The Glimmer Palace (9 page)

She did not notice the two girls that night as they appeared very briefly on the other side of the iron entrance gate and headed toward the city center. She did not catch sight of the basket of pale pink, deep red, and milk-white roses. Night had fallen and she hadn’t turned on the lights. She closed her eyes and would doze fully dressed until waking stiff and cold the next morning at five a.m.

The tingle-tangle was on Oranienburger Strasse. From inside came the braying of laughter and the smell of beer and damp wool. Hanne and Lilly divided the flowers in half.

“Remember, always pick couples, and never men on their own. And don’t bother with women: they never buy anything.”

“What is this place?” Lilly asked. “Have you been here before?”

“My dad used to come here,” Hanne said. “It was his favorite tingle-tangle.”

Lilly watched as Hanne gazed distractedly along the street.

“Aren’t you worried he might be here?” asked Lilly.

Hanne shrugged. She still couldn’t talk about her father. The last time she had seen him, he had punched her in the face. If she saw him again, she would punch him back. She had grown two inches in the last year. She wouldn’t be scared of him anymore. Not that he would even recognize her. Dressed in a shapeless orphanage dress, she felt almost safe, a girl still, even though her girlhood had been stolen two years earlier, when she was ten.

Inside the tingle-tangle, a woman started to sing and some of the chattering momentarily ceased. Lilly breathed in the smell of the night, stale beer, tobacco, men’s sweat, engine grease, and the scorched metal of the tram tracks. The street outside was streaked with color: red, blue, and orange light blurred in the puddles. In the air was the peppery taste of possibility. And hanging above it all, making her giddy, was the soft green scent of the general’s roses.

The bar was lined with men from the construction sites. In the middle of the floor were tables and chairs where courting couples drank hot chocolate or schnapps from tiny blue glasses. Girls dressed in white poplin and stripy stockings flirted with boys wearing braces and dust-covered boots. On a small stage at one end, a woman in a tightly laced dress played the piano. Hanne and Lilly moved quickly round the tables offering pink and white Perpetual Damasks or cream and scarlet Bourbons for fifty pfennigs each.

“Will you kiss me if I buy you one?” said one boy of about seventeen to a girl who wore a hat decorated with a huge silver feather.

“What, kiss a boy from Pappelallee?” she laughed. “What would my father say?”

The boy chose a dark red Bourbon, half closed. He pulled out five coins from his waistcoat pocket and slammed them down on the table. Lilly watched as the girl leaned across the table and kissed him slowly, softly, on the lips. She pulled back, stared into his face, and smiled. With one movement he reached for the seat of her chair and pulled the chair, the girl, the hat, toward him. She barely took a breath before she was encased in his arms, his kiss, the confidence of his adoration. As quietly as she could, Lilly picked up the coins.

At the next table, two girls and a soldier were having an argument. One of the girls stood up and swung a fist at him. Before it hit, the soldier reached up and grabbed her arm.

“Now, now,” he said. “Don’t you know that’s a felony?”

“Let go of me,” the girl cried.

“He was only trying to protect himself!” the other girl shouted. And then the two started to yell at each other instead of him.

The soldier glanced round and saw Lilly with her basket of roses.

“What have we here?” he said. “Flowers for my flowers.”

It was then that Lilly recognized him as one of the soldiers from the garrison. She remembered him perched on the windowsill in the general’s office with his cup of tea. He looked at her long and hard. Lilly stared back. She would deny everything.

“How much for a pink one?” he said at last. “My pretty.”

She picked up a Damask, still wet with night dew.

“Four marks,” she replied.

He pulled a face.

“So, this is no ordinary common or garden rose,” he replied.

“No,” she said. “It’s a Perpetual Damask. Bred by a Frenchman called Nabonnand.”

The soldier looked up. He had thick dark hair and a large mustache. His face was creased with laugh lines and blurred with drink. He pulled out a handful of change and leaned toward her.

“I’m always here on a Tuesday,” he whispered.

She smiled as she handed him the rose. He didn’t remember her after all.The two women were still arguing.

“Better make it two,” he said, and gave her a handful of marks and pfennigs. “And you can keep the change.”

