It wasn’t surprising that Bill Frame’s invitations to dinner were never answered. As MGM’s agent in Europe, however, he wasn’t used to being ignored quite so blatantly. When he appeared in person in the lobby of her apartment building with a car waiting and a huge bouquet of hothouse flowers, she claimed she’d never heard of him and asked him to send her a card. He explained—as patiently as a man who was better used to saying the same words himself to the hundreds of actors, technicians, and dancers who would have licked his boots for the chance to sign with him—that he had done so already, over a dozen times.
“Oh,” Lidi said. She looked up at him and his heart leapt. Even without makeup, she was lovely. And then, since she seemed to have run out of excuses and had nothing planned, she agreed to have coffee in a little place that she knew around the corner.
The café was shabby and the coffee revolting. Bill Frame, a six-foot Texan who had gone into the movies rather than the family oil business, adored her even more for it. As he watched her sip from her saucer all the coffee that the waitress had carelessly spilled, he tried to articulate—in the German he had been studying every morning for six months but was still struggling with—that Kinetic was a classic and her performance was groundbreaking. Lidi lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the air between them.
“Really?” she asked. “Even the director hated it. It was a failure.”
“You’re wrong,” he replied. “I loved it. It was an epic.”
Lidi looked at him and wondered if the flattery was simply a ruse. As far as she knew, it had never been released in America. But then he smiled at her with teeth so perfect that she suspected he had never suffered, not even from tooth decay, and she realized that he was guileless. He picked up his coffee, which had never been more than warm, and drained the cup. And then his eyes glistened with expectation as he leaned toward her.
“You must have thought about going to Hollywood,” he asked conspiratorially. “Everybody else is.”
She smiled and shook her head.
“My work is here.”
“What work? You haven’t worked for months. It’s over in Berlin for you and you know it,” he said.
She hadn’t known it until he said it. And once she knew it, she wished he hadn’t told her.
“But I don’t speak English,” she replied simply.
“You can learn,” he said, his huge hands grabbing handfuls of air. “And, more than that, can you think of a single reason not to?”
Lidi considered. And a reason came into her head despite herself: Ilya Yurasov.
“No,” Lidi told Bill Frame. “You’re right, I can’t think of a single reason.”
At the next table sat a group of unemployed men in coarse brown trousers and stained yellow shirts. They smoked and spat and read a newspaper called Der Angriff, subtitled The Oppressed Against the Exploiters. Frame, whose attention was focused solely on the German actress, did not hear the dirty jokes they shouted or sense the way they took up more space in the room than their physical mass should have allowed.
At that point Frame had never heard of Joseph Goebbels, who had been appointed Gauleiter of Berlin the previous year. Dr. Goebbels, a small man with a deformed foot and a powerful voice, had been sent to introduce National Socialism to the middle classes of the city. In a year he had completely reorganized the party, recruited a private army, orchestrated a number of parades, and encouraged his bodyguards to fight Communists in the street to provoke agitation. He would become minister of propaganda but was at that point focusing on recruitment, opening up hostels for the unemployed with free food and board, but only for members of the party.
In the back of the steamed-up café in April 1927, as Bill Frame helped Lidi, the actress, with her coat, the men, who had recently been promoted to storm troopers, ordered another round of beer and argued over a bag of posters that the Gauleiter himself had handed to them that morning and that they were supposed to post all over East Berlin. And then one of them pulled out a leaflet and began to read.
“Each area or local group is to report all Jews living in the area, including as far as possible baptized Jews, with details on their persons, age, occupation, and address. This is necessary in order to develop reliable statistics on Jews in the whole population.”
They glanced around the café, at the old Russian man in the corner who sipped sweet black tea with lemon, at the young boy with the long nose and brown eyes who was stacking bottles, at the young woman with gray eyes and a long coat who was on the point of leaving, whom none of them could place but all claimed that they had “poked.” And then they all fell silent. Their division officer had arrived.
