The Glimmer Palace (33 page)

But even though she vowed over and over to end it, when she returned hours later filled with resolve and a couple of glasses of wine, he would disarm her with a kiss, a punch, or a harsh word.

“Help me,” he would plead. “If you love me, help me.”

Morphine could be bought easily on the street outside the police station on Alexanderplatz for a handful of change. And that would be where Hanne would head, to street corners or under the S-Bahn to buy small brown paper bags from young men in long overcoats. Kurt kept his syringe in the soap dish on the sink. He would be right as rain within the hour.

“I should move,” Lilly whispered when he had finally passed out.

“Stay,” Hanne begged. “I need you. I’ll sort it out. Lilly, promise me you won’t leave me.”

Hanne’s face started to collapse, and all her attitude and bravado, all that protective armor that had taken so many years to accumulate and that had seemed as impervious to breakage as Bakelite, began to crack.

And so Lilly promised.

Hanne’s film parts gradually dried up. It wasn’t that she had become unreliable, turning up hours late or not at all; something about her, the so-called director told his assistant, had changed. She had stopped pretending she enjoyed it. Instead she lay in bed all morning with Kurt and, until he sold it, listened to military marches on the phonograph. She spent the afternoon auditioning, walking from one theater to the next and from one back lot to another. She had told him she was a respectable actress. Now all she had to do was prove it.

On days like these, when Hanne was out and Lilly didn’t start her shift until later, she was left alone with Kurt. At first he ignored her except to ask her, perhaps, where they kept the sugar or if she would like a cigarette. But sometimes, when he was high, he would tell her about himself, about how he had grown up on a small farm, about how, being the youngest child and only son, his father had expected him to be bigger, stronger, harder. And when he wasn’t good enough, how his father would take him into the cowshed and beat him with a rake. But most of the time he would pace the floor in silence or stand at the door and sway.

And so Lilly began to go out for walks alone, to sit in cafés and read the paper from cover to cover, to go to the cinema—anything to fill up the hours until her shift started. The Kakadu became a refuge from the tension of the boardinghouse, and she would take her time tidying up at the end of the night, cleaning and polishing the bar twice over until even the parrots started to squawk “Time to go, the bill, the bill, time to go” at her. But then a new manager was hired and everything changed. He was a tall, wiry ex-army sniper with a nervous, twitchy manner. When he approached Lilly with his new business plan, she thought he was joking.

“All the girls who work in these places do little extras for tips,” he claimed. “You think we make enough money from beer?”

He gave her a day off to decide. Lilly walked past barricades, past ruined buildings, past rows of “half silks,” or amateur prostitutes who came out onto the street only after five p.m., when their jobs as office girls or shop assistants were over for the day. And then she found herself outside the Movie Palast.

The film was a romance about a blind girl and a war veteran. It called for lots of minor chords and a slow pace. Ilya Yurasov was aware of the girl from the boardinghouse in the audience. He knew that the other girl had a boyfriend now; he’d met him on the stairs. He was one of Noske’s men, unfortunately, a thug with an insignia, a drunk with a truncheon. And so he wasn’t surprised to see the girl on her own. At the end of the film, however, he was surprised by the girl’s face. She had been crying. The film was a poorly acted melodrama. Surely she couldn’t have found it that affecting.

“Excuse me for inquiring,” he said, “but are you all right?”

The girl nodded and patted her eyes with a handkerchief.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m fine.”

It was already eight in the evening, but the night was filled with shimmering autumn light. They walked west toward the boardinghouse, the horizon ahead streaked with red and amber, the clouds edged with the palest green. Ilya, the polite Russian, walked with long, loose strides. He had an easy laugh and dark eyes that tilted up very slightly at the corners. Although there was a tangible space between them, they both knew that they must look like a young couple out for the night. She thought about Stefan, about the way he had touched her. Find somebody else if I don’t return, he had told her. And marry him.Why not this one? she asked herself.

As they walked, Lilly brightened up and they talked about films, about jazz, about Berlin. At one point Ilya turned and walked backward while describing the plot of a new film. His eyes widened as he reached the climax.

“The devil took his soul,” he said. “And the girl died of a broken heart. Baboom.”

