The Glimmer Palace (38 page)

The Inflation

T
he manager of the Ufa-Palast am Zoo stands on the lip of the front stairs and rocks back and forth. From here he can see that the queue stretches all the way to the station. “I’m sorry, we’re full. I’m sorry, we’re full.” He has two thousand seats and all have been sold out at three daily film screenings for more than a month. Berlin may be hungry, but an appetite for the kinky or exotic or scary is stronger. “I’m sorry, madam, we’re full.”

The houselights lower, the audience settles, the curtains part, and Lupu Pick’s
Shattered
starts to roll.

It’s winter; the snow is falling gently in the middle of a darkening forest. Werner Krauss is a railroad trackwalker who lives in isolated monochrome with his wife and daughter. When a railway inspector arrives out of a blizzard, everything goes haywire. First the poor daughter is seduced and then spurned, and then the heartbroken mother freezes to death. Finally the railroad worker avenges the family honor by strangling the inspector. In the last and final scene he walks along the tracks and stops the express train. His lamp radiates a brilliant, hand-tinted red.The snow, the air, the night turn crimson. He climbs aboard the train and speaks his only line: “I am a murderer.”

As the train speeds away from the dark forest still iced with snow, the
audience, as one, lets out a sigh of satiation. What a trick, what an effect. A film with color, ingenious.

Lilly spent every night with Ilya, often lying awake until the dawn broke, talking, kissing, making love, unwilling to let sleep steal even a single moment. It was as if she could suddenly speak another tongue, a language of murmurs and moans and kisses that had been there in her heart all along but was incomprehensible until she met him.

“I’m so happy,” she whispered more than once.

And he would reply with a kiss or a sigh or a caress.

I am weak, Ilya thought to himself as he lay beside Lilly. But the guilt that he felt always passed like a shadow. All he had to remember Katya by was a framed studio photograph. But when he looked at it, he found that her strong features and posed expression seemed to belong to another era, to another life he barely remembered living. Maybe she had fallen in love with another man? Maybe she had forgotten him? Maybe she was dead? He had taken her photograph down from his wall, but he found he could not throw it away.

Lilly went back to the boardinghouse only to fetch clean clothes or pay the rent. She didn’t want to meet Eva; the situation was an almost exact reversal of what had happened with Stefan. She had been Eva’s deceiver and she had subsequently been deceived. But it was more than that: she knew that she loved Ilya in a way she had never been able to love Stefan.The brief courtship, the marriage, the wedding night had seemed in retrospect to be nothing more than a charade played out by children. And in her head Stefan would always be more boy than man as he rode, with lance carried aloft, into the hail of bullets that killed him.

Hanne, however, didn’t invite Eva back to the boardinghouse. They went to clubs or wealthy friends’ apartments or, if neither was open or available, to seedy bars in West Berlin. Eva’s invitation to move into an apartment together was rarely mentioned, and her small gifts had dwindled to almost nothing apart from the occasional bar of chocolate or pair of stockings. When Hanne finally brought it up, Eva admitted she had already sold her mother’s jewels. She had no funds to speak of; in fact, she didn’t have enough for a glass of wine, let alone a bottle. And then she laughed until her eyes watered and her side stitched.

“You still love me, don’t you?” she asked Hanne when she had recovered her breath.

But Hanne, her face stony, did not reply.

Eva Mauritz’s political convictions had waned since the heady days of the Spartacists’ uprising.The revolution on a Russian scale had not happened.The leaders of the party had been murdered in police custody, their bodies unceremoniously dumped.The city seemed to have absorbed the dissent and then quickly forgotten it, with only the pockmarks of bullet holes on streets such as Karlstrasse to show there had ever been any conflict at all.

She had returned to the apartment in Steglitz but found it occupied by a group of refugees from Galicia. She would claim that she was a Communist and therefore was bidden to share what she had, but when faced with the reality of shared ownership she changed her mind and asked them to leave many times over. They refused, and so she chucked an old woman out of her room and slept there, only venturing into the kitchen for hot water. Apart from the bare floorboards, the iron bedsteads, and the few pieces of furniture that were yet to be burned, there wasn’t much left in her uncle’s flat anyway. The paintings once so loathed by Stefan, the typewriter on which Lilly had learned to type, the hand-stitched clothes, and the soap from France were all gone, all stolen by a member of the Freikorps who broke into the apartment by smashing the lock on the pretext of looking for Communists, or Kozzis, as they were known.