When Kurt saw Lilly, he froze. He would have to pass her to reach his men. She was with a large man, a man who spoke German with the rounded consonants of an American. Kurt raised his hand to hide his face. He had four deep gashes down his cheek.
“Kurt?” Lilly said.
She had seen him. Kurt started to crumple a Nazi flyer in his pocket into a ball. Her eyes were searching his, taking in his face and the fact that he couldn’t raise his eyes and greet her.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
He shook his head.
“What’s happened?” she asked.
Finally, Kurt let his eyes stray to hers. He tried to empty them of everything, the night before, the fight, the pain of her nails as they tore into his cheek, the coldness of the blade as it pressed into flesh. But she saw. She seemed to look right into his heart and see it all.
“It was an accident,” he whispered, his voice as soft as a boy’s.
Lilly left the café, the storm troopers, the American, and Kurt, and stumbled out into the road. Trams, cars, bicycles, careered past. She paced the curb, back and forth.
“Hey,” said the American, suddenly appearing at her elbow. “What’s going on?” “What’s going on?”
“I need a taxi,” she said. “I need it now.”
“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.
A taxi rounded a corner and came toward them.
“No,” said Lilly as she hailed it.
“Well, don’t leave it too long to get in touch,” he said as she climbed inside. “I’ll be leaving this crazy town of yours in a couple of months. And you should too.”
As he closed the door, she gave him a look he would never forget. It was a look that was both question and answer.
The door to Kurt’s apartment stood open a couple of inches. The main room was in darkness even though it was already midday. Light spilled around the closed shutters, throwing everything in the room into silhouette.
“Hanne?” Lilly said. “Hanne!”
As she stepped across the threshold she was immediately hit by the sweet, acrid smell of alcohol and stale cigarette smoke. She paused, listened, and was, she realized, suddenly, unaccountably scared.
“Lilly . . .” a small voice came from the bedroom. “I’m so glad it’s you.”
Hanne was lying curled up in bed, underneath a sheet. For a moment Lilly was so relieved that she sat down on the edge of the mattress and held her own face in her hands. From an apartment upstairs came the muffled sound of a gramophone playing the same song over and over, the tune audible, the lyrics muffled.
“I met Kurt,” Lilly said. “Hanne . . . I was so worried.”
She reached over and took her friend’s hand. It was cold. Hanne had barely moved at all since Lilly had come into her room; there was a stiffness about her, a tenseness in her shoulders. And then Lilly noticed that there was another smell in the room, the metallic, visceral smell of congealed blood. Very slowly she lifted the sheet. Lilly clamped her hand over her mouth.Tears spilled from her eyes.
“You stay here,” Lilly whispered. “I’m going to get an ambulance.”
Hanne reached out and grabbed Lilly’s wrist with surprising force.
“No,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me. I prayed to God that you would come, and here you are.”
“Bu
t, Hanne, you need to go to the hospital.”
“I’ll go soon, I promise,” she said. “But I’m so cold. Get in beside me. Please?”
Lilly took off her coat and shoes and climbed into the bed. Her body curved around her friend’s from behind; her arms folded around Hanne’s waist, her knees curled into the backs of Hanne’s knees, and she held her, the way they had once held each other at St. Francis Xavier’s.
“What has he done to you?” Lilly whispered.
“I forgive him,” Hanne whispered. “Tell Sister August. Tell her she made a Catholic out of me after all.”
Hanne’s breathing was regular and deep. Lilly closed her eyes and impossibly, or so it seemed afterward, her breath fell in step, in, out, in, out.
When she woke up it was dark outside. The gramophone upstairs was silent.
Hanne’s neck had been slit, her legs gashed open, her abdomen stabbed. Both eyes were blacked in with bruises and wept mascara. Only the calligraphy of her track marks remained untouched.
Kurt gave himself up without resistance. He was charged and sentenced within a month. He claimed reduced responsibility due to war wounds and gross provocation, and the judge, having looked briefly at Hanne’s past record of employment, drug use, and marital infidelity, gave him a six-month suspended sentence.
