The Glimmer Palace (12 page)

“But I did,” he replied. “And you did too. For a second or two, anyway. But it’s harder for a girl.You have to pick a man, Tiny Lil, a rich one, who’ll support you. Tell him that both your parents died in an automobile accident and that you were swindled out of your inheritance by a wicked uncle . . . something like that.You could do it. If you believe it, they will.”

“I don’t think so,” Lilly said.

“They’ll want to hear it, Lilly.With a pretty face like yours, they’ll want to believe it.”

Otto watched as Tiny Lil blushed, the color spreading upward from her neck until it reached the tips of her ears. She had certainly turned out well, he thought suddenly. But when she felt his eyes on her, she glanced up at him with such a piercing look that for an instant he was sure she could penetrate his thoughts and he felt his own face begin to flush.

He pulled a bent cigarette from his pocket and placed it in his mouth.

“In years to come, when you’re some baroness with a house by a lake,” Otto continued, “you’ll thank me. You will, you’ll thank me. Lilly, you don’t want to end up on a street corner.You’ve seen those girls, the ones who wear the lipstick and the high heels when they’ve barely lost their milk teeth.”

He struck a match and sucked in the flame. And then he told her what had happened to him since he left the orphanage. First, how he went to work in the underwear factory and then, after a year of military service, how he had found a position in the railways through one of his captains. It was a good job, he said. He checked the rolling stock. And then, in great detail, he explained the science of locomotion with diagrams scribbled down with the stub of a pencil on the margin of the previous day’s newspaper.

“One day,” he said, “I’m going to drive the royal train.” His nails were rimmed with engine grease. His mouth was full of the taste of journeys he had yet to make.

Lilly inhaled the alcohol that evaporated from her glass and let the warmth spread across her chest. The royal train. She had not even known there was such a thing.

“How is Sister August?” he asked.

“She left,” Lilly replied.

“Of course she did,” Otto said. “We rip up our pasts and move on. This is the modern age.”

Otto had grown. His shoulders were broader; his feet were bigger. He was much taller, the product of a late growth spurt at seventeen. His face had lengthened and his chin was blurred with short fair prickles. As Lilly looked at him, she tried to see the baby who had been left on the doorstep in a milk crate, or the boy with a shaved head and patched boots who used to jump over the orphanage wall and disappear into the city for a few hours. But they were gone. Otto was now a young railway man with the kind of easy smile that prompted many a female passenger on the steam trains to Paris or Rome or Calais to pause before they boarded and wonder if their destination was the right one after all.

For a while neither of them spoke. It was already evening and the tavern was full of people. In the corner, a man was playing an accordion and a few couples had started dancing. Lilly had been to better taverns than this one, taverns with piano players and stained-glass booths where ladies drank Goldwasser from Danzig and smoked tiny dark brown cigars. But she had never actually sat down in one before.

“Shall we dance?” she asked. “Are we allowed?”

Otto laughed, a big, open laugh that came from the waist up.

“Of course it’s allowed,” he said. “This is Berlin, the capital of the world.”

He took her hand and she stood up. Beneath her coat, she was wearing one of the gray cotton orphanage dresses. Noting her hesitation, Otto turned to a young girl who had just come in from the cold with an armful of roses, bought one, and pinned it to Lilly’s chest. It was a pink dog rose, uncultivated, wild.

“Now you can take off your coat,” he said.

As thick-waisted women laid their heads on the threadbare shoulders of thin old men, as drunken whores swirled their clients round before consummating their transactions in the shabby rooms upstairs, Otto and Lilly danced, if you could call it that. The whole of her hand was not much bigger than the size of his palm.The top of her head barely reached the bottom of his chin. And when she stepped on his toes or turned the wrong way, Otto laughed.When he backed into another dancer or led her into the corner, she laughed. And when they spun too fast and Lilly’s face accidentally brushed the cotton of Otto’s shirt, he leaned down and kissed her.

“Tiny Lil,” he said. “What a surprise.”

When they noticed the time, it was after two in the morning. The tavern was closing and the barmaid was sweeping the floor.The door had been wedged open with a brick and an icy draft raced around the room.

“I think the last streetcar left at eleven,” Otto said. “And won’t the gate be locked?”

