The Glimmer Palace (29 page)

He could hear their whispers and the click of their guns. He could smell their fear, their sweat, even the oil they used on their rifles. He picked one, a small man with a strange loping shuffle, and set him in his sights. And then he saw that the soldier’s uniform was faintly steaming. He happened to glance down and realized that his own uniform was doing the same. The sun was drying out the rain, the mud, the recent past; they were the same, weren’t they? He knew he should shoot, he should pull the trigger when he had the chance. Instead he started to pull off his uniform, his identity tag, his helmet.

Stefan heard the whistle of the bullets in the air, but he had no idea what they could be. He woke up in a hospital in Strasbourg. Six months later he was transferred to Mainz in Germany. He had been hit in the face. His nose was smashed, his cheekbone was shattered, and he had a hole below his left eye. It took him months to summon up the courage to look in the mirror, and when he did he did not recognize himself. His face had become distorted, stretched, bent. Only his eyes—still startlingly blue, still clear as clean water—suggested what he once could have been.

Lilly, however, had been right: the personal effects were not his. In the carnage that had followed the British assault, most of the men in his trench had been killed. His identity tag was found in the mud and attributed to a mutilated corpse. It was only months later, when he could open his mouth wide enough to speak, that he could confirm his identity. He was discharged in May 1918, officially unfit for duty.

“I’m so proud of you,” Eva cooed. “My brother. A hero.”

Stefan didn’t say a word at the station or on the journey back to Steglitz with Eva in a taxi. He knew he had done nothing heroic. He had been a coward from the first moment he had heard the beat of the bombs. And yet he didn’t contradict her. In fact, only when it was clear that the apartment was empty and there was no evidence of the wife he had left behind did he finally speak.

“Where is she?” he asked. “Where’s Lilly?”

Eva took his hand in hers. She took a deep breath and then finally looked up at him.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry. It was the Spanish flu.”

Tears welled up in Stefan’s eyes and rolled down over his broken face. He had rehearsed dozens of possible bad outcomes—that she might not want him looking how he did, that she had found another man, that she had fallen out of love with him—but not this one.

“You still have me,” said Eva. “I’m here.”

But Stefan barely heard or saw her as he stumbled toward his room. How could it be true; how could his beautiful Lilly be no more; how could God have made him live through so much pain only to hit him now with a far worse torment? He eased off his wedding ring, the ring he had fingered and spun for so many months, and left it lying on the hall table. n Rixdorf, Gudrun sipped the coffee in silence. Hanne opened her

bag and pulled out a leather pouch of tobacco and some papers. Then she started to roll a tiny cigarette. So, Lilly was a widow. Hanne suspected that it wasn’t unusual anymore. She had heard stories about couples marrying practically on the same day as meeting. People fell in love almost instantly, then swore they would remain faithful and dutiful to total strangers. The proximity of death increased the libido. But how long would these marriages last in peacetime? Maybe Lilly had been lucky: she had lost him before she had the chance to really know him. Or maybe, it suddenly occurred to Hanne, it was she who had been lucky, first found by Lilly’s letter and then reminded of who she used to be. And her face flushed and her hands trembled as she lit her cigarette, as she realized how close she had been to being lost too.

Lilly was woken up at five a.m. Hanne couldn’t stop coughing; she moaned, she yelled, her temples were burning hot. But it was the rattle of her chest that was most frightening.

“I can’t breathe,” she gasped. “Don’t leave me, Lilly.”

Gudrun stared at the young woman lying on her lodger’s bed.The papers had reported that the illness didn’t kill, that the death toll in Germany reported by the foreign press was propaganda. But when she tried to call the doctor from a corner shop, she was told that the lines were down: all the operators were sick.

Hanne seemed a little better later that morning. Her cheeks were still scarlet and her lips had a bluish tinge, but she sat up and drank a cup of water boiled on the stove. Lilly carried Hanne’s bag and slowly they took the steps one by one.The hospital was a short tram journey away.When no trams came, they walked, Lilly’s arm around Hanne’s waist to stop her from falling. Hanne stopped every third step to cough. It took them several hours to walk a mile.

“I’ll pay,” Lilly offered. “Just make her better?”

