The Glimmer Palace (24 page)

Eva had laid out some nightclothes and a spare toothbrush. Lilly dried herself quickly and then cleaned her teeth. A blurred face in the mirror looked back at her. She had almost forgotten what she looked like. As she wiped away the condensation, her reflection gradually appeared. She tried to smile, but her face, she noticed with a jolt, was one that had become configured for tragedy.

The next morning Lilly woke at five and lay awake as the room lightened. Eva had looked at her in the same way that Marek had, with the same hunger and giddy slide of her eyes. And once more she hadn’t resisted it; she had been complicit.

And so she got dressed and started to clean the apartment. There were balls of dust in the corners of the corridors and the rugs were gray with soot. As quietly as she could, she dusted, polished, and washed floors. Eva rose at ten-thirty. As soon as she saw the mop in Lilly’s hand, she tried to take it away.

“You don’t have to do that,” she told Lilly. “I’ve been meaning to get a lady.”

“But now you’ve got me,” Lilly replied. “Please, I’ll only stay here if I have something to do . . .”

Lilly’s grip on the mop was unyielding. And they both knew that Eva’s question had been answered.

“If you insist,” Eva conceded with a laugh despite the dip of disappointment she felt inside. “But it’s only because you want to. If you clean, I’ll cook. And I don’t know what happened to your wardrobe, but you’re welcome to have as many of my clothes as you like.”

“That’s very kind of you,” Lilly said.

“I’m a very kind sort of girl.”

Within a week, Eva commented later, it seemed as if Lilly had come back to life from the dead. They ate together, they danced together, they talked until late: about school, about clothes, about their childhoods. Although Lilly would remain tight-lipped about her recent situation, she hinted that it involved a father who wanted to marry her off to a much older, very wealthy man. And if Eva was ever suspicious that she had read Lilly’s anecdotes in a book or seen them on the cinema screen, she never let on. But Lilly always covered her tracks. While her tales about boarding school and balls and banquets were filled with convincing detail, she was always vague with places and dates. In fact, the only real person in her stories was her school friend Hanne Schmidt, whom she described with such affection that Eva became fascinated.

“Tell me again about your friend who worked in a tingle-tangle,” she would insist. And so Lilly would describe her friend’s shocking downfall from aristocrat to bar singer, and even sing a snatch or two of her songs, which Eva always found hilarious.

“I know a man with a great big . . .
Dick was his name . . .”

“It’s like you’ve always lived here,” Eva said when she had finished laughing.

And so they settled into a routine of sorts, with Eva cooking and Lilly cleaning up, Eva observing and Lilly letting her, a symbiotic relationship in which neither admitted what was happening or questioned how it would end. Sometimes, without telling Eva, Lilly looked for a job. She paced the city streets, from Zoo to the Cölln and from Potsdamer Platz to Mitte, looking for notices in shop windows or cards on notice boards. But the city was full of unemployed female servants and the middle classes were unwilling, it was said, to hire again until the war was over.

Eva’s camera was put away and the portrait was never mentioned again. It was just one in a series of short-lived passions.The next was writing a novel. Every morning after breakfast, she set up a brand-new Remington typewriter on the kitchen table and stabbed out each word letter by letter, swearing loudly when she made a mistake.

“Is it difficult?” Lilly asked. “Typing, I mean.”

“No.Yes, I admit it. It’s bloody hard.You want to try?”

Lilly sat at the table and Eva stood behind her. Lilly slowly bashed out the alphabet, letter by letter. Sometimes she hesitated and Eva would lean over her shoulder and point out a letter. And when she had reached Z, she typed up a sentence:
Eva has Every Eventuality Evaluated.

Eva smiled and typed out a sentence in return: “ ‘My Little Lilly is a Lovely Lass,’” Lilly read.

“I have a guide if you want to learn,” Eva said. “I did a course, but quite frankly, I have no natural aptitude. Maybe you could pick it up, though.”

Lilly ran her fingers very gently over the Bakelite keys. Maybe she could. The book claimed you could learn in a week. It took Lilly three. She followed the exercises without any ink, since typewriter ribbon was increasingly hard to get hold of and she didn’t want to waste it. And then, when she could manage a page or two slowly and clumsily, she offered to type up the first chapter of Eva’s book.

“Oh, no. It needs another draft,” Eva said. “It’s not finished.”