“Thank you,” she replied. “And give the general my best regards.”

The soldier cocked his head to the side.

“Oh,” he said. “So you know the general, do you?” And then he winked.

Lilly handed the money to Hanne in the cool street outside. As she did so, she glanced over her shoulder through the open door of the tavern. And there was the soldier, gazing after her. She gave him a half-smile. He raised his glass. It was almost too easy.

Hanne grabbed her arm and pulled her from the doorway.

“What are you doing?” she said.

“Nothing,” Lilly replied.

Lilly gazed at her friend, her eyes wide with shock. Hanne’s grip was so firm, it hurt.

“I didn’t do anything,” she said. “I charged him a fortune.”

“Never smile at them,” Hanne said. “Never. Don’t let them think of you that way.”

“Why not?” Lilly asked. “What way?”

Hanne Schmidt did not want to tell her about the men she had known, men who had sought out nipples on flat chests and hairless legs in high heels. Grown men who liked little girls.

“Because,” she said emphatically. “Just because. Let’s go.”

The autumn of 1911 was especially hot in Berlin. Although cool forests stretched all the way to the Polish plains, the city baked in its long stone coat and the heat drove people temporarily insane. One man stole an army uniform, rounded up a bunch of soldiers, marched to the town hall, arrested the mayor, and made off with four thousand marks. One woman rode the Ferris wheel at the newly constructed Luna Park before taking all her clothes off and throwing herself naked from the apex.

In the orphanage, half a dozen boys ran away. Their beds were almost immediately filled by some Jewish children whose parents had been killed when the horse-drawn cart they were all traveling in was hit by a train. And then there was another outbreak of lice and all the younger children had to have their heads shaved.

Sister August’s head itched. Her body underneath the thick brown habit ran with perspiration. She watched Lilly and Hanne walk in the shade in the garden. Although they still wore shapeless orphanage dresses, their bodies had been redrawn with the curves and hollows of puberty. Recently they had begun to wrap their arms around their chests and would not strip down to their petticoats like the younger girls. She noticed then that although Hanne had always been aware of her own prettiness, Lilly was not. At ten, she was taut as a rubber band. Her big eyes and sharp little face were always moving, always fluid, and what could be seen as potential insubordination in a child was restless and beautiful in a young woman. They were heading toward the rose garden. Maybe the general had been right after all.

She locked herself in the bathroom and washed her face with cool water. She rarely glanced in the mirror above the sink, but this time she paused and examined her eyes, her mouth, her nose. The skin across her cheekbones was smooth but three thick lines crossed her forehead. Her eyes were clear but the lids were wrinkled. She was thirty-seven. How could she have grown so old?

That morning she had received two letters.The first was from the convent. She was instructed to give up control of St. Francis Xavier’s to a Sister Maria. The second was from her mother. Her father had died very suddenly of a heart attack. Sister August stared in the mirror, looking for any signs of Lotte. But they were gone. He was not her father, she told herself. Her father was in heaven already.

Sister Maria would arrive the very next day. Sister August knew that she had been sent to watch her, to report back, and to detail all her misdemeanors. News had reached the order about the children staging unsuitable plays and being taught by cabaret performers.They had also heard that the orphanage was in receipt of some very strange gifts. But her worst crime, as far as she could tell, was to accept Jews.

All the children, apart from the Jews, attended Mass once a day; on that she could not be faulted. The priest came every Sunday to take a service and spend a couple of hours listening to confessions. And whatever the children told him didn’t seem to upset him unduly.

The children were mostly clean and well fed, and as well as being literate, they knew some German poetry by heart. But despite her rationale, despite her deliberate attempt to be realistic, unsentimental, and practical toward the children, she wondered now if she had failed them, if her approach had not equipped them well for adult-hood at all. And it was at that moment, as the tap dripped and the sound of laughter drifted through the window, that the general’s words came clanging back to her.What did she know of life?

anne kept the rose money in a tobacco tin underneath her mattress. Lilly didn’t mind pooling the takings. After all, it had been Hanne’s idea. The garden had been well planned and provided them with flowers almost all year round. They always started at Bötzow’s beer garden before heading back to the Friedrichstrasse, Oranienburger Tor, and the Unter den Linden. Occasionally they spent some of their money and went to a late-night showing in a cinema. There, in the blue, smoky air, they watched Charlie Chaplin films or Oskar Messter’s newsreels. Men stared at them in the queue for the chocolate kiosk but they never returned their gaze.