The hospital had no room for any more patients.The morgue was full. Hanne was given a blanket and a space on the canteen floor. She lay down under the blanket without taking off her clothes, told Lilly to leave her there, and fell asleep. Back in the attic room, Gudrun had developed a fever. She didn’t want a doctor, she insisted. Lilly nursed her with cool washcloths and cups of hot water. Gudrun sometimes called her Karl and wanted to hold her hand. But most of the time she tossed and turned as her head burned and her body sweated.

Hanne, despite developing double pneumonia, recovered. Gudrun died just before dawn three days later.

Lilly did not hurry as she made the journey with a borrowed handcart to the cemetery. She was tired: tired of grief, tired of war, tired of misfortune. And when the striking miners marched past on their way to the Reichstag, she paused and let them wash around her. Only the bare foot that protruded from beneath the blanket gave any hint as to what was beneath it. But nobody wanted to know, nobody wanted to see. The dead were everywhere. Corpses lay piled on the side of the street, black blood oozing from crusted bullet holes. Machine guns rattled overhead and occasionally a figure would fall three or four stories and land with a thud on the cobbles.

That day Lilly’s body seemed to float within her skin as if it had become too large for itself. Her hands seemed huge, her mouth too small. If she hadn’t brought Hanne back to the flat in Rixdorf, would Gudrun have lived? The outbreak of flu had become an epidemic, but Lilly hadn’t so much as sniffled.With every breath she took, her heart felt like a fist. In, out, in, out; it clenched and unclenched itself over and over again.

That morning she had tried to sleep. She couldn’t. She had tried to forget. She couldn’t. She had tried to ignore the insistent roar of the blood in her head, but it was impossible. And so round and round she spun in her bed until eventually she lay immobile, completely enshrouded in a damp sheet of sorrow.

But although it seemed unbearable, intolerable, sometimes nonsensical, life in Berlin went on. On every pillar or boarded-up shop window she passed, a poster posed the question
Who has the prettiest legs in Berlin?
Hundreds of shops had been forced to close, but new cabarets and nightclubs were opening every day.The soldiers and revolutionaries, the troops and bands of workmen had lost their appetite for bread long ago. Their bodies ran on adrenaline and they swelled and ached with fear and sexual frustration in roughly equal measures.

Meanwhile, the German navy had mutinied and returned to port. The strikes spread south from the cities of Kiel, Bremen, and Hamburg. The king of Bavaria had been overthrown and a Socialist Republic of Bavaria had been announced. Even the policemen were handing over their weapons now and joining the demonstrations.

The gates were locked at the munitions factory. When Lilly returned to Gudrun’s room, the landlady was waiting.

“The kaiser has abdicated. I think the war is almost over,” she said. “I need this room for my son.”

Two days later the armistice was signed in a railway carriage in the forest of Compiègne. All fighting ceased. The monarchy was in exile in Holland. In Berlin, on the banked-up seats of the Circus Busch, an assembly elected a new Republican government. Friedrich Ebert, a Social Democrat, was appointed chancellor.

It was almost impossible to find new lodgings: in addition to the returning military, Berlin was filled with Russian refugees—some, it was said, still with their jewels plaited into their hair.You needed pay slips, references, deposits. And so Hanne took a room in a boardinghouse on Motzstrasse near Nollendorfplatz and paid up-front in cash.

It was late afternoon when they climbed to the third floor and unlocked the door. Room 14 was actually two rooms divided by a curtain that smelled of mildew and cigar smoke. On one side were two saggy beds. On the other, a straw-stuffed sofa and a cracked sink with a mirror above it.The rest of the furniture—the tables, the sideboards, and the wardrobes—had been burned as firewood by a previous occupant two winters before. The fireplace had subsequently been boarded up. But there was a gas ring and kettle to brew tea, French windows, and a small balcony that looked out over a chestnut tree.

Lilly suddenly imagined taking rooms like these with Stefan.They would have pushed the beds together, undressed, and lain there for hours in each other’s arms. She could remember the way he held her, she thought she could remember the smell of his body, she could still picture the way he had yawned and stretched on the shore of the lake, but she realized with a jolt that she had forgotten his voice. She tried to hear it again in her head but it was gone. This is how we lose people, Lilly thought: not in one go but gradually. And Lilly understood that she had not only lost Stefan but also the life she could have had with him, a ghostly parallel life of now unattainable happiness.