Eva had not seen her younger brother for more than two years. In the devastation of their flat, however, she had salvaged a single, posed photograph of both of them, aged nineteen and seventeen. And when she was feeling depressed or overwhelmed or rejected, she would look at it and weep. And so when Hanne Schmidt, her lover, her adored muse, her darling girl, did not return her devotions, her mind was drawn back to that image of her brother. He had loved her, she was sure of it.

At that point Stefan Mauritz was living in lodgings near the An-halter train station. He had enough money in the bank to live on without working. If it was fair, he walked the city’s parks. If it was cold, he would buy a cinema ticket and spend the whole day snoozing and watching the same film sometimes four or five times over.

One day he fell asleep in a matinee screening of a film he had not noticed the title of. He woke with a start and there she was, her face the size of a shop window, her eyes as large as the moon: Lilly, his wife. And his heart soared and then dived as he suddenly remembered. He touched his face and felt his changed physiognomy, so alien to him still. And then he thought about Eva, his sister, and he started to bang the armrest over and over with so much force that the couple behind him moved to another row.

Hanne dropped Eva in March 1921. After they had made love in the women’s washroom in a tiny bar on Friedrichstrasse, she pulled down her skirt and fixed her hair as Eva pawed her body, wanting more.

“Good-bye, Eva,” Hanne said as she unlocked the door. “It’s over. I don’t want to see you again.”

“What are you talking about?” said Eva. “Come back.”

But Hanne would not.

“Very well,” she said. “Are you going to tell me why?”

“The truth? You disgust me.”

Eva stared at Hanne, her mouth slightly open. And then she regained her poise.

“Me, I disgust you?” Eva said. “You are nothing, no one, worthless. You’ve got the street written all over your face. You’re cheap, the cheapest I’ve ever had. Good luck, Hanne. But let me tell you something:you won’t even get more than a few marks out there. All those dreams of being an actress. Take a look in the mirror. You look haggard, used up, old.”

Hanne did not listen anymore. She walked out of the bar, her face blazing and her knees noticeably shaking. She should have expected it. She shouldn’t let herself care. But still her throat thickened and she had trouble breathing. And without warning his name came into her head again. She hailed a cab and without even a moment’s hesitation asked the driver to go to the barracks of the Freikorps.

Eva was shocked at herself. What was happening to her? Where was her private-school demeanor and well-read charm? The bar was full of young men with hungry eyes. She chose one and bought him a drink. And then she sat and talked until closing time about poetry and opera, about art and politics, until he grabbed her thigh and told her he’d do anything for the price of a loaf.

Lilly had come to collect the last of her things from the boardinghouse. The studio had insisted she move immediately to the Hotel Adlon, to a part of Berlin where their drivers didn’t get their cars scratched and their headlights stolen every time they came to pick her up. She had packed a couple of suitcases, written a note to Hanne telling her that she had paid the rent up front for the next six months, and propped it up on the shelf above the sink. As she took one more look around the rooms, however, the door swung open and Hanne stood swaying, half in, half out of the door. Blood was smeared all over her face.

“You’re here,” said Hanne. “I’m so glad you’re here.”

“Hanne!” Lilly said. “What happened?”

Hanne said she had tripped and fallen down the U-Bahn stairs. She said that the stairs were wet and she would make a formal complaint, but with such little conviction that it was clear that none of it was true. Her stockings were ripped at the knees and there was a deep gash in her head. Her face, for so long kept composed, finally began to fold.

“My only pair of stockings,” Hanne said. “To think I wasted my only pair of stockings.”

“I’ll buy you more,” Lilly whispered. “They’re only stockings.”

But Hanne couldn’t be comforted, and she cried without inhibition for the stockings that could never be mended and for Eva’s insults that could never be taken back, and mostly for the man who could not forgive her and was so filled with hurt that he had held her with his good hand and punched her with his bad.

