The Glimmer Palace (15 page)

“Good, good. Alice needs a quiet, thoughtful maid like you,” he said. “She’ll try and push you away, to rile you . . . but underneath it all, Lilly, she’s actually very kind.”

And then he told her that the Countess wanted a cup of hot water to be left outside her room at midnight.

“But don’t make a noise,” he added. “Take it there quietly, leave it, and go. We don’t want to aggravate . . . her condition. . . . Think of it as a game. Pretend to be invisible.”

Over the next few months, Lilly came to understand that working for the Countess was indeed an exercise in invisibility. But it was hardly a game. In every room in the house apart from the attic rooms, blinds were kept pulled down, curtains drawn, and windows locked. From the outside at least, the villa looked unoccupied, closed up, as if the owners had left on some long, extended holiday. And although the Countess insisted she needed tidiness, hot drinks, and a wardrobe of laundered clothes, she refused to see or hear any evidence of it. Anything that made a noise, such as the laundry mangle, the whistle of the kettle, or the carpet sweeper, had to be muffled or operated behind as many closed doors as possible. Even the cracking of eggshells against the side of a bowl was said to be too much to bear. As for the ringing of the telephone, it nearly killed her.

“Make it stop,” she would shout from her bed. “And call the operator and tell her to only put through calls if there’s an emergency. A real one.”

Notes started appearing attached to the laundry, fixed to the lip of a crystal glass, or in the middle of the polished floor. “Clean again! Not good enough!” “This is dirty!”The Countess complained about everything, from the sound of Lilly’s footsteps to the taste of the tea. She claimed that Lilly breathed too loudly, she stepped too heavily, and she scrubbed too hard. And so Lilly took to wearing two dusters around her feet instead of shoes and crept around on tiptoe to avoid the squeakiest floorboards. As if I’m not here, she told herself as she peered through the silent murk. And eventually she did feel invisible, her body weightless and her presence just a whisper in her head. But then her reflection in a mirror would startle her and she would see what she really was, a maid with dusters on her feet and a mistress who was crazy.

The doctor came about twice a week at first, summoned from the opera, the surgery, and sometimes his bed by the Countess’s phone call. And each time she would beg him for something to lift the fog from her head, for medicines, treatments, or cures, for anything that could keep the noise out. The doctor was increasingly powerless to help her. The skies above Berlin were often filled with the low, insistent hum of zeppelins. Planes whined through the clouds, trailing advertising banners. And if the wind was blowing in the right direction, you could hear the cheers that greeted military parades and staged maneuvers.

In spring Emperor Franz Josef visited Berlin again, and the streets around the center came to a standstill. He had come to talk about Serbia’s rapid expansion and plans to annex Albania. On the Balkan Peninsula, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Greece, and Serbia had been at war with the Turks for several years. An armistice had been signed the previous autumn but had just expired. What Franz Josef was intending to propose was military protection so he could declare war on Serbia.

“I can’t stand the noise,” the Countess told the doctor when he finally arrived.

“Maybe you should go back to the country,” he suggested.

“Impossible,” she said. “I have nothing to go back to.”

She was a real countess, Lilly was informed by the postman. She had come from the South with a huge fortune and a young daughter after her first husband had died of an infected tooth. She had brought a dozen cases of dresses and a hundred pairs of shoes, and after a summer during which she attended every party and danced with almost every minor count at court, it was clear she was on the lookout for a suitable new husband. And yet, after a couple of short relationships with eligible if dull bachelors that had been salaciously well documented by her so-called new friends, she had suddenly, inexplicably, married a penniless poet six years her junior.

Immediately after the wedding, her new friends dropped her and her original in-laws insisted their granddaughter be sent away to school. When Lilly arrived, the new husband had gone to a sanatorium at the seaside, temporarily, and hadn’t returned. A lull had settled over the villa. Nobody visited except the doctor. Nobody called on the telephone except by accident. Nothing arrived in the post except bills. A monosyllabic woman called Maria came in every morning and cooked, but the household was not what was known as “staffed.”

