The Glimmer Palace (2 page)

As for her father, his supposed speculations took up all week and most of the weekends as well. And so Baby, as she was known briefly, was taken to theatrical auditions and abandoned in the stalls. She rapidly perfected a high-pitched screech that nobody, apart from her mother, could bear for more than a minute. Eventually arrangements were made and Baby was cared for by the landlady or, if she wasn’t available, the philosophy student on the third floor. The landlady had too much experience with infants and used to stick her in a high-sided clothes basket from which Baby could not escape. Once, exhausted from screaming, she fell asleep, was covered up with soiled sheets, was carried all the way to the laundry, and was just about to be thrown into a cauldron of boiling water laced with starch when someone noticed her faint but dainty snore.

The student, on the other hand, had too little experience and spent many hours pontificating on the pitfalls of humanism and dangling his silver watch chain just out of her reach until, intoxicated with the schnapps he drank to help him concentrate, he would fall asleep and leave her to crawl around his filthy floor and eat the crusts, cigarette ends, and single beads from ex-girlfriends’ dresses that he had never bothered to sweep up. It was a miracle that she survived at all.

Her mother didn’t. The Bavarian lover shot her when he came back unexpectedly and discovered her in bed with the philosophy student. The philosophy student, quoting Kierkegaard, grabbed the firearm and shot him back. Baby slept through the entire episode. She was one and a half.

Somebody from the cabaret group knew someone who knew someone else whose child had just been killed in a perambulator accident. Baby was the same sex, same age, same size—the same in everything, it was said, except in the color of her hair, which was dark instead of fair. And so, still dressed in black, which was now deemed appropriate under the circumstances, the child was shipped off to the suburbs to grow up in a dead girl’s set of clothes and renamed Dora.

The new father worked as a foreman in a factory and, at forty-three, had waited until he could provide a suitable home for his wife before he would allow her to conceive. But only once, he had clarified at the time, for reasons of safety. The house was sparsely furnished, with just a few ornaments brought from another, poorer life, that had been rationed one to each mantelpiece. Stepping inside felt like trying on a coat a few sizes too large.

Dora’s new room had a cot, a wardrobe, and a small, threadbare rug. Despite an almost tangible sense of sadness, it was always meticulously clean. Her new mother fought a daily battle with dust and the thick black dirt that was pumped out of her husband’s factory and fell on every surface like gritty rain. Each morning, after fastidiously scrubbing the floors with scalding water, she was visibly satisfied when the newfangled carpet sweeper her husband had bought for her birthday failed to pick up a single mote.

Life as Dora was not bad, just uneventful. Nothing changed but the food they ate for dinner, and even that was on a weekly rotation. When Friday came again and her new mother placed a plate of mashed whitefish and cabbage before her, Dora did not even hesitate before she launched the whole lot onto the spotless floor.

It was not that her new parents were unkind to her: they gave her every form of sustenance they could, except one. Even as a toddler, Lilly Nelly Aphrodite was aware that something was not quite right. Why did her so-called mother sob when she brushed her long dark hair? And why did they look at her with eyes half closed, as if trying to see something or someone else dressed in her clothes? She knew instinctively that these people did not belong to her, or she to them.

It was not surprising then that her terrible twos started early and never stopped. She would refuse to get dressed, eat supper, have a bath, get undressed, get out of the bath—in fact do anything she was asked to do. She left sooty black finger marks on the pristine white walls and liked to run around naked whenever visitors came for tea. Her new parents took her to the doctor, who recommended a firm hand and a hard bed.When they told him that this only made matters worse, he looked at them with pity and a visible amount of scorn. Dora could not be sent back to the place she had come from. Or could she?

The new father wrote a check equivalent to ten percent of his earnings for the next five years and finally let himself and his wife grieve for dear little dead Dora the First. The St. Francis Xavier Home for Orphaned Children agreed to take Dora the Second at the end of the week. Lilly Nelly Aphrodite, as she was named on her birth certificate, stood on the main steps with a suitcase at her feet that contained nothing more than her personal papers in a brown manila envelope. The new parents, now former, had already walked away, just as she had insisted. She clutched a present that she had promised in a rare moment of sweetness she would open once she was inside. It was from her mother’s cabaret group, who, following her fate and feeling just a little responsible—but not responsible enough to take her in themselves—had all chipped in and bought a doll with a wind-up smile.

Snow was falling gently on the blackened building. The organization was running on a skeleton staff of one elderly nun who was rushed off her feet. A seven-year-old had tried to set fire to the director’s curtains. A ten-year-old had found the trapdoor to the roof and was encouraging as many as he could to follow him up the ladder. It was, in short, chaos.

After what seemed like hours, the new orphan gave up pressing her tiny finger on the large brass doorbell. A whistle followed by a loud bang came from somewhere nearby. She turned round and looked up. In the sky above the orphanage an explosion of light illuminated the falling snow. She didn’t know it, as no one had told her, but she had arrived at St. Francis Xavier’s on her third birthday, the thirty-first of December, 1903. Finally the main door opened.

“Don’t just stand there. Come inside,” said a nun in a grubby cotton apron. “Do you want to catch your death?”

Lilly Nelly Aphrodite paused before she stepped through the main door and into the darkened reception hall of the orphanage. Could death be caught, like a cold? At that point in her infancy, however, the dead were still very much alive. A trail of French scent or the drift of a Havana cigar triggered vivid memories of the kind that young children are not supposed to retain: a long-fingered hand, the graze of a newly shaved chin, a kiss on the top of her head. And somewhere deep inside her subconscious was a long-held conviction that she had merely been set aside, stowed away, put in storage for collection by her people at a later date. A snowflake landed on her bottom lip but immediately melted. She sniffed twice: cabbage and disinfectant.The nun picked up the suitcase and ushered her in with an impatient wave. Lilly Nelly Aphrodite tentatively stepped across the threshold. The main door slammed behind her with a long, low boom.