When Hanne’s sobs eventually subsided, Lilly washed her cuts and dressed them. Hanne let herself be told what to do, be cared for like a wayward child, be mothered. Later, Hanne lay on the divan and Lilly tucked her in under a blanket.

“This place feels like the only safe place in the whole of Berlin,” Hanne said.

Lilly stroked her hair. Hanne’s forehead, she suddenly noticed, was lined, her eyes had started to drag at the corners, and the whites were yellow.

“Go to sleep,” Lilly whispered.

“You always were my only real friend—you know that, don’t you? Nothing’s changed, has it?”

Lilly shook her head. “Nothing’s changed.”

Hanne sighed and closed her eyes. In a matter of minutes she was asleep. But it wasn’t true: everything had changed, the world had turned, the stars had shifted.

The next morning Hanne was sober and silent. At eight-thirty there was a knock at the door. Hanne opened it. Outside was a porter from the Adlon.

“Hanne . . .” Lilly started. “The studio . . .”

Hanne glanced round the rooms. It was only then that she noticed the suitcases. She inhaled sharply.

“Just until I find a place of my own,” Lilly added. “I can afford to buy somewhere now. For both of us.”

As the porter picked up the suitcases, another man appeared at the door, a driver.

“There’s a car waiting, ma’am,” he said.

“You’d better go,” Hanne told Lilly.

“We’ll talk later,” Lilly said as she pulled on her coat. “You’ll come with me, won’t you?”

Hanne smiled but she did not answer.

Lilly moved into a suite of rooms at the Adlon that evening. Although the beds were turned down every night, there was room service twenty-four hours a day, and all her laundry would be washed and ironed twice a week, Hanne refused to stay there. She said she hated the place; she claimed she was regularly accused of soliciting as she walked through the foyer. And so Lilly offered to pay her rent instead, but she would not accept it.

“I can earn my own money,” she said.

“But you’ll be all right?” Lilly asked.

“Of course I will,” replied Hanne. “I can look after myself. I always have, haven’t I?”

That morning Lilly started filming a script set in the Arabian desert. Several tons of sand had been shifted into one of the new studios, a silk tent had been erected, and a series of flats had been painted, trompe l’oeil, to look like a vast and endless wilderness. It was all lit with a mixture of natural light and electric. The scenario was simple: An English explorer falls in love with an Arabian princess, played by Lilly. Ilya would have been able to wrap it up in a few hours had it not been for the fact that the actor, who had come from the stage, insisted on detailed notes on backstory and motivation.

“Love can’t be that complicated,” Lilly laughed. “Can it?”

Ilya had not replied.

It was midnight. Ilya, beautiful Ilya, with his long eyes and his skin as smooth as water, was lying on his bed completely naked, completely open. But sometimes she still sensed a hint of his old reticence.Was he hiding something from her? The thought filled her with panic. All the people she loved—her parents, Sister August, Hanne, Stefan—had left her, and only one had ever come back. Maybe, the thought suddenly occurred, he didn’t love her as much as she loved him. Maybe she would wake up one morning and he would be gone too.

“Ilya,” she said. “Wake up.”

His eyes were closed and his arms were around her waist. He moved closer to her so he could kiss her neck, her ear, her mouth.

“I want to marry you,” she whispered. Ilya pulled back, opened his eyes, and looked at Lilly with a frown.

“What did you say?” he asked.

“Why not?” Lilly said. “If you have any reason why these two people might not be joined in holy matrimony . . .”

Her voice trailed off.

“I didn’t have a family, I didn’t have a childhood, nothing good ever happened to me until I met you.”

“Lillushka,” he said, “it’s late. Can we talk about it some other time? We both have to work in the morning.”

“No,” Lilly said. “Let’s talk about it now.”

“Always so impatient,” he said.

Ilya kissed her gently, pulled the blankets around him, and even as she watched him fell asleep.

But Ilya didn’t sleep. Although his eyes were closed and his body was still, he lay awake until dawn.What have I done? he asked himself over and over.What have I done?

The next morning the phone rang once, twice, three times before Ilya answered it. It was Hanne. She wanted Lilly to meet her immediately for coffee in the Josty.