The Glimmer Palace (3 page)

Later, all she could remember about her illness were the upside-down clouds that raced across a clean blue sky, the smell of damp cotton sheets, the sharp tang of lemons, and the sweetness of her own sick breath. It was here, however, that she started to suspect that the specters of her parents might never become fully realized again after all. If so, why hadn’t they come when she cried for them? Where were their cigar-scented kisses and long-fingered, perfumed hands when she had needed them the most?

“What’s an orphan?” she asked the nurse one day.

The nurse, a woman who had six children of her own and was unshakably unsentimental, explained.

“Am I one?” she asked.

The nurse pretended not to hear the question. That was answer enough.

When she was completely well again, Tiny Lil, as the nurse had named her, was led back to the dormitory and given a cot at the very end of the room, opposite the bathroom.

“Your friends will be glad to have you back,” said the nurse with a pat.

She smiled and hoped it was so. But Tiny Lil did not have any friends. The other three-year-olds glanced at her with a mixture of schadenfreude and contempt. Who could forget the bear-snatching incident? And rumors about her lemonade habit had spread. Besides, everyone had a best friend—or the next best thing, a brother or a sister—already.

Tiny Lil lacked a partner for the compulsory two-by-two crocodile formation, she had no one to play with when the weather was fine, and she sat facing a wall at mealtimes. And so she spent much of her time alone or, if she was especially unlucky, paired up with a couple to make a threesome.

The thick black pipes rattled and gulped along the dormitory walls as she listened to one of the twins pretend to read the single book all three had been issued before bedtime.

“May I have a look?” she asked in her nicest voice.

“The Virgin Mary came to me in a vision and said only good girls are allowed to read the book,” said Isa, the twin with the book on her lap.

“You’re going to come to a bad end,” said Ava, the other twin. “Everybody says so.”

The first blow hit Isa smack on the nose; the second caught Ava across the cheek. Tiny Lil had both eyes screwed shut, was holding one thick blond plait from each twin in each hand, and was pulling as hard as she could when her fists were prised open by the nurse.

“That’s no way to behave,” the nurse said.

She opened her eyes. The twins were red-faced and yelling. The book was lying facedown on the floor.The nurse, with her cold hands and her soapy smell, was kneeling down in front of her, so close that the thought occurred to Tiny Lil that the rise and fall of the nurse’s soft padded breast was the perfect place to lay her head, if only for a moment. The nurse, as if suddenly aware of what Tiny Lil was thinking, took her by both shoulders and shook her.

“If you ever do that again,” she said, “I’ll have to report it. Understand?”

Tiny Lil gulped a mouthful of air and leaned into the nurse’s grip, willing her to not let go, not yet.The nurse stood up and clapped her hands.

“Lights out. And stop making such a racket,” she told the twins.

Tiny Lil’s shoulder’s still felt aglow long after the nurse had strode out of the dormitory and switched off the lights. In the dark, the twins whispered their grievances to each other; three beds down, a girl climbed into bed with her elder sister; in the far corner, two teenagers sat up and shared a cigarette. And slowly the glow began to fade. Eventually, the “smokes” were stubbed out and the chatter stopped, but Tiny Lil couldn’t sleep. By the time that the birds started to sing and the room lightened, she had a plan. She would pair herself with the only other female in the building who did not have a partner: the other new arrival, the nun, the tall one.

Sister August, real name Lotte von Kismet, was six-foot-two and had been so since she was fourteen. Socially marooned by her height and consequently rendered invisible to the opposite sex, her long limbs and large feet were invariably too big for the styles her mother had once ordered from Paris, no matter how many times they were altered.

“She looks like a man dressed up,” her father had carelessly commented when he thought she was out of earshot.

Despite the fact that her skin was perfect, her face finely drawn, and her eyes the color of bluebells, Lotte’s heart had been broken more than once by young men who simply failed to notice her. She began to believe that she was sexless, unfeminine, inelegant, and that she would never produce any children of her own. It wasn’t just her own experience; several maiden aunts of a similar height had spent their lives stooping or permanently sitting down, dressed up in altered clothes, waiting.