“When can I read it?” she asked.

“Soon, soon,” Eva replied.

The next day Eva burned it.The typewriter, however, remained.

Eva’s status as a “regular customer” in her local shops was undermined by extreme food shortages. Although Eva and Lilly both had ration books, what was listed inside them was pure fiction.

“A loaf of bread a week,” Eva scoffed. “And a pound of meat a month.You know what he offered me? A cup full of flour and a pound of wormy apples.”

And so in June, Lilly and Eva decided to go on a foraging trip to the country. As they walked to the station, they noticed that the city was strangely silent. That spring, boys with ladders had climbed trees, raided nests, and then sold the birds’ eggs they found for fifty pfennigs each. Others had rigged up nets and offered starlings and pigeons, magpies and swallows, at one mark a pair.

Every weekend the trains left the main stations packed with people. At country stations, where there was little more than a church and a couple of houses, at least two dozen old men, women, and children would disembark carrying baskets and sacks. They had all heard that some farmers would sell eggs and milk—at a price. Others would chase trespassers away with a stick. But they couldn’t guard all of their crops all of the time, and so every potato field, vegetable garden, and grain crop was liable to have had some of its produce “liberated.”

The police, however, had grown wise to this and they patrolled the main stations in Berlin, arresting anyone caught with what they assumed were foraged goods. And so the foragers knew it was better to eat what you could in the country than to risk the prospect of the food you gathered, by honest means or not, being confiscated and left to rot on the platform.

Lilly and Eva bought tickets for the next train leaving, the nine-thirtyto Munich, and they climbed off about lunchtime at a tiny village. The fields around were planted with rye and the hedgerows were tangled with cow parsley and goosegrass. First they decided they would try to buy some eggs from a farm. Following directions from the stationmaster, they turned off the road and headed up a small grassy track. As they walked toward a long, low farmhouse, they passed a hen coop and a cow in a barn. A boy of about eight sat on the wall to keep watch.They smiled and wished him good day, but he simply stared at them.

They offered ninety pfennigs per egg, but it was not enough. The farmer’s wife, a tired-looking woman with thick, graying blond hair, watery blue eyes, and several chins, wanted two marks. From the open doorway came the smell of freshly baked bread and smoked bacon. She folded her arms and watched their reaction.

“That’s daylight robbery,” stuttered Eva. “Before the war you could buy six dozen for that price.”

“That’s what they cost today,” the farmer’s wife said as she started to close the door. “If you want eggs, get your own hens. Otherwise, eat turnip like everyone else.”

“Greedy lump,” said Eva as they walked away. “Fat old cow. . . . Even if I had the money, I wouldn’t pay that for an egg.”

From the farmhouse, they heard the farmer’s wife calling her son for lunch. Eva sniffed.

“I can still smell bacon in my hair,” she lamented.

They walked along in silence for a few minutes.

“I think you can eat dandelions,” Lilly said. “But is it the flowers or the leaves?”

It was Eva’s idea to liberate some eggs. Before they had a chance to change their minds, Eva was dragging Lilly back along the road toward the farm.

“We’ll leave some money,” she said. “Ninety pfennigs per egg. Which is still outrageous.”

The boy on the wall had gone. From what they had seen of the house, the kitchen seemed to be in the back. Quickly they slipped into the chicken coop. Half a dozen hens rushed toward them, expecting grain. Neither Lilly nor Eva had any idea where to look for eggs and so they floundered around, surrounded by a clutch of hens, searching in corners and under planks.They both heard the sickening crack when Eva stepped on two eggs by mistake. A child’s high-pitched scream came from the house. Without a prompt, both girls jumped over the fence and ran. They reached the turn of the road laughing and gasping for breath.

“Do you think anyone saw us?” asked Eva.

“I hope not,” said Lilly.

A squawk came from inside Eva’s jacket. It was then that Lilly noticed the bulge. Eva undid one button. As soon as it saw the light, the rooster started to crow in hoarse, clucking rasps. A door slammed in the farmhouse.

“What have you done?” said Lilly.

“I just grabbed it,” Eva said. “We’ll keep it in the apartment. I’ll send them some money. . . . How much do you think a hen costs?”

“It’s not a hen,” Lilly said. “It’s a rooster.”

“So?”