“I climb over the wall like you used to do,” said Lilly. “If you could just point me in the right direction . . .”

They both glanced through the open door at the darkened street. Lilly shivered.

“Why not stay with me,” Otto said. “In fact, I insist you stay with me. I live very close.”

Otto held her by the hand. Her head was full of wine.Was it such a bad idea?

“I have to go to work in five hours anyway,” he said. “I’ll sleep on the floor. I’d worry about you all night if you didn’t.”

Otto boarded with a widow who lived in a four-room apartment on the top floor of a five-story building on Dragonstrasse.They crept into the parlor and, as Otto instructed her, carefully stepped around the Turkish rug. You weren’t, he whispered, allowed to step on it because you might wear it out. He led her up a narrow flight of stairs to a tiny, low-ceilinged attic room with a window that looked out across East Berlin.There was a single bed made up with a green blanket, a rickety wicker wardrobe, and a washstand with a cheap metal bowl and pail. The only evidence that Otto actually lived there at all was a set of tools in a leather holder on the floor and a pile of books on the table.

They sat side by side on the bed under the bare electric bulb with their coats on. Then Otto pulled down a box of chocolate cherries from the top of the wardrobe.

“My landlady gave them to me,” he whispered. “She went to see an American moving picture with a man she met on the S-Bahn. He gave her these chocolates and led her to the back row. She excused herself to the powder room before the film had even started.”

“And left?” said Lilly. “An American moving picture? But why?”

Otto smiled but didn’t explain.

“Take one,” he said. “Go on.”

The warmth of their breath and the heat from the bare lightbulb slowly began to thaw the ice that covered the glass on the inside of the windowpane. Otto’s knee absentmindedly bumped hers as he tapped out the military tune that he’d heard that afternoon. Lilly unwrapped a chocolate. She bit through the hard, dark coating and cherry brandy exploded into her mouth.

“Good?” he asked.

Lilly couldn’t speak, her mouth was so full of alcoholic sweetness. She nodded. Otto was staring at her lips, her nose, her eyes. She swallowed.

“What?” she said.

They both heard the creak of bare feet on the stairs. Otto leapt to his feet and instinctively pushed his hand through his hair. A trickle of cherry syrup fell from the corner of Lilly’s mouth. The door opened and a woman in a red silk Chinese dressing gown stood in the doorway.

“Visitors, Otto?” she said.

In 1912, Olivia Licht was forty-two. At that time she had thick black hair piled up on the top of her head above her heavy-lidded eyes. Her smell coiled around her and was instantly recognizable— essence of lavender, which she sprinkled on her laundry, cold cream, and something metallic like old coins kept in a box. Although her features, taken individually, were even, her face gave the impression that too much pressure had been used, perhaps, in its making.

Maybe it was a direct result of her occupation. A doctor’s widow turned abortionist by trade, she made a good income with a contraption that she claimed had been manufactured in Paris by a Viennese specialist.

“Frau Licht,” Otto said with a bow. “May I introduce my friend?”

“It’s past midnight. And this is neither the time,” Olivia Licht replied, “or, more important, the place!”

Lilly stood up.

“Actually,” she said, “I have to go now anyway.”

Olivia Licht took in the girl with the sticky mouth and the coat two sizes too small. She was only a little surprised that she still had it on.

“You see, he’s not allowed. It’s a rule. I’m so sorry, my dear. But we don’t want you getting into trouble.”

“Frau Licht,” began Otto, “she missed the last streetcar. And the snow . . .”

Olivia Licht placed a pale hand on Otto’s arm. Lilly saw the way her hand lingered. She saw the way that Olivia Licht gazed up at her lodger.

“Such a kind boy, always thinking of others,” she whispered. “But sometimes kind acts can lead to unkind consequences.”

Lilly suddenly felt very sober. She pulled herself up to her full height, which wasn’t very tall. Otto shrugged and let out a short, mirthless guffaw. It was a reaction neither woman expected.

“I know the way,” said Lilly.

She fiddled with her coat buttons and adjusted her boots. The moment seemed to stretch. Come on, thought Lilly, say something. Finally, as she was stepping down the stairs, Otto called after her.

“Wait,Tiny Lil,” he said. “I’ll walk with you to the corner.”

