The Glimmer Palace

by Beatrice Colin

  While the two sides were battling out the deal, the days and weeks and months had dragged past until she could hardly bear it, until she would have signed anything if it had been offered. And then she could wait no longer and against her lawyer’s advice she bought her train ticket, headed from California to LaSalle Street Station in Chicago, and then, after a wait of two hours, boarded another train for New York’s Grand Central. But the trains, despite the fact that they were advertised as “express,” took five days to travel from one coast to the other.To Lilly, they seemed to crawl inch by inch across the wide, flat plains of America, loitering at red lights in the middle of nowhere and languishing in dusty provincial stations, even though no one ever climbed on and no one ever disembarked, as if they had sensed her irritation and were conspiring to vex her. After another wait, another restless night, she had boarded an ocean liner and spent ten days watching the sea boil and counting the minutes as they slipped past, her body aching with impatience. And now, finally—finally—she was back in Germany with a special visa from the Ministry of Propaganda and a contract pending signature.

  Berlin rolled out beneath her, the wide expanse of Potsdamer Platz, the newly constructed multistory department store beyond, the brightly lit avenues, and the wide Strassen that radiated so confidently north, south, east, west, into acres of shadow. And then it started to rain, lightly at first and then so heavily that it was almost as if the whole city had been thrown out of focus.

  part from the crumpled bunch of mimosa, nothing about Ilya was the same. It had been more than six years. His beautiful dark curls had been cut close to his head and were now flecked with gray. His face was so thin that his cheekbones protruded and his lips seemed fuller. He had the stubble of a beard. And there was something static in his manner that was new, a kind of inner stillness. He was also soaked to the skin.

  Lillushka—she was always Lillushka with him—was the opposite: she couldn’t stop moving, as if all that traveling had left its mark on her and she was still in motion despite herself. She closed the door, took his coat, poured him a drink, took the flowers—which, compared to the rest of the blooms that filled the room, were embarrassingly modest—and started to rip off the outer leaves. Her hands, she noticed suddenly, had become wrinkled from the American sun.

  “I’ve never seen such rain . . .” she started to say.

  Ilya gently took the flowers from her and put them down.Then he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her neck, her throat, her mouth. And the years telescoped and meant nothing.

  “Ilya,” she said, and threw her arms around his neck. “Oh, Ilya.” To Ilya Yurasov, Lilly, his Lillushka, looked exactly the same. He experienced the same sweet note in the belly when she looked at him, the same cantering of his heart, and the same constriction of his chest. Her clothes smelled different, of soap powder and sunshine, but her skin, her lips, tasted just as they had all those years before. He pulled back and looked into her large gray eyes, the gray eyes that in recent years he had gotten to know so well from her films, the films that he had threaded up and watched over and over; and although he was an atheist, in his head he thanked God several times over.

  “You shouldn’t have come,” he said. “You shouldn’t have.”

  “I couldn’t wait any longer,” she whispered. “I can’t wait any longer. But look at you, you’re soaked right through. Take off your wet clothes.”

  “Always so impatient,” he replied. And then he laughed out loud and she saw he had barely changed at all.

  As Ilya lay in Lilly’s bed and waited for her to join him, he hoped nobody had seen him in the lobby.The situation had changed since his last letter. Most of the Russians in Berlin had already moved on, to Paris, to New York, to London. Since the Nazis took over, he had been watched. He was an anomaly; could he be a Communist agitator? A militant Jew? He refused to join the Reich Film Guild, and when precensorship had been introduced a few months before, and every single process from screenplay to edit had to be examined, he had been given a list of conditions that he knew he couldn’t meet. He had been dropped from his own project.

  Without an income, he had lost his apartment and moved on to Mr. Leyer’s floor. He had been offered work in Paris by the Alliance Cinématographique Européenne, but his exit visa had been denied. And then he received the telegram.

  Coming home stop, it read. Arriving on June 30 stop. Love your Lilly stop.