When she reached the age of eighteen and despite the fact that she had been brought up as a Protestant, Lotte was struck by the certainty that she must become a Catholic nun. Looking back, she guessed it was partly an act of revenge against her father, a military adviser to the kaiser, who regarded Catholicism as an enemy of the empire. Against her family’s wishes and after having learned, by letter, that she would inherit nothing, Lotte was admitted into the Sisters of St. Henry, an order based in Munich, whose mission included sheltering disgraced women and abandoned orphans.

It was a huge relief to take off her corset, throw away her stockings, and put on the novice’s white shift. She wore men’s shoes, which were comfortable and flat. She tucked her hair into her wimple and, because she wasn’t obliged to twist it painfully in rags, slept well for the first time since childhood. And when she took her vows, she didn’t feel subjugated but liberated.

After ten years in the convent office, stamping papers and stuffing envelopes, Lotte had been posted to Berlin. She started on the first day of spring, 1904, at the St. Francis Xavier Home for Orphaned Children. Before she arrived, she had visualized the institution situated in a leafy suburb. She had half imagined herself surrounded by an adoring crowd of pretty blond children, a ministering angel in a starched white apron. As she approached the blackened building with its gloomy wooden door and filthy glass, however, a dead swallow plummeted onto the gravel in front of her. A window on the third floor was wide open. Coming from inside, she could hear the sounds of adolescent laughter and the ping of rubber stretched and then released.

“You!” shouted Sister August as soon as a boy appeared at the window, even though she was not entirely sure that he was the one who had fired the makeshift catapult and killed the bird. “I want you down here—now!”

There was something in the tone of her voice, maybe directly inherited from her father, that demanded obedience. In under a minute the boy was there, with his head bowed and his cap in his hands. He was about eight, with huge ears that glowed red in the light and a ring of grime on his neck.

“I want you to bury this bird,” she said. “And then I want you to find out everything you can about swallows and come and tell me.”

The boy looked up at her in amazement.

“You mean you don’t want me to say one hundred Hail Marys?” he muttered.

“Not today,” she replied. “But first I want you to have a bath.”

The memory of Sister August’s arrival never left the child who was known as Tiny Lil. From the moment she had hung up her coat, the nun ruled over the orphanage with a bar of green carbolic soap in one hand and a bunch of keys in the other. The nun whose position she had been sent to fill had spent most of her time fretting and scolding in a tone of voice to which nearly all the children had grown deaf; any notions of discipline or hygiene had been systematically unheeded. Food had gone missing on a daily basis from the kitchen, there was never any soap in the bathroom, and anything that was small enough to fit in a pocket rarely remained in the orphanage for long.

Decades later, Tiny Lil could picture Sister August as she presided over bedtime. Scrubbed so clean their faces shone, with their hair combed and their prayers learned by heart, the younger children looked almost too good to be true. Likewise, with the pale northern sun framing her face and turning her eyelashes gold, the nun looked as if she were an actress playing a part.

In reality, as she marched up and down the hall with her key chain swinging and her face set into an expression that revealed that she would rather die than admit defeat, the new nun seemed to have more in common with the real Joan of Arc than the actress Renée Falconetti, who was to play the doe-eyed martyr in the film version in 1928.

Sister August was determined to stand against the complacency of the establishment and do what had never been done before at St. Francis Xavier’s: put the children’s interests first. Thus, to protect her charges from themselves, she introduced communal prayer time, installed locks on every exit and cupboard, and slept with the keys beneath her pillow. God and prayer had their place, she had privately decided, but so did propriety, a clean environment, and a decent diet. With all opportunities and temptations eliminated, the incidents of theft dwindled to almost zero, and the food budget of three hundred marks a month went much further.

And every single pfennig was desperately needed. St. Francis Xavier’s was a holding bay for an ever-increasing number of children who were too old or unruly to be considered for adoption. Infertile couples in search of the child they desired but could not produce did occasionally come in for a look, but they all usually headed over to St. Mary’s Hospital in Alexanderplatz, where the babies were new and untainted by tragedy or neglect.