Behind the shades in a house where it was so quiet that you could almost hear the bricks shrink, Lilly spent hours silently buffing, ironing, and sweeping.The Countess’s underwear was pressed and folded and her laundry sent out twice a week. The cutlery and glasses were always polished and the house was kept absolutely spotless. She gave the Countess no reason to complain. But when was her husband going to return? Where was her daughter? And what was wrong with her face?

One day Lilly discovered the daughter’s room.The doctor had visited and Lilly had overheard him give the Countess a draft to make her sleep. On her way to clean the bathroom, she noticed a faint banging coming from a small room next to the Countess’s bedroom. She turned the key in the lock and opened the door. As in the rest of the house, the shutters were closed and a single strip of light fell across the room. As her eyes adjusted, she saw a pale pink counter-pane on the bed and a rocking horse. A row of dolls stared glassy-eyed from the mantelpiece.The window was open a couple of inches and a soft breeze rattled the pane. There was a narrow wardrobe against one wall and one of the doors swung on its hinges. Before she closed it, she looked inside; at least twenty dresses hung from padded silk hangers.

The Countess coughed in the next room. Lilly froze. But then she heard nothing more, nothing but the shiver of wind in the trees and the coo of a wood pigeon. A model theater sat on the window ledge. The stage was set up to resemble a drawing room with a grand piano and two tiny silk-upholstered armchairs. There was a switch on the side. She flicked it and one by one a series of tiny stage lights flickered on. Lilly found a line of puppets hanging from the back. She chose a princess, a king, and a queen and lowered them onto the stage. And here the baron and the cabaret artist met their long-lost daughter.Tears were shed, explanations offered, and apologies ruefully accepted.

The next evening, she noticed that her own door was ajar. On her bed lay three of the daughter’s dresses in pale green silk, blue serge, and white poplin.The styles were out of date, but they were made by hand, not machine, and, as far as she could tell, unworn. Lilly tried them on. With a few little adjustments, they would fit. This is how I might have looked, she thought, in my other life.

Years later, when she thought about the newspaper clipping and how it might have changed her, she realized that the discovery of her parents’ story had no immediate effect. Instead she grew into the knowledge, just as she grew into the dresses of the Countess’s daughter, gradually filling out the facts, the dates, and the tragic consequences until she had absorbed the information and wore it in the carriage of her head, perhaps, or in the heavy black pools of her eyes.

“Thank you for the dresses,” she said the following morning as she placed the Countess’s breakfast tray on her side table.

“Just tear them up for rags if they’re no good,” the Countess murmured.

Lilly glanced at her face in the gloom. Maybe the Countess had noticed how hard she worked. And maybe the doctor was right: beneath the brittle surface was a hidden generosity.

“Are you feeling any better today?” Lilly asked.

But she had gone too far.The Countess simply ignored her.

Lilly had initially supposed that the job would get easier. But she was wrong. Every single morning when she woke up, the day ahead seemed so predictable, so stifling, so boring that she could hardly get out of bed. How could she stand another minute, let alone one hour, two hours, three? How could she bear to put on her uniform again and assume the shape of a shadow? How long would it take her to save enough money to be able to leave?

But the time did pass; spring came, and then summer. And every week she placed another ten marks in a white envelope, which she kept in her box beside the photographer’s lens.

In the evening Lilly would curl up in bed with one of the books that lined the study and read herself to sleep. She read anything at first—Dickens, Ibsen,
Vogue
—and then she found Goethe, Heine, and Ernst Stadler again. She had studied German poetry at the orphanage. And once she had found it again, she didn’t know how she had lived without it for so long. She carried a volume in her pocket to read whenever she was waiting for water to boil or an iron to heat.

On her day off, she would put on one of her new dresses and walk in the park or take a crowded train to the country. She wasn’t the only one. City boys, drunk on cider and high on cheap tobacco, took off all their clothes and somersaulted into deep water from rickety jetties. City girls with dusty petticoats and Sunday hats pulled out their ribbons, kicked off their shoes, and danced barefoot on the grass. It was a summer when it was almost impossible not to feel as if you would be young and beautiful forever. The sun shone every day. The air was full of laughter and hilarity; nothing mattered, no one cared.You could do almost anything with anyone.