The Sisters of St. Henry had just installed a telephone. The nun who answered it clearly didn’t quite believe that her voice could actually travel all the way from Munich to Berlin without a huge amount of human effort.
“Can you hear me?” she yelled.
“Yes,” Lilly replied. “I’m looking for Sister August. It’s a personal matter.”
“Just a moment,” the nun shouted. “I’ll fetch her.”
In the long moments before Sister August was fetched, Lilly began to shiver. She had not wept for Hanne Schmidt. Not when she greeted the police and showed them the body, not even when she had packed up Hanne’s possessions and taken them home. She had simply told herself that Hanne had done it again. She had walked out on her without notice, without a backward glance. But in that ache of time while the nun was being fetched and the silence of the telephone line wailed, she accidentally let herself realize that this time she wouldn’t let herself be found again.This time she was really gone for good.
By the time the nun picked up the phone, Lilly was incoherent with grief.
“Hello!” the nun shouted into the chasm of the telephone line. “Hello, hello!”
It was not the right Sister August. The wrong Sister August explained patiently that Lilly’s own Sister August, real name Lotte von Kismet, had left the order and then died years ago in the war, probably killed by a mortar attack on an army hospital. Her body lay in an unmarked grave somewhere in France, her long limbs bent to fit into a regulation-size coffin.
Edvard sent a bunch of white lilies. Hanne’s brothers could not be traced.The ladies who ran the adoption scheme now spent their days raising money for aged pit ponies. And so Lidi, the actress, was the only mourner at Hanne Schmidt’s small committal, apart from the Bulgarian who had once owned The Blue Cat, who came at the end and cried noisily into his sleeve.
Lilly sat alone in the cemetery as it grew dark. Few other mourners noticed her, a small figure dressed from head to toe in black. In the past few months she had felt not sad, not betrayed, but numb, so numb that she would often shake herself awake to find herself sitting like this, immobile, inert, with no idea how long she had been there.
ince he had bought Ufa, Hugenberg’s dinners were not optional for any actor or high-ranking crew member. They were compulsory. And this one was no exception. The studio couriered a rack of dresses and sent a car.
The room was alight with crystal and scented with huge vases of freshly cut gardenias. Actresses, singers, and dancers in dresses shimmering with jet drifted from the terrace to the cocktail bar and back again. Joseph Goebbels held court in a corner. He was easy to spot with his limp and his overlarge head. He came to every premiere, every wrap party, every fashionable gathering, or so it seemed, in Berlin. His friends were American socialites and titled Germans. He was married but that didn’t stop him from making advances at any passing starlet. His eyes, it was claimed, could strip you at twenty paces.
It was noted that the actress Lidi barely touched the food she was handed but drank several glasses of Champagne. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet,” somebody said. “There’s someone I’d like you to meet.” Her glass was empty so she took another. But then it was empty again and she decided that she must have spilled it. The room was too bright, the music too loud. She stood swaying slightly as man after man spoke to her, responding to him with a simple nod, a “Really,” or an “I see.” A fresh glass was placed in her hand and she drank it in one mouthful. And then she looked up, and although the diplomat with whom she was engaged in conversation repeated the question three times, she did not reply.
Dressed in a black dinner jacket with his deformed hand in his pocket, Kurt mingled among the financiers, the bankers, and the politicians as if he had been circulating in this kind of company his whole life. He had seen her, she was sure of that, but as he passed by he looked straight through her. Her glass was empty again.The diplomat had given up and been replaced by an executive. She smiled, made her excuses, and headed to the bar.There she picked up a bottle of Champagne, but the dark green glass was wet and it slipped through her fingers and landed on the marble floor with a loud fizzy smash. Everybody turned and looked, everybody except him. They were waiting, it seemed in that moment, for something from her, a word, a joke, a smile. It didn’t come.
“Murderer!” she shouted after the former soldier as he made his way toward the French doors. “She loved you so much. . . .”