  His Lilly paced up and down that overblown, overheated hotel room still fully dressed. She was suddenly nervous. Had she aged? Was she still desirable? Did he still find her attractive? He was watching her with a look of such peace on his face that she never forgot it.

  “I feel as if I’m dreaming,” he said. “Prove to me I’m not.”

  She pulled her shoes off, unbuttoned her clothes, let them drop to the floor, and lay down beside him until there was not an inch where his body did not touch hers, and finally she was completely still.

  “Welcome home,” he whispered.

  The next morning it was still raining, the sky the color of tin. As Ilya slept, Lilly listened to the sounds of the rush-hour traffic, of pneumatic tires on a layer of water, of the screech of the tram track and the whistle of a policeman overlapped with the rattle of a room service cart in the corridor. How could so many years have passed? It was inconceivable. But now, she thought, all that time seems no more than a blink.

  “Lillushka, are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  Ilya was awake now, his eyes open, his gaze serious.

  “If you appear in their films,” he whispered, “it will look as if you condone all they do, as if you agree with all their policies, all their sanctions. And all the work you have ever done will fade into insignificance. This will be what you are remembered for: the actress who came back from America for Joseph Goebbels.”

  “I’ll do one.We won’t come back.”

  “One is enough.Your reputation will be ruined.You will be a Nazi by association. And even if you never make another film again, you might be vilified, demonized, discriminated against. Think about it, Lilly. Is it really worth it?”

  “Some things are more important,” she whispered. “I’ve made up my mind.”

  As the rain fell outside, Ilya watched its liquid reflection stream down the brocaded surface of the walls. And although he wanted so much to believe that Lilly’s plan could work, he found himself unable to. The Nazis were not fools.You didn’t strike a deal with Goebbels and expect to win. But to dream of another future, to be so close to such faith in the impossible, was transcendent. She had come back for him. And that was all that mattered.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  And then she kissed his tears away.

  The marriage took place that evening in a tiny church in Schöneberg, a church that was blown to bits by a bomb in 1945. A record remains, however, in the registry in the city hall on Schloss-platz. Lilly wore a cream-colored satin dress; Ilya, a borrowed suit. Mr. Leyer was their only witness. After a swift glass of French Champagne, it was decided that it would be safer for both of them if they didn’t see each other until it was time to leave.

  The Hotel Kaiserhof was on Wilhelmsplatz, opposite the Imperial Chancellery. She took the lift to the third floor. When the doors opened, a man was waiting for her with a clipboard. She was shown into a darkened suite at the very end of the corridor and invited to sit down. A pair of wooden doors with polished brass handles divided the rooms. The curtains were closed even though it was mid-morning. A white screen was hanging on one wall and below it there was a tray with tea and cakes. She poured herself a cup of tea but did not drink it. She picked up a cake but could not eat it. Within a minute or two she realized she was not alone. Suddenly the bedroom doors flew open and a small, dark man came through, adjusting his collar.There was something wrong in his gait and her eye was immediately drawn to his built-up shoe. It was Joseph Goebbels, Gauleiter of Berlin.

  Goebbels had just heard that Hitler had personally com
missioned two more films from the former actress Leni Riefenstahl, and Goebbels was in a cantankerous mood. She was going to produce and direct so-called film monuments recording the Nazi Party’s conventions. He couldn’t help feeling suspicious of the woman. Wasn’t direction and production a man’s job? And since he was minister of propaganda, why hadn’t he been consulted? But now he was bringing back a German film star from America. This was something the Führer couldn’t ignore. This would be his trump card, upstaging all Riefenstahl’s expensive triumphalism.

  “What a pleasure to meet you at last,” he said. “Joseph Goebbels.”

  Even though they had in fact met before, the minister of propaganda held out his right arm and shook her hand. In his left hand he held a scrap of paper and a pen.

  “Would you be so kind?” he asked, and handed them to her.