As Lilly sipped lemonade or gazed down at the ripples in the water of some pleasure lake or other, she thought about Hanne and wondered how she was. And sometimes she decided that she would go to her and beg her forgiveness. But judging by the way Hanne had looked at her the last time she saw her, Lilly considered it unlikely she would grant it. And so she would finish her drink, compose her face, and read German poetry. No wonder she looked so detached, so aloof, so much older than her twelve years. She did nothing to draw men to her, but they came anyway. Indeed, even without the come-hither gaze, men fell for her large gray eyes, the graceful angle of her shoulder, and her tiny alabaster hands. They broke off from their friends, offered her refreshments, and asked her to go for walks along secluded paths. And as they licked vanilla ice cream from their fingers or downed the last mouthful of sour local beer, they told her that they were in love with life, with Germany, and—although they had just met—most definitely with her.

And then, shielded by weeping willows or deep in small copses of pine, they would stop for a rest or to tie a lace, sit down, and blame the heat for their breathlessness. And without guilt, much ceremony, or procrastination, Lilly would sometimes let them slip their hand into hers or kiss her on the cheek. Although she knew it was not love or anything close, the birdsong seemed sweeter, the green buds brighter, and the sky a shade of blue much bluer than she had ever seen before.

“What’s your name?” they would always ask.

“Lara,” she would sometimes reply. Or Hanne, or Clara. If they asked what she did, she told them she was an heiress, a ballet dancer, or a singer. And some of them believed her.

“Can I see you again?” they would always ask at the end of the afternoon.

“It’s best not,” she would reply, and then she would climb aboard a train or omnibus without either an explanation or a backward glance.

That season was so beautiful and, since Lilly saw so little of it, so precious that in the years to come, she forgot the truth; she rein-vented how she felt. While pairs of cabbage butterflies flittered past and tiny fish flipped in the river nearby, while the sun shone green through the lime leaves and she sat with her eyes shut, sun-soaked and adored, she remembered an intensity of feeling that had in truth never been there. And likewise, months later as they shivered in a trench, those men and boys convinced themselves that they would have given her all their worldly goods in exchange for another kiss. But in truth, if they had bumped into her a week later on a crowded corner of the Tiergarten, you could be almost certain that they would doff their hats and she would turn her cheek, and they would both carry on without the slightest sign of recognition.

So, years later, when Lilly read their names on those mossed-over memorials and wept, she did not cry just for those boys, be they German, American, or French, but for the fact that the only witnesses to her youth, the only ones who knew her as young and beautiful and pure, were gone forever. And with them part of her was gone forever too.

The papers had started talking about the possibility of a war. It was said that although royalty and heads of state from all over Europe had attended the marriage of the kaiser’s daughter in May, Germany had no friends apart from Austria. It was also rumored that despite the pageants, the gala operas, the banquets and military parades, the girl would not come out of her room, so convinced was she that she would lose her brand-new husband on the battlefield.

There was no sign of the penniless poet, and Lilly had forgotten all about him until she found a photograph that had fallen behind the bookcase. In scuffed monochrome, a young man sat on a checkered blanket under a wide tree. His skin was dark and his eyes were long-lashed and so clear they seemed almost bleached. He looked like a poet; he wore a floppy necktie and a wide-sleeved Russian shirt. She had met plenty like him that summer, Russian boys on their way to America, Bavarians who talked about the special scent of the South, students who claimed they were passionate about trees. She placed the photograph back behind the bookcase again and it fell behind a pile of encyclopedias, where it wouldn’t be rediscovered for twenty years.

And then, one day in late October, he appeared again. Lilly came across him sitting at the kitchen table with a glass of vodka in his hand. Since she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be invisible to him or not, she lowered her eyes, ran a damp cloth over the blackened stove, and then quietly wrung it out at the sink. She could see his reflection in the window; his thick black hair was now threaded with gray, his eyes a faded blue. He downed the last of his vodka before he spoke.