Lilly protested, but Olivia Licht protested louder. She pointed out that he might be late for work, fall asleep on the job, and get the sack.

“I give you a special rate,” she whispered. “But if you can’t pay the rent, you know I’ll have to lose you.”

The landlady reached out her arm and her robe fell open, very slightly, revealing the long white slope of her breast. Lilly saw Otto’s eyes slide down. But he already knew what was beneath the red silk. She knew he already knew.

“We had an agreement,” she whispered.

Lilly coughed. Otto turned.

“Well, if you insist,” said Lilly, “then I will accept.”

Otto smiled his broad, generous smile and buttoned his greatcoat.

“Won’t be long,” he said.

The clouds above the snowed-up city were a hazy pink. A chemical plant several miles away was pumping out black smoke and the air was heavy with the taste of sulfur. And yet the streets of Berlin were all white, whiter and cleaner than either of them had ever seen them before. By morning they would already be trampled and soiled, the snow pockmarked with thaw and a dusting of soot. But for the moment everything was pristine. Otto walked her to the first corner, and the second and the third, until he decided he might as well walk her all the way home.

“What are you doing living in a place like that?” Lilly teased.

“It’s cheap,” Otto replied. “And she’s not so bad . . . once you get to know her.”

“She’s a dragon,” Lilly whispered. “A monster, an ogress, a witch in a wig.”

“It’s not a wig,” Otto said.

They passed a couple kissing against a wooden fence, their arms and legs, hands and faces struggling, grabbing, pushing, and rubbing. They passed a group of old men and an elderly prostitute huddled round a fire on a construction site. They were taking it in turns to warm their hands between her thighs.They passed a man pulling four children behind him on a sledge.The children wore no shoes.

“Come on,” Otto said, and, reaching back, he took her hand. “Let’s skate.”

Otto and Lilly ran and skidded, ran and skidded along the road on the thin strip of packed snow and ice where the automobiles and droshkies had driven. Every so often they heard a car approaching and jumped aside to avoid being hit by the arc of dirty snow that flew from the wheels.

A taxicab drove by. Inside, they glimpsed a lady in pale blue and a man in topcoat and tails. They were arguing loudly. At the end of the street, just as the cab turned the corner, a shower of cards flew out of the window.When they reached the spot, Lilly plucked one from the snow. Otto picked up a couple more from an icy puddle.

“Tingle-tangle cards,” Otto said. “Quite a collection.”

They couldn’t have known it, but the man in the cab was a minor count who was having a scandalous affair with an actress. In the following weeks, he paid a friend to film his lover taking off her clothes. She ran away with the friend, the film fell into the hands of his wife, and he ended up with an alimony problem so severe that he had to go into business. He started to import pornography from France and made a handsome living for around a year until he was caught and imprisoned. But that night, the future was still blank. The film had not been shot, the bromide was still in its brown glass bottle. Nothing had been fixed.

“Can I see?” she asked Otto.

Otto handed her the postcards. On each one, a girl wearing underwear posed against a curtain. Lydia, Colette, Sophia, Masha. Another cab was approaching. Lilly slipped the cards into her pocket and stepped into a doorway.

They reached the orphanage just as the sky was turning milky. Otto scaled the wall, cleared it of snow, and then pulled her up in one swift move.They sat opposite each other on the damp, mossy stone.

“Well, at least I found you,” she said.

“You’ll never find your friend,” he replied. “Promise me you’ll give up or I’ll never take you out and dance with you again.”

He took both of her hands in his. He stared into her face.

“I can’t do it,” she said.

He laughed and shook his head.

“But I’ll teach you,” he said. “I’ll teach you to dance.”

Not dancing but looking for Hanne: he had deliberately missed her meaning. She let it go. On the tracks nearby, the first S-Bahn of the day thundered past, its carriages lit up pale electric yellow in the dawn.

“I should be getting back,” Otto said at last. Suddenly she didn’t want him to leave. She didn’t want him to go back to Olivia Licht. She didn’t want the evening to end.

“Not yet,” she whispered.

She swung her legs over the wall and jumped down into the undergrowth.

“I am the Queen of Sheba,” she said. “And I order you to come here.”