  She was so taken aback—by his appearance, by his enthusiasm, by his request—that she held the paper and pen in her hand for a moment and did not respond.

  “I should really say that it is for my daughters,” he added with a smile when he noticed her hesitation. “But that’s not the truth and I’m sure you’d suspect otherwise. I am, I confess, a fan. If you would . . . an autograph?”

  “Of course,” she answered.

  Lilly was about to sign the piece of paper when he reached across and took her wrist. He turned it over and examined the white skin of her arm and her turquoise veins.

  “You know, you look different from the way I remember you,” he said. “You are dark, not fair.You have large eyes, a small mouth, high cheekbones.”

  Her heart started to race, her palms to sweat. And she was suddenly sure that it was a trap: that they knew she was half Jewish, that everything she had planned, all she had risked, was for nothing.

  “I’ll sign if you sign for me,” she said softly.

  Goebbels looked at Lidi, the actress who was a favorite of the Führer’s, the actress who was going to consolidate everything he had worked for, with slight unease. Had he conceded too much? Could he trust her? Was she hiding something? And he decided with absolute certainty that she had to be brought down a peg or two. Although at that moment he had no idea how he would do it.

  He dropped her hand, picked up the contract, and signed.

  “I expect dinner,” he said as he wrote. “À deux, of course.”

  Suddenly the door opened and a woman strode in, unpinning her hat.

  “Ah, Magda?” he said. “What do you think of her? Isn’t she delightful? In the flesh she looks decidedly . . . sultry.”

  Magda Goebbels shook Lilly’s hand but didn’t smile. She looked at her husband and the actress with a wariness prompted by her recent discovery that her husband was having another affair.This time it was with a young woman from an Alpine hotel whom he had “persuaded” onto the big screen. Mercifully, in some respects, she proved to be a hopeless actress.

  “Pleased to meet you at last,” she said. “We have a shortage of good people.”

  “Really?” replied Lilly.

  “Yes, it was something of a coup to get you, I suppose,” said Magda Goebbels as she opened the door to a maid bearing more tea. “But you will do rather well out of it, I hear. As well as two hundred thousand marks, half paid in foreign currency, you have asked for a return ticket to America for you and for your husband.”

  “The ministry will arrange all that,” said Goebbels. “Just call them with your dates and times.”

  “I only just heard you were married,” said Magda Goebbels. “Any-one we know?”

  “I have the perfect script for you,” Goebbels cut in as he stirred the pot of tea. “It’s been in preproduction for a while. As far as I know, it was actually written for you by someone you once worked with.”

  “I’ve worked with quite a lot of people,” Lilly replied. “I wouldn’t necessarily remember a name.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Anyway, we have had to rewrite some of it, but the basic conceit is good. It’s called The Queen of Sorrow. More tea?”

  Goebbels lifted the teapot, his wife offered milk, but they both noticed simultaneously that the actress’s face had blanched. She shook her head.

  “Well, then, maybe you’d like a cake?” asked Joseph Goebbels with a slightly strained smile.

  va Mauritz, Communist agitator and sister of Stefan, had been released from the Moringen women’s camp near Hanover sometime in spring. For two years she had been incarcerated in a converted psychiatric hospital where she slept ten to a cell with other Communists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Gypsies on straw-filled sacks. As a Communist, Eva had received the brunt of the “correction”: she had been beaten daily by the camp commander until she admitted everything and more and cursed the ground that Karl Marx had ever walked upon. If she was physically scarred by the experience, she didn’t let it show. But to those who had known her before—to the women she’d loved and left in Berlin’s clubs, such as the Magic Flute Dance Palace and the Dorian Gray—to hear her echo Göring’s words and encourage them to “take hold of the frying pan, dust pan, and broom and marry a man,” it was patently obvious what damage she had sustained.