Located just off the Altonaer Strasse, between the river Spree and the Tiergarten, St. Francis Xavier’s backed right onto the elevated lines of the S-Bahn. Commuters shivered as they thundered past its sooty walls. Occasionally they caught a low-wattage glimpse of children lining up for baths or a meal and vowed to place a couple of coins in the box provided at the gate next time they passed on foot.

Five stories high and built on a swamp, the orphanage was squat and barrel-chested despite its size. Constructed for the purpose by an altruistic factory owner who had nowhere to put all the bastard children of his employees, St. Francis Xavier’s was originally designed for a smaller number of children on a much larger plot of land.

Tiny Lil used to wonder why the garden stopped so abruptly only a few meters from the back of the building. Sometimes she imagined that it would almost be possible to leap from a window, land on a train carriage, climb inside, and be carried off to another life.

The reason for the S-Bahn’s proximity, however, was that in 1878 Otto von Bismarck had given the go-ahead for the elevated railway, which would, he planned, run right across the factory owner’s plot. He offered reasonable compensation and promised that the factory owner’s name would be immortalized forever as a station. By the time the line had been built, however, Bismarck had changed his mind and the factory owner was dead. But his name lived on anyway, as a type of orthopedic corset.

The owner of the underwear factory had been a man of his age and, rather than staffing the orphanage with a motley crew of cleaners, laundry girls, and kitchen maids who might only end up adding to the problem, had installed brand-new appliances such as a sewing machine, an electric stove, and a wooden-tub washing machine.

And they worked—most of the time. No one would ever forget the night when the lights went out and all the fuses were found thrown in the garden. Or the day that the washing machine flooded and it was discovered that it had been filled up with newspaper. Even the electric range with its heavy black plates and greasy knobs wasn’t immune. A series of baked toys was blamed for its tendency to malfunction. And one day Tiny Lil was caught urging Little Franz to climb in with a blanket.

“What would have happened,” Sister August had pointed out, “if cook had switched it on?”

“He might have warmed up a little,” she had replied.

Tiny Lil spent much of her first year at the orphanage sitting in a chair in silence as punishment for bad behavior. She ate hundreds of meals alone in the dark and had been beaten more than once with a leather slipper by the director. At night, as the light from the carriages of the elevated train, next stop Bellevue, lit up her face in flickering strips, Tiny Lil kicked off her blankets, shoved away her pillow, and lay shivering in the cold. Soon Sister August will come, she told herself; soon she’ll come and find me dead. And then she’ll be sorry. She didn’t know it but she had inherited her father’s temper and her mother’s impulsiveness. Neither, however, had been subjected to the severity of Sister August’s regime.

If the nun ever came and checked up on her, however,Tiny Lil was never awake to witness it. And if her blankets were tucked in the next morning and the pillow wedged firmly underneath her head, she never suspected that it was anyone other than her own sleepy self who had remade the bed and doubled up the layers to ward off the night chill.

It took some time but she learned that insubordination did nothing to further her relationship with Sister August. The tall nun’s eyes would not meet hers or see the tears they spilled, and her voice contained no pity as she administered a series of increasingly severe punitive measures. And even when Tiny Lil had a fever and claimed she might not last the night, Sister August would do nothing more than place her hand upon her brow and say, “You’ll either die or get better.” It was always the latter. No one had died since she had arrived. The only way, Tiny Lil soon realized, was the one of least resistance, of compliance.

Eventually, the doctor from long ago was proven right: a firm hand and a hard bed had the desired effect. Tiny Lil became an ideal orphan, silent unless spoken to, polite and pious. She learned to read and studied the Bible in bed every night, could quote any rule when required, was never late for Mass, and—although she was not always meticulous about changing her pinafore—prayed so often for forgiveness that her soul, to outside eyes at least, was regularly laundered.

In the moments before the nun ushered the children into their beds, as the cold northern wind shook the glazing and the rain beat against trees, Sister August would let her hand rest just for an instant on each little head.