The Glimmer Palace (34 page)

“Thank goodness he only has five,” Hanne said. “He lost the other fingers in the war.”

Eva blushed and fumbled in her bag for a cigarette.

“It would just be for a few days,” Eva said. “Just until I find another hideaway.”

“Lilly is the only respectable person in the block,” Hanne said. “I don’t think a lady like you would like it here.”

“I can assure you,” Eva replied, “that I have stayed in far worse places than this.”

Only Hanne laughed.

They left Eva with a cup of coffee and a saucer for her cigarette ash, and locked themselves in the communal bathroom.

“Just a couple of days,” Lilly said. “I know there’s no room. She said she had nowhere to go.”

“It’s all right,” Hanne replied. “She can stay as long as she likes. I have Kurt.Why can’t you have a guest?”

This wasn’t the reaction she had been expecting.

“Are you forgetting what he does?” Lilly replied. “Hanne, are you forgetting who he is?”

Someone outside started to bang on the door.

“He needn’t know anything. We’ll just tell him the truth. She is . . . was . . . your sister-in-law.”

And then she smiled, her false tooth a slightly brighter shade of white in the half-light of the open window.

The Studio

L
ight, shade, light, shade, the artist dreams of traveling in and out of tunnels on a train whose destination is unknown. His nightmares are set in rooms with tilting walls and dense black shadows. He is haunted by specters with white faces and malevolent movements.

He was an Expressionist painter, a member of the Berlin Sturm group. They did not believe in perspective or naturalism or representation. They did not paint landscapes or portraits or still lifes. They were employed by the film studio as set painters. It was a steady wage in unsteady times. Do what you will, the producers instructed. As long as it’s cheap.

“Our vision is clear,” they said. “Our style distortion. Films must be drawings brought to life. Here and only here can we truly externalize the fermentations of the inner self.” And yet the critics missed the point entirely. Observing sets where the walls leaned in and the chimneys tilted, the windows sloped and the roofs collided, they derided their work as the hallucinations of sick brains.

But now the artist realizes that those sets were a premonition, not only of film noir and other later genres, but of the light, shade, light, shade of that train journey to nowhere that he would later make himself.

Kurt knew, of course. He knew as soon as he saw her. Her tattered clothes, a little out of fashion. Her good walking boots now worn down at the heel; her attitude, the way she talked to him with her contempt not exactly hidden but translated into the angle of her shoulder, the twist of her mouth, the slight narrowing of her eyes when he spoke. It was obvious.

But there was more. After just a few days, Eva began to find reasons to be near Hanne. She hovered around her, she put on her favorite record, she danced too close, she talked to her to the exclusion of all others, she touched her arm when asking her a question and stroked the stockings Hanne always left to dry over the backs of chairs. What was initially meant as a snub became an unspoken provocation.

“She’ll have to go,” Lilly said. “I’ll ask her tonight.”

Hanne, however, would not hear of it. In fact, she seemed to enjoy it.

“She’s your sister-in-law,” Hanne implored. “I won’t let you do it.”

Of course, although she claimed the contrary, Eva didn’t have to stay; she had other options. The Spartacists still had hideouts all over the East where she could have lived in relative safety. And she had plenty of new friends. Eva had been a regular at a lesbian bar, the Verona-Lounge on Kleiststrasse, for the last few years. She liked blondes in dresses and not the women in men’s hats and long fur coats who haunted the Verona. But Hanne was a different matter entirely.To be flirted with, to be toyed with, to be led on by a woman who was a Freikorps man’s girl was so dangerously thrilling, she decided she would take the risk, whatever the consequences.

But there was more. She still thought about her brother, Stefan— about how, when he had returned from the front, he had withdrawn into himself so deeply that he had stopped speaking—and she was still angry. One day he had gone out for a walk and never returned. She had searched for him for a month or so, to no avail. He was never the same, she still told herself, since he had been stolen from her by Lilly. And so when she looked at Lilly and remembered the way she had misled Stefan, she didn’t feel guilty. Like so many of those hasty unions made in wartime, the marriage had been a sham, a desperate attempt to validate something fleeting and insubstantial. She knew it, Stefan knew it, his so-called bride knew it.