Falling Light

M
eet Oskar Messter, Germany’s first King of Film. His hair may be gone and his mustache may look like two black slugs, but his eyes are filled with the kind of energy that can only be electric. He’ll talk about his inventions without a prompt—the projector, the camera, the processor, and the reproducer. “I make moving pictures too,” he’ll say.

In Messter’s new cinemas the seats are cheap and filled with loafers and losers, shopgirls and shovelers, pimps and peasants, and at the very back where it’s so dark you can hardly see your own hand let alone anyone else’s, the lovers. And on the screen?Well-turned ankles, arms and legs and vigorous exercises:
Lydia Was Not Dressed to Receive Callers; Clara Forgets to Pull Down the Blinds.

Everybody thinks that Messter’s cinemas are temples of ill repute and sin. And for now everybody is right. But there’s nothing like sitting in the dark watching the world in all its shades of monochrome flicker through his spectacular invention, the picture sequencer. When Messter proclaims it the medium of the new century, it would be churlish to disagree. Long live King Messter. And long live his glorious, illustrious, magnificent screen.

There is a single photograph of Lilly Nelly Aphrodite, or Tiny Lil, as she was known then, as a child. Third from the right in the second row from the front, she wears a gray dress and her dark hair has been braided and arranged over the right shoulder.While many of the children’s faces that surround her are rendered illegible by the smudge of movement, Tiny Lil stands perfectly still and stares out of the frame as if her name has just been called. Her enormous eyes are glassy clear and her mouth is resolutely closed. Her left hand clutches the pocket in her dress to hide its contents. Inside is a dead mouse that she has been trying, in vain, to bring back to life.You can just about see, if you look closely, that her knees are caked black from all the praying.

At the back, in the center of six rows of twenty children each, is Sister August. Her image is ghostly and transparent, the result of joining or leaving the group between the moment the photographer pressed his button and the twenty seconds later or so that the shutter fell. Through her chest, the open door to her office behind is clearly visible. It is filled with the pale dusty sunshine of childhood memory. The date, written in longhand in faded brown ink on the back of the print, is the twelfth of February, 1906.

“Useless,” shouted the photographer. “Is there time for one more?”

But there was not. A bell rang and the children dispersed up stairs, down corridors and through doorways until none was left except one.

“Sister says I’m to show you out,” Tiny Lil told the photographer.

He let the little girl look at his lenses while he packed up his camera. She held up a fish-eye and stared at the vaulted glass ceiling.

“Mind you, don’t drop it,” he told her.

The world was beveled. Golden light fell in wide shafts from the cupola and threw the rest of the hall into a rich, gilded darkness. Although she knew the reality was otherwise, it became the kind of space where angels and archangels or even the Virgin Mary with her beloved bundle might appear.

The photographer, a boy of seventeen who had recently set up in business and had offered to take the orphanage photo for nothing to add to his portfolio, held out his hand and waited for her to give it back.

“Everything looks different,” she said.

He glanced around the main hall. The glass ceiling was cloudy with dirt, the walls were painted a dark, shiny green, and the marble floor was dull and streaked with the gray residue of industrial-strength disinfectant. It couldn’t, he considered, look any worse.

“You can keep it if you like,” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Tiny Lil,” she replied. “Want to see my cot?”

Noting his hesitancy, she continued.

“It’s all right.They’ve all gone to Mass. I don’t need to go, because I went this morning. And besides, it’s on the way.”

Tiny Lil led the photographer through the orphanage. The hallways and stairwells were so multiple and nondescript, so dimly lit and featureless, that the photographer soon began to suspect that he was being led around in circles, which he was.Years later he would be reminded of St. Francis Xavier’s when, lost at Verdun in a maze of trenches, he turned left and right, then left and right again, as if led by a little girl wearing a gray dress. He did not hear the mortar launched by a mason’s apprentice from Aberdeen a quarter of a mile away, and the last image that raced through his head was a memory of the afternoon sun streaming onto two dozen identical cots.

“Guess which one is mine,” said Tiny Lil.

He could not.They were, you see, all the same.

After she had shown him the front door and the photographer had climbed upon his bicycle and ridden off down the driveway, Tiny Lil pulled the dead mouse out of her pocket and dropped it down a drain.Then she took out the photographer’s lens and held it, heavy, in her palm.

he certainty that her parents would come and soon collect her had taken some time to fade. The doll with the wind-up smile, however, was stolen the day after she arrived by an eight-year-old girl with a harelip. After several inconsolable hours, she snatched a small brown woolen bear from a six-year-old who had also just been admitted after losing both parents to diphtheria. Earless and eyeless, with one leg coming loose, the bear was the only toy that the bereaved child had been allowed to bring. Hugging the substitute to her chest and finally able to sleep,Tiny Lil breathed in the germs that for some reason the toy bear’s owner was immune to, succumbed to diphtheria herself, and nearly died.

The bear was burned and the doll was buried by its harelipped thief, who intended to dig it up later.Tiny Lil never saw the six-year-old again; she had been adopted by a distant relative from Hamburg who instantly presented her with a brand-new bear that he had bought that morning in Hertzog’s department store. But Child 198, as she was labeled on her arrival, spent six weeks in isolation in the orphanage infirmary. There were times when it was proclaimed that she would not last the night. Last rites were read no fewer than three times. And yet, with what the doctor could only put down to constitutional irregularities, Child 198 recovered despite the odds stacked against her. As she recuperated she insisted on lemonade every day. When it was decided that tap water would be adequate, she lapsed back into a critical condition, forcing the doctor to prescribe her favorite drink on demand.