Lilly laughed. He shrugged and smiled at her, the way he had outside the Bad Boys’ Ball. And then he turned and they walked on in silence.

Lilly’s pace slowed as they reached Nollendorfplatz. She didn’t want to go back to Motzstrasse. She didn’t want to see Kurt or hear Hanne’s misgivings about him. Lilly couldn’t help Hanne: only she could break it off with Kurt. And what about her job at the Kakadu? The thought of any of the customers touching her filled her with panic. She would not do it; she could not do it.

Ilya had noticed her change of pace and was suddenly nervous. If she turned and wanted him to kiss her, would he resist? Just being near her made him feel strangely exhilarated. He leaned forward to open the heavy wooden door of their lodgings, hoping she wouldn’t notice the tremor of his hand.

“Ilya,” she said.

He paused before he pulled the handle. Lilly stared at the buttons on his cuff and then slowly, slowly, she lifted her large gray eyes to his. He met her gaze. His whole body surged quite involuntarily.

“Do you know anyone who needs a typist? I need a new job.”

He smiled and pretended to consider. So he was wrong about her. And although he felt a tug of disappointment, he was also relieved.

“In fact,” he said, “I do.”

Ilya Yurasov regarded himself as a man of substance. His heightened sense of honor, morality, and decorum came out of, he supposed, a visceral reaction to the irresponsible lifestyle of his parents. His mother had given him up when he was just two months old. He had been cared for by a succession of wet-nurses, nannies, and governesses while she was occupied by a series of increasingly passionate affairs with opera singers, minor royalty, and high-ranking military men. She had fulfilled her side of a bargain with her husband, one of the czar’s advisers, and had produced a son, but she made it quite clear that that was all he should expect. He seemed quite content with the situation, however, and spent most of his time on his estate, where he had an ongoing relationship with the daughter of his manager.

Ilya grew up valuing justice above everything else, a quality that he had inherited from the women who had cared for him for long hours and little pay. They also instilled in him an aversion to rule breaking that never left him and that used to amuse his mother to no end. “Go on,” she used to taunt him. “Steal an apple from the neighbor’s garden. Go on, Ilya.” But he would not.

And so, when Russia entered the war with Germany, much to the chagrin of his parents, he immediately enlisted. He never saw them again. They would eventually emigrate to Nice and live together in a small apartment near the Russian Orthodox church until the pressures of cohabitation proved too much and they split up, both rapidly remarried, and lost touch with each other and their only son.

The very next day Ilya made some inquiries on Lilly’s behalf. Two days later a letter was pushed underneath her door: she was invited to attend an interview. It was only after she had read it twice that she noticed the company’s letterhead was the Deutsche Bioscop, a film company.

Lilly took a train right out of the city, through the Grunewald forests to Potsdam, and then she took a tram to Stahnsdorfer Strasse in Neubabelsberg.The interview was brief. She was given a few pages of script by a matronly woman with unreadable eyes and timed as she typed. And then she was offered the job.

“When do I start?” she asked.

“Tomorrow,” the woman said without looking up. “I’ll get someone to show you round.”

The Neubabelsberg film studios in 1919 had two huge areas with walls constructed from glass. That day, inside the larger studio, there was a horizon painted on the curved backdrop and a series of flats constructed to look like a medieval keep. A bank of lights was aimed at the set from up above and the floor at the edges of the space was thick with black cables. Nothing, however, seemed to be happening. And then, with a loud buzz, someone switched on the lights. A woman in a dressing gown stepped into the brightness and warmed her face in the light.

There was also a covered hangar for storing film stock, camera equipment, and props. Cars, real and miniature, models of skyscrapers, and papier-mâché trees stood beside cardboard gravestones and vases full of colored paper flowers. A moat, complete with draw-bridge and portcullis, had been stored next to a plywood gallows.

Lilly was shown to a small hangar on the edge of the lot behind the main studio. The site had until recently been an airport and this hangar, she was told, used to house fighter planes. The ceiling was high and the only natural light came in from a dusty oblong window at one end. Strip lighting had been installed up above and the floor area was set up with about forty desks in rows, each with a typewriter. Twenty typists were already at work, and the clack of their fingers on the keys was almost deafening. Lilly was allocated a desk and given a sheaf of paper.