  Her only visitor, her only confidant while she was in prison, had been her brother. In 1927, as her only living relative, Stefan had been informed of her whereabouts and had come looking for her. Something had changed in him and he seemed to have pulled himself together again. He had found a job as an insurance clerk and a comfortable room in a boardinghouse. Over the years they had come to a tacit agreement not to mention the war or the years that followed. And yet, one day just after her release, he admitted that he knew that Lilly, his wife, was still alive.

  “I watched her, you know. For years I watched her. But why?” he implored her. “Why did she ask you to lie for her?”

  Eva could not admit her culpability. In fact, she didn’t admit anything.

  “And now she has emigrated to America and I will never see her again.”

  “I’ll make it up to you,” Eva said, and reached up and cupped his broken face. “I promise. We can get a place and live together like we used to.”

  But Stefan pushed her hand away.

  “I hate this city,” he said. “I hate this government. I hate this country.”

  And he left without another word.

  n 1934, one in three people in Berlin was unemployed.The Great Depression had already crossed the Atlantic well before Lilly made the trip. The new government had to take drastic measures: wages were cut, trade unions taken over, and the unemployed put up in tent camps on the outskirts of Berlin. But as the French politician Léon Blum pointed out at the time, while socialism represents a morality and communism a technology, fascism represents an aesthetic. All over Germany, cinema façades had been updated or lit up with newly installed spotlights. They had become government buildings in what would become known as a campaign of illusion.

  Goebbels had high hopes for The Queen of Sorrow. The filming schedule had fallen behind and the budget had already gone to pot, but they were almost finished.They had left the climactic scene—the scene in which Mary, Queen of Scots, has her head chopped off at the order of her treacherous cousin, the queen of England—until last.

  Anyone who saw the filming of scene 125 would never forget it. The setup had taken a week to perfect. Flats had been painted to look like a medieval English castle. Three spotlights had been positioned, at three, six, and nine o’clock, to throw the longest shadows. A mob of extras had been chosen for their strange physiognomies or physical deformities.The scaffold had been polished with butter.

  They rehearsed the scene several times. Lidi, dressed in black velvet, her face as white as alabaster, her hands tied behind her back, whispered the words, “Into your hands, O Lord, into your hands.” And then off came her black velvet gown, to reveal a chemise of brilliant crimson, and she placed her head on the block.

  They filmed the scene in a single take.The sight of a young woman with her newly bleached fair hair pulled ba
ck and her gray eyes wide open as the ax came down was heartbreaking. Some of the extras even cried.

  Goebbels was extremely irritated when he was informed that the actress Lidi had married the Russian director Ilya Yurasov in secret the day after she arrived.Yurasov had not been seen entering the Esplanade Hotel, as he had feared; it was only when the churchwarden in Schöneberg was arrested for sheltering a Jewish mistress and bartered the information in exchange for her that the marriage was uncovered.

  Goebbels had met the director once years before at a party and found him charming. When Yurasov had applied to go to Paris, however, he had personally turned down his exit visa. The explanation given was a lack of correct paperwork, but the real reason was that Yurasov was a highly skilled filmmaker, a talented director, a writer of note: he was a valuable asset despite his defiant stance. And now he had inadvertently assigned him a visa and the German film industry would lose him.

  But his irritation was more than merely professional. Three times since returning to Berlin, the actress had accepted Goebbels’s invitation to dinner and then canceled at the last minute. Goebbels was a man not used to being rebuffed by women, not since his political ambitions had been realized, and as she had given him no indication to the contrary, he believed that an affair was just a matter of logistics. And now he saw plainly that the Russian director and the woman he had gone to some lengths to bring back to Germany had duped him. But what could he do? He had personally signed a contract with the actress. He didn’t want her to go back to America and spread the word among other German actors on the point of returning that he couldn’t be trusted. No, he couldn’t get out of it without major embarrassment or scandal. A month before the date scheduled for the premiere of The Queen of Sorrow, however, Goebbels received an interesting phone call from the Berlin chief of police.