rooms, however, the door swung open and Hanne stood swaying, half in, half out of the door. Blood was smeared all over her face.
“You’re here,” said Hanne. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Hanne!” Lilly said. “What happened?”
Hanne said she had tripped and fallen down the U-Bahn stairs. She said that the stairs were wet and she would make a formal complaint, but with such little conviction that it was clear that none of it was true. Her stockings were ripped at the knees and there was a deep gash in her head. Her face, for so long kept composed, finally began to fold.
“My only pair of stockings,” Hanne said. “To think I wasted my only pair of stockings.”
“I’ll buy you more,” Lilly whispered. “They’re only stockings.”
But Hanne couldn’t be comforted, and she cried without inhibition for the stockings that could never be mended and for Eva’s insults that could never be taken back, and
mostly for the man who could not forgive her and was so filled with hurt that he had held her with his good hand and punched her with his bad.
When Hanne’s sobs eventually subsided, Lilly washed her cuts and dressed them. Hanne let herself be told what to do, be cared for like a wayward child, be mothered. Later, Hanne lay on the divan and Lilly tucked her in under a blanket.
“This place feels like the only safe place in the whole of Berlin,” Hanne said.
Lilly stroked her hair. Hanne’s forehead, she suddenly noticed, was lined, her eyes had started to drag at the corners, and the whites were yellow.
“Go to sleep,” Lilly whispered.
“You always were my only real friend—you know that, don’t you? Nothing’s changed, has it?”
Lilly shook her head. “Nothing’s changed.”
Hanne sighed and closed her eyes. In a matter of minutes she was asleep. But it wasn’t true: everything had changed, the world had turned, the stars had shifted.
The next morning Hanne was sober and silent. At eight-thirty there was a knock at the door. Hanne opened it. Outside was a porter from the Adlon.
“Hanne . . .” Lilly started. “The studio . . .”
Hanne glanced round the rooms. It was only then that she noticed the suitcases. She inhaled sharply.
“Just until I find a place of my own,” Lilly added. “I can afford to buy somewhere now. For both of us.”
As the porter picked up the suitcases, another man appeared at the door, a driver.
“There’s a car waiting, ma’am,” he said.
“You’d better go,” Hanne told Lilly.
“We’ll talk later,” Lilly said as she pulled on her coat. “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”
Hanne smiled but she did not answer.
Lilly moved into a suite of rooms at the Adlon that evening. Although the beds were turned down every night, there was room service twenty-four hours a day, and all her laundry would be washed and ironed twice a week, Hanne refused to stay there. She said she hated the place; she claimed she was regularly accused of soliciting as she walked through the foyer. And so Lilly offered to pay her rent instead, but she would not accept it.
“I can earn my own money,” she said.
“But you’ll be all right?” Lilly asked.
“Of course I will,” replied Hanne. “I can look after myself. I always have, haven’t I?”
That morning Lilly started filming a script set in the Arabian desert. Several tons of sand had been shifted into one of the new studios, a silk tent had been erected, and a series of flats had been painted, trompe l’oeil, to look like a vast and endless wilderness. It was all lit with a mixture of natural light and electric. The scenario was simple: An English explorer falls in love with an Arabian princess, played by Lilly. Ilya would have been able to wrap it up in a few hours had it not been for the fact that the actor, who had come from the stage, insisted on detailed notes on backstory and motivation.
“Love can’t be that complicated,” Lilly laughed. “Can it?”
Ilya had not replied.
It was midnight. Ilya, beautiful Ilya, with his long eyes and his skin as smooth as water, was lying on his bed completely naked, completely open. But sometimes she still sensed a hint of his old reticence.Was he hiding something from her? The thought filled her with panic. All the people she loved—her parents, Sister August, Hanne, Stefan—had left her, and only one had ever come back. Maybe, the thought suddenly occurred, he didn’t love her as much as she loved him. Maybe she would wake up one morning and he would be gone too.
“Ilya,” she said. “Wake up.”
His eyes were closed and his arms were around her waist. He moved closer to her so he could kiss her neck, her ear, her mouth.
“I want to marry you,” she whispered. Ilya pulled back, opened his eyes, and looked at Lilly with a frown.
“What did you say?” he asked.
“Why not?” Lilly said. “If you have any reason why these two people might not be joined in holy matrimony . . .”
Her voice trailed off.
“I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have a childhood, nothing good ever happened to me until I met you.”
“Lillushka,” he said, “it’s late. Can we talk about it some other time? We both have to work in the morning.”
“No,” Lilly said. “Let’s talk about it now.”