The situation in the boardinghouse grew increasingly difficult for everyone except Eva. All winter the radiator rattled and moaned, but it was never more than lukewarm. Lilly’s bed was almost big enough for both of them, but Eva always seemed to end up with most of the covers. And so Lilly would rise in the middle of the night, put on all her clothes, make tea, and wait for the morning to come. It was too dark to read, so she went over the scenes she had typed during the day and, by taking on all the parts, she played them out in her head. Here the characters’ motivations were clear and their resolutions deserved. The good were loved and the bad were punished. Happiness could be earned.

At work the pace suddenly increased. More films were in production than at any time after the war.When she arrived in the mornings a small pile of scripts to be typed was already on her desk, and she often had to work late just to get through them. Last-minute changes were standard. Her typewriter was old and some of the letters stuck. She typed until her fingers ached and her shoulders began to seize up. And then she would make a mistake and have to start the whole page all over again.

The first time Lilly fell asleep, she was woken gently by her supervisor, who brought her a cup of coffee.The second time she was given a formal warning and agreed to come in over the weekend to catch up. The third time she woke on the office sofa with her coat thrown over her and her shoes placed neatly on the floor beside her. It was a Saturday.

From that day onward, she began to notice the presence of a benign force. One morning a brand-new typewriter appeared on her desk. Nobody knew where it had come from. Another day she found a small bunch of winter roses on her chair when she returned from lunch. She looked around the office at the other typists and secretaries, but none of them gave any indication that they knew who had put them there. The studio had a huge staff: scene painters, electricians, wardrobe masters, and cameramen were on the move almost constantly from studio to studio and from country to country. One crew had just come back from Cairo. Another was going to the Orient. And then there were the writers and producers, who were always rushing off to endless meetings or first-day shoots, throwing rewrites at her or asking her to type up draft scripts, even though it wasn’t officially allowed. It could have been anyone.

Back in the city, Eva would sometimes disappear for days. But she would always return, smelling of tobacco and railway stations, hysterical with reports of nightly raids and close shaves, but with a look of such unfulfilled longing on her face that the real reason she had returned was obvious. Lilly knew that Hanne encouraged her. She would let her gown slip over her shoulder and occasionally ask Eva to button up the back of her dress or ask her opinion on her hair. Once, when Kurt had passed out on the bed, Hanne dared Eva to draw him. She sketched a grotesque caricature of a young man whose empty eyes and hollow cheeks suggested that his insides had been sucked clean out. Hanne laughed at first and then, when Kurt shifted under the covers and began to wake, she promptly burned the page with a match.

At Christmas, Eva produced a couple of invitations to an artists’ party that was being held in a school hall in Charlottenburg. It was a masquerade, a Silvester Ball to celebrate the New Year. There was only one rule: You had to wear a costume and a mask, which you couldn’t remove until midnight.

“Do you want to go?” asked Lilly.

“I don’t know,” replied Hanne.

She lit a cigarette and stared out of the window at the blank white sky as the match burned between her fingers.

“Kurt has forbidden me to go dancing,” she said softly. “So I’ll have to go, won’t I?”

The school hall was decked with garlands of silk flowers, paper snakes, and Chinese lanterns. A woman in a bathing costume played the bugle on the small stage. A jazz band all dressed as satyrs joined in for a bar or two and then broke off to drink wine or polish their instruments. A Spanish dancer was performing on a table. A Napoleon was trying to look up her skirt. On the dance floor, there were a handful of Pierrots in bright red costumes, a couple of Harlequins, a Scaramouche, and a few Columbines. Others were dressed as Chinamen with woolen pigtails, Arabs in turbans, and Negroes with blacked-up faces. Milling around the hall, drinking wine or smoking, were dozens more people in black evening suits. Some were men. Some were women. Some sported a monocle and a starched white shirt. Some wore nothing but the suit.