“They don’t lay eggs, Eva.”

“Oh,” she said.

The rooster started to flap its wings, to peck at Eva’s hands and face. She held on tighter.

“Let it go,” said Lilly.

“Absolutely not.”

Kickeriki.
The rooster’s crow was almost as loud as the steam train’s whistle.
Kickeriki.
Eva pulled her jacket over the bird’s head, but it was too late.

“The rooster’s out,” shouted the boy back at the farm.

“Let it go, Eva,” Lilly repeated.

“Lunchtime, Chooki!” he shouted.

Eva giggled but it wasn’t funny anymore. From inside her jacket the rooster clucked and its feet started to claw at her arms.

“I left three marks on the hen coop. I paid for it. . . . Ouch.”

They could hear the rattle of the grain bucket as the boy walked slowly down the lane toward them.

“Come here, Daddy,” he shouted.

The rooster stuck its head out and opened its beak. Before it had a chance to cry out, Lilly grabbed its neck with both hands. And with one swift turn, she broke it. Eva stared at her for a second, her mouth open. And then she looked down. The rooster hung limp in Lilly’s hand.

“What have you done?” said Eva.

Lilly quickly stuffed the rooster’s body into her basket, covered it with a cloth, and then, taking Eva’s arm, walked as briskly as she dared away from the farm.

The land opened out into fields and then closed in deep, dense forests. The road was sandy and infrequently used. And yet, though they were forty kilometers at least from Munich, the countryside was full of people. They passed several families scanning the ground and the hedgerows. One woman sat on a stool beside a small, slow-moving river with a fishing rod in her hand. She looked up nervously when she saw them coming, and her hand instinctively flew to a canvas bag at her feet.

The rooster grew heavier and heavier in Lilly’s basket, but she forced herself to carry it as if it were empty. If anyone they passed suspected they had something other than a few edible leaves in their basket, she was sure they would have no qualms about a little more “liberation.” Neither Lilly nor Eva spoke until they reached a cross-roads. The right fork headed back toward the village, the left into a wood.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Eva at last. “I think we should bury it and go back to the city. I feel like a common criminal.”

“What?” said Lilly. “It would be criminal not to eat it.”

“But if we’re caught with it in our basket . . . Lilly, if only you hadn’t . . . killed it.What are we going to do with it?”

Lilly didn’t respond. In the air was the smell of turned earth and wood smoke. She began walking again and took the left fork of the road. Eva followed a short distance behind.The smoke was billowing up from a small clearing on the other side of the stream. Lilly headed toward it.

“Where are you going?” called Eva. Lilly jumped the stream and scrabbled up the other side of the bank. She waited for Eva to follow and helped her up.

“Lilly,” Eva scolded. “Now my boots are all wet.”

The clearing was out of sight of the road. Sitting on logs around the small bonfire was a family of Gypsies, two men, a woman, and three children. They were boiling up a pot of coffee. Behind them a horse was tethered to a tree. A cart loaded with belongings lay upended nearby.

“Let’s go before they see us,” whispered Eva.

But Lilly appeared not to hear her. Instead she took out the dead rooster and held it by its feet. She walked slowly toward the fire with her arm outstretched.The whole family turned.

“We’ll share it with you,” she said, “if we can share your fire.”

The men glanced at each other. Maybe, Lilly suddenly thought, they would attack them, or rob them, or even rape them.There were stories about Gypsies, about how they ate their babies and stole away small children. The wood on the fire cracked like a gunshot; she jumped and Eva let out a small, high-pitched scream.The men’s faces broke and they started to laugh. The children joined in. Only the woman did not smile. Then they spoke softly to one another in another language.

After some discussion, one of the men stepped forward and, with a small bow, took the dead bird.While one prepared the rooster, first plucking it and then taking out its innards with a knife, the other man handed them small cups of coffee. It was as thick, sweet, and black as treacle. While they sipped it, the men argued. The smell, they explained in halting German, might attract attention. And so, after another long discussion, they began to dig a hole and fill it with the ashes and burning logs from the fire. The rooster was wrapped up in leaves and placed on top of the embers. Then the Gypsies scraped soil over it all until the bird was completely buried. Finally they collected the feathers and the bird’s bloody insides in a piece of newspaper, swaddled them in a cloth, and stuffed the bundle deep into a carpetbag.