The midwinter sun lit up the room with a pale blue light. Lilly put her suitcase on one of the beds while Hanne opened all the curtains. Below, another march went by. Across the road a woman was standing in the window, brushing her hair. In the room above, a man paced back and forth holding a telephone.

Lilly had a tiny widow’s pension, and although the hostilities were over, Berlin was on the brink of civil war. What would she do now? How would she survive without a job? As Hanne stood on the balcony and smoked, Lilly had a sudden and vivid memory of Sister August and the way she used to march along the corridors of St. Francis Xavier’s with her keys swinging at her hip. She would rather have died than given up. It was up to Lilly to do the same. And so, as she unpacked her few threadbare dresses, she decided that no matter how hard it would be, she had to make herself forget about Stefan; she would stop grieving for another life.

“I can’t believe the price of this place,” Hanne said as she chucked her cigarette butt into the sink. “It’s such a dump.”

“Tomorrow I’ll try the East,” Lilly said. “I’ve heard there’s still cheap lodgings in the East. And then I’ll try all the factories. But with all the men returning . . .”

“Lilly,” Hanne said. “We can stay here for a while. Don’t worry about it.”

“But I can’t afford it, Hanne,” Lilly said.

Hanne sighed.

“I’ve got something to show you.”

She started to pull everything out of her bag. At the bottom, beneath the underwear and soiled stockings, the cold cream and combs, was a long, flat canvas bag. She threw it into Lilly’s lap.

“Open it,” she said.

Lilly undid the cord and opened the top. It was stuffed with foreign banknotes.

“It’ll last us both,” she said. “At least until we work out what we’re going to do with the rest of our lives.”

Upstairs, a man burst into song. His voice was strong but the tune was unfamiliar. His feet thumped, back and forth. He was dancing. At that very moment the door opened. A man in a white dress shirt without cuff links strode into the room. As soon as he saw Lilly and Hanne, he stopped abruptly. He looked from face to face, taking in the young girls, one blond and one dark, the suitcases, the afternoon light on their faces.

“Room twenty-five?” he asked with a heavy Russian accent.

“No, room fourteen,” the dark girl replied. “Next floor up, I expect?”

“I most humbly and sincerely apologize,” he said with a bow of his head. “You should keep it locked, you know. The door. Ah . . . I see you have a kettle also. I use mine to cook spaghetti, although I’m not sure it is allowed.Well, so nice to be acquainted. Good afternoon.”

And then he turned and marched out again, pulling the door shut with a decisive click.

Lilly and Hanne looked at each other and started to laugh. The man was so formal, so polite, so courteous. Nobody had spoken to either of them like that before. Whether Ilya Yurasov, who had recently arrived from a POW camp, really did mistake the floors of the boardinghouse and barge in uninvited unintentionally is debatable. He was at that point running late for his new job as a piano player in the local cinema, and had returned for his wallet after leaving in a rush. But he had seen the girls earlier in the lobby, one blond girl, one dark, and he was intrigued.

“Be my baby,”
sang the man upstairs.
“You’re the only girl for me.”

Although they could hear other boarders singing, laughing, sobbing, dancing, Lilly and Hanne only very occasionally passed them on the dimly lit stairs. And then they would all, as if by mutual consent, keep their heads down and mutter “Good day” without looking up. Sometimes droves of people stamped up the narrow stairs outside their room for an impromptu party in the room above at four in the morning. And then the girls could expect to be awake until dawn, when the party dispersed two by two into the rush hour.

The rent was collected once a week by a sad-eyed fat girl who would touch their money only with gloves on. There was a price to be paid for anonymity. There was a price to be paid for a blind eye turned. And so they lived from week to week in an establishment that catered to guests whose gains were probably ill-gotten, among people whose skin was the wrong color or whose talents would never be recognized by any professional body or whose papers were not in perfect order. And when the boardinghouse burned down four years later at two on a Sunday morning, nobody perished but the sad-eyed fat girl. Everyone else was working.