Lilly wore a black taffeta dress and a small cat mask. Hanne wore a red dress and a bird of paradise mask. Hanne had borrowed them from a friend who worked in a theatrical store. As they crowded through the doorway, a mermaid showered them with confetti.

“May I kiss the brides?” she said. And she kissed them both on the lips.

At that moment the girl in the bathing costume was carried offstage by a clown. The jazz band put down their drinks, stood up, and started to play. Everyone surged toward the dance floor, taking Lilly and Hanne with them.

“Hold my hand,” shouted Hanne.

“I can’t reach,” Lilly replied. “I’ll come and find you.”

“Not if I find you first,” mouthed Hanne.

And then they were both carried in different directions, passed from one person’s arms to another’s, from one embrace to the next, as the tempo of the music grew more insistent and the room grew warmer and warmer still.

“You look familiar,” the first of Lilly’s dance partners told her.

Her hair was still golden, her mouth was stained red, and she carried herself as if there was something precious in her breast.

“Are you on the stage?” he asked her.

“I work in films,” she replied.

“I thought I knew you,” he said.

And so the Pierrots, the Columbines, the clowns, and the satyrs tried to match her masked face with a memory they didn’t have. But when they tried to kiss her or pull her into a dark corner, Lilly simply laughed, turned her face, and walked away.

As it approached midnight, some of the garlands were pulled down and worn around necks or over bare breasts. Lilly thought about Ilya, the Russian, and wondered if he was celebrating the New Year in Russia. As another man lunged toward her and she ducked and spun away, her heart struck a short note of regret. People disappear and you never know, that’s the worst of it.

A Marie Antoinette and a Turkish dancer were sitting on the corner of the stage, sniffing cocaine through a rolled-up banknote. Heavy rain began to pound the skylight above. The roof leaked and water started to cascade down onto the dance floor. The air was blurred with alcohol and smoke. All the windows had steamed up. Nobody could tell if their partner’s smudged kohl and lipstick were caused by rain or sweat or kissing another or by a mixture of all three.

After searching all over the hall, Lilly spotted Hanne in a clinch with someone in a black evening suit. A gong sounded: it was midnight. Everyone cheered.

“Lights off, masks off!” they all shouted. “Lights off, masks off!”

The room was pitched into sudden black as all the lights were switched off. In the dark, a man pushed past Lilly and the rough fabric of his jacket chafed her bare shoulder. And then she heard the unmistakable sound of a gun being cocked.

The crowd started to chant, five, four, three, two, one, and suddenly the lights were switched on again, brighter, much brighter than they had seemed before. And there was Kurt, standing in front of Hanne, Hanne who had her arms around the person in the suit, a person who still wore a mask. Kurt took a step forward and ripped it off. It was Eva. Of course. It was Eva.

Kurt was in full uniform. His face was damp from the rain and he swayed a little in his boots, as if they were too big for him. In his hand the pistol seemed to weigh heavily, but still he aimed it at the dyke in black. A woman screamed. A man told her to shut up. The room fell silent. But then into that silence came the most shocking sound of all. Eva’s shoulders started to shake, and she started to laugh. In seconds, the rest of the room joined in. It was a joke, obviously. The gun was a fake, the soldier an actor. They laughed until they couldn’t stand straight, until they wet their pants or got a stitch. They laughed at the actor with the mutilated hand (poor sod), they laughed at the government, they laughed at Germany himself, cuckolded by a woman. Kurt stared at Hanne. She did not raise her eyes to meet his. And then her mouth began to twitch, and although it seemed as if she could not help herself, the first inklings of amusement began to tug at the corners of her lips. As soon as he saw it, Kurt spun round; his shoulders hunched and his disfigured hand dragged across his face, wiping away the rain and the mucus and the tears. And then he seemed to collect himself; he pointed his pistol at the floor and fired once.