Even after years of elocution taught by Sister August, the second half of her sentence was swallowed in a sob. Kurt turned and looked back at her, and a single word slipped from his mouth, one word that he knew only she could hear.
“Jew,” he said.
How did he know? Had she told Hanne? She couldn’t remember. Lilly picked up a vase of flowers from the mantelpiece and hurled it, the roses, the water, the porcelain hitting the wall just to the left of him and showering the room with red petals and broken pottery. It was, some said later, so out of character that many had to do a double take. They laughed and wondered if it was some kind of press stunt. Then somebody took her by the elbow, covered her bare shoulders with a jacket, and tried to lead her to the door.
“No,” she said. “No.”
But it was not Mr. Leyer or Hugenberg or Kurt or even Joseph Goebbels.
“Ilya!” she cried. “Oh, Ilya.”
“Lilly, let me take you home,” he said.
But once they were outside, Lilly seemed to sober up. And the awkwardness between them returned.
“I’m sorry about your friend,” he said.
Lilly nodded.
“Are you all right?”
He tried to look at her, to catch her eye. But she would not.
“Just put me in a cab,” she said. “I’ll be fine.”
“Lilly,” he said. “We have to talk.”
Lilly looked up the street. A taxi was approaching.
“Let it pass,” he said. “Get the next one. Please?”
“I’ll call you,” she said. “And thank you.”
Ilya told himself later that he should have stopped her. He should have taken her hand and led her back to the place they had once been. He had loved her; he loved her still. Katya was a ghost, a figment from the past. Lilly was the one who was real, who was alive, who was there. But he let her go.
The taxi slowed as it approached the center of the city. In the middle of the street were a group of adolescent Nazis, boys as young as fourteen dressed in brown uniforms shouting, “Death to Judah!” As they marched past, Lidi saw that they had a girl with them, a girl whose head was shaved and who had a placard round her neck that read: I GAVE MYSELF TO A JEW.
Lilly
had turned down a contract from MGM five times but agreed to sign it the day after Hugenberg’s party. In truth, she hadn’t even read the first offers; she had merely noticed the studio’s stamp on the envelope and thrown them away. The deal she accepted was for three thousand dollars a week with a fully staffed house in the Hollywood Hills. It was four times higher than the original offer and would cost Bill Frame his job.
The morning she left Berlin, the sun was shining. It promised to be the most glorious day in 1927. Wet shirts hung in courtyards would be dry before lunchtime, cats lay sprawled in the shade, windows that had been closed for months were finally yanked open to let the damp air of countless nights of restless sleep escape.
The grass in the Tiergarten was awash with black serge as bank clerks and businessmen stretched out their lunch break. Groups of students sunbathed on the beaches of the lakes in the nude. Long brown bodies lay side by side—the short, the hairy, the pale, the pink. Everybody who had a job could afford a beer in the Swedish Pavilion or a jaunt in a mildewed rowing boat. Even the city’s landladies, the widows, the ones who’d lost their sons in the Great War and their daughters in the flu epidemic, came out onto their balconies, where their faces, painted garishly by gaslight, puckered in the sunshine.
The smell of moisture and decay, a smell that caught in the mouth, mixed with the scent of gardenia and honeysuckle, rosemary and lavender. If policemen and storm troopers, traffic wardens and train drivers unbuttoned their shirts and rolled up their sleeves, who could blame them? It was a day for forgetting sadness and forgoing judgment. Nothing mattered but the caress of your lover’s hand or the midday sun on the back of your neck, nothing mattered but the effervescence of the beer in your mouth or the water as you swam, nothing mattered but the sense that you were at the moment in full illumination, in focus.
She had called him the day before she had arranged to leave. Ilya had agreed to come to the station to see her off. He had bought a couple of magazines and a bunch of mimosa wrapped in newspaper. At first he hardly recognized her: she wore a simple cotton day dress and a frayed coat. She looked uncomfortably like the girl he had found in the typing pool.
The Glimmer Palace Page 33