“Always so impatient,” he said.
Ilya kissed her gently, pulled the blankets around him, and even as she watched him fell asleep.
But Ilya didn’t sleep. Although his eyes were closed and his body was still, he lay awake until dawn.What have I done? he asked himself over and over.What have I done?
The next morning the phone rang once, twice, three times before Ilya answered it. It was Hanne. She wanted Lilly to meet her immediately for coffee in the Josty.
“I met a man,” Hanne said as soon as Lilly sat down. “He is an art dealer. He said he’d been coming to the cinema for weeks on the off chance of seeing me. And I never even knew.”
Her eyes were large and black and she could not stop smiling. At the next table a man laughed long and loud. Although it was only nine in the morning, at the bar a drunk started to sing.
“He wants to marry me,” Hanne whispered for full effect. “When he has divorced his wife. And then we’re going to live in his house in the Grunewald with a huge garden.”
Lilly poured a cup of tea from the pot already cooling on the table.
“So he’s married already?”
“What? Oh, yes,” admitted Hanne. “He married young, forced into it by his parents. It was a mistake.”
“Does he have any children?”
Hanne exhaled loudly. “He has two young daughters. Of course, I said they could come and stay with us anytime . . . and who knows, I might, you know . . .”
Lilly picked up the milk jug. It was empty. She turned to look for the waiter. Hanne’s mouth began to twist.
“How can you be so disapproving? Isn’t this what you wanted? To get me off your hands?”
“I’ve never thought that, Hanne.”
Lilly took a sip of lukewarm black tea.
“What’s his name?” she asked.
Hanne paused as if weighing up whether to trust her.
“Edvard.”
Lilly looked at Hanne and they both started to laugh.
“It’s not funny,” said Hanne. “His mother was English. He has perfect manners.You won’t believe it.”
Hanne and Edvard invited her to an engagement party in September. The invitation arrived at the studio. It was addressed to Miss Lidi and partner. Ilya was editing the Arabian film, so Lilly went alone. Edvard welcomed her with both arms. He was a lugubrious man almost twenty years older than Hanne, with sad, baggy brown eyes, a head of thick white hair, a bushy mustache, and short, fat fingers.
“At least he has all ten of them,” Hanne whispered when she noticed Lilly’s eyes focus on his hands. “And he has more money than he knows what to do with.”
As Hanne led her by the hand to the drinks table, Lilly noticed that the room was full of artists and fellow dealers, writers and editors. She was Hanne’s only guest.
“You’re my only respectable friend,” Hanne whispered.
The wife had insisted that the ownership of the house in Grunewald be transferred to her, so the betrothed had moved into the former family home, a large rented apartment in the west of the city. It had, as Hanne boasted later that night, a telephone in the bedroom and a shower with a head the size of a dinner plate.While most households had lost their servants to the war effort and had never reinstalled them, Edvard still retained a housemaid, a cook, and a driver. However, the cook had taken one look at Hanne and resigned on the spot.
Cinema, Edvard was fond of saying, was his undoing. From the first film he ever watched—Harry Piel in Under a Hot Sun, in a tent somewhere in France in 1916—to the films of Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Werner Krauss, the big screen
rapidly replaced painting as his primary passion. While he was once moved by a well-placed brushstroke or a particularly vibrant shade of vermilion, he soon came to regard two-dimensional representation as nothing more than room decoration for the wealthy. Instead, he willingly succumbed to tales of cunning criminals, hapless heroes, and tragedies overcome just in time to finish with bright, trashy happy endings, twice during the week and four times at the weekend.
The first time he saw Hanne Schmidt, standing with her electric torch and ticket punch, he did a double take. He knew he had seen her before but couldn’t place her. In fact, he had watched her “acting” three times over one hot day in July 1918, when his wife and children were in the country. In the murky humidity of a Saturday matinee, at first she thought he was asking her directions to the men’s conveniences. But then she realized he was not saying “Do I have to go outside?”but “Will you go out with me?” By this time she was nodding fervently, which he took to mean yes even though she probably would have said no if she had heard him correctly.
He was waiting for her at the main doors at the end of her shift. He took her to the Romanisches Café opposite the Memorial Church. It was open all night, every night, and this night, like any other, it was jam-packed.They were shown to a table, a table that was permanently reserved for him alone, then he ordered a bottle of kümmel and chose a cigar from a box. And as the chess players silently battled upstairs on the balcony and the painters argued loudly at the bar, she looked at him and believed, for that moment at least, that he was just what she was looking for after all. month after they met, Rathenau was assassinated. The foreign
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