That evening the heat of the day still rose from the bricks, the cobblestones, and the painted metal archways of the S-Bahn. It was still light when Hanne and Lilly paused on the top of the wall to let the cool breeze from the river lift their skirts. Many of the roses had been scorched or blown or would start to turn brown the moment they opened. Hanne had cut some rosebuds too early and Lilly knew that they would never flower.

“Maybe we should charge less for the buds,” suggested Lilly.

“Lilly, the men don’t care about the flowers,” Hanne snapped. “Can’t you see that yet?”

Lilly paused before she spoke. Hanne’s moods could change suddenly and unexpectedly.

“Then they should pay more,” Lilly said softly. “Let’s charge them double.”

It was then that they heard the regular tick of a woman’s footsteps approaching. Both girls lay on top of the wall, their faces pressed against the baked stone and dried-out moss, and waited for her to pass.

The woman came round the corner from the direction of the orphanage gate and stopped to adjust her shoe. She wore an old-fashioned, high-collared blouse and a long brown skirt that hovered a few inches above her ankles. Her face was hidden beneath a large straw hat. Finally the shoe was fixed. She stood up, took a deep breath, and continued walking. She was unusually tall.The girls sat up and looked at each other. Even in a different outfit, they could not mistake her. It was Sister August.

They left the roses on top of the wall, dropped down onto the street, and followed the nun in woman’s clothing. She paused at the stone entranceway of the Tiergarten and then went through, walking along the avenue that led to the Grosser Stern in the middle of the park. From there, she headed south toward the zoological gardens.

“She’s going to the Kurfürstendamm,” whispered Lilly.

“I know,” said Hanne.

A tram rolled past them and swerved into the Grosser Stern. It pulled in at a stop and momentarily obscured the tall woman in the large straw hat. And by the time it drew away, she was gone.

“Let’s go back and get the roses,” said Lilly. “Before it gets dark.” hen the man with the brown eyes asked her name, Sister

August told him it was Lotte. He bought her a glass of white wine and she did not stop sipping until she felt the alcohol reach her fingertips, her earlobes, and her wide red lips.

“Do you want to come for a walk?” he asked after her third glass.

They walked back to Zoo and into the Tiergarten. It was now dark and the moonlight turned the leaves of the linden trees pewter. His kiss was urgent and soon his fingers were in her hair, in her mouth, on her buttons, on her bare white breasts. She reached down and lifted her skirt until she felt him push against her, hard and hot.

“Slow down,” she whispered.

He pulled back for a second and they looked at each other. Sister August saw that he was young—much younger, in fact, than she was. Her fingertip rested on the nape of his neck. It was soft, soft as the skin of a child. He shivered and then he smiled.

“You’re a real beauty,” he said. And there, in her civilian clothes, with the moonlight in her hair and the taste of wine and sweat on her skin, she knew she was. When he entered her at last, she was far, far beyond any place she had been before. She was liquid, she was made of light, she was buzzing and blazing as she was pulled to the brink, to the edge of herself.

“Jesus,” he said, and pulled out just in time.

Sister August gasped twice and then finally fell.

The next day Lilly watched Sister August closely to see if there was any outward sign of her transgression. But despite the fact that they had seen her enter the Tiergarten in civilian clothing, she was calmer, much calmer than she had been for months. She even introduced with a smile the new nun who, they discovered at breakfast, was to replace her.

The night before in the park, she had sobbed as she had buttoned up her blouse and straightened her skirt. Lotte, he whispered, what’s wrong? And she had wiped her eyes on his shirt and told him the truth. My father died. My father died.

Sister Maria was middle-aged and sullen. A large brown mole on her nose sprouted thick black hairs and her hands looked red and scalded. She immediately dismissed all the lecturers from the university. Meals became more frugal and portions smaller. One morning they woke to find the Jewish children’s beds stripped and empty.