“I sat down and that was that; I felt as if I belonged there,” she told an interviewer in 1926. “It was the first time in my life that I had ever felt that way. And the smell, I remember the smell, of ink and new paper and adrenaline. I sat down and just breathed it all in.”

But didn’t you dream about being a film star yourself, the interviewer asked, of being in the films you typed?

“Never,” she replied. “I was given handwritten pages, I typed them, I handed the pages to somebody else. Sometimes I read the words, sometimes I didn’t. Just by typing, I believed that I was helping to make something live, to make all these ideas and fantasies— those wonderful love affairs and heartbreaking tragedies—make sense, become reality. I loved films. Escapism? Yes . . . of course it was; everyone needed it then.”

Lilly started work at nine in the morning and finished at six. The streets were peaceful around Potsdam, and it was, she admitted, sometimes hard to make herself head back into the city, to the fighting, the barricades, and the intermittent sounds of gunfire, to Hanne and Kurt.

“After I had worked in a factory, this didn’t feel like work at all,” she told the interviewer. “I wasn’t paid a great deal, it’s true. You know, I would have done it for nothing, if they had asked. My head was in another place when I worked.”

Lilly had tried to thank him in person, but Ilya Yurasov had unexpectedly moved out of the boardinghouse. He had also resigned his part-time job at the Movie Palast. The sad-eyed fat girl mentioned something about him leaving a note for her, but she had lost it.

“Probably gone back to Russia,” she said. “I would if I were him.”

So that was that. He was gone without even a word. She should have expected it.There had always been, she realized now, something reticent in his manner. And although she started to see suggestions of him everywhere—the angle of a shoulder, a smattering of Russian spoken too fast, pale fingers below threadbare cuffs—she told herself that he was only someone who had helped her once. Everything else had happened only in her imagination.

The sad-eyed fat girl was right. Given the choice, who would choose Berlin? The city was still being patrolled by increasing numbers of government troops. The Spartacists had been gradually hunted down and imprisoned. And any revolutionary material, any pamphlet or magazine, that was found was confiscated, and those responsible for distributing it were shot.The fighting had stopped but the terror went on.

When Lilly saw a woman standing outside the station with a sack of several hundred copies of the Dadaist magazine
Die Pleite
that she was giving out to factory workers, she wondered if the woman was insane. Lilly was about to head down to the U-Bahn but hesitated at the top of the stairs. There was something familiar about her. She looked again. She was well dressed but a little unkempt; her hair was falling out of a loose knot, and there were holes in her stockings.

At that point, Lilly told herself to keep going. She could hear the rattle of a train approaching.They were not friends anymore; Eva had made that clear the last time they had met. And then, as Lilly lingered on the top step, blocking the path of dozens of increasingly irritated commuters, she saw what Eva could not see: the approach of three Freikorps from the street, their pistols drawn and their eyes shiny with excitement.

Of course Lilly used Kurt’s name. They wouldn’t shoot a woman whose friend was intimate with one of their own ranks.They took the magazines and regretfully let them both go.

Eva ate three bowls of dumpling soup while Lilly sipped a weak black coffee. The restaurant was small and cheap and rarely frequented by government troops. Eva looked over her shoulder to see if she could be overheard; then, when she saw that they were the only customers, she told Lilly she had been sleeping on a succession of floors for several months.They knew where she lived, she whispered, her small eyes wide. They had ransacked the flat in Steglitz and paid the neighbors to inform them if she returned.The door crashed open as another couple of customers came in. Eva jumped despite herself.

“It would be better for them,” she said, “if I disappeared.”

Lilly paid the bill and took her back to the boardinghouse.

Hanne was wearing a silk dressing gown that she had been given by one of her “directors.” Her cheeks were red and the kohl around her eyes had smudged. Kurt, she mentioned with a wave of her hand, had just left. She sat down on the divan and her gown fell open over her leg. Eva’s eyes dropped and Lilly saw her staring at five small purple bruises on Hanne’s thigh.