The Glimmer Palace (17 page)

A Poet’s Soul

H
er name spelled out in yellow bulbs on the façade of the Zoo Palast,her photograph lit up against the darkening westerly skies, her face two stories high on the silver screen. Germany’s favorite star, a blaze of filaments sparking in the dark blue Berlin night.

It doesn’t matter about plot or story or genre. Nobody cares who wrote the script or who told the actors where to stand.The whole world is in love with Henny Porten (and Asta Nielsen and Meg Gehrts) because whatever part she plays—the wife, the lover, the daughter, the queen—she will always be recognizably, unmistakably her.

In the theater and films from not so long ago, there were no actors, only players; no photographs, only programs. But from America came
Motion Picture Story
and
Photoplay
, magazines filled with star portraits and plot synopses, photo opportunities and rated reviews. Here, in feature interviews, exotic pasts and intricate love lives are fabricated for the daughters of tailors or shopkeepers or farmers. Everyone knows it’s all hearsay, gossip, fantasy, made up by publicists, but everyone carries the magazines in pockets and pastes the pictures to walls anyway.

And now Germany’s stars and their public are on first-name terms: Asta
at home, Meg on set, Henny on holiday. But still nothing will ever match a big-screen audience: the darkened cinema a willing foil to the star’s singular light.

The Blue Cat had changed. The door was wedged wide open and the old drapes had been replaced by red velvet swags. Lilly noticed that Hanne’s postcard had been pasted in a brand-new glass-fronted sign along with three other female “artists.” A new photograph had been taken in which she gazed moodily over a chair. Despite the beer-pouring incident, Hanne had been kept on. The client had been mollified with a bottle of sparkling wine and Hanne had handed him a letter of apology written by the Bulgarian.

Since she had lost her brothers, Hanne’s career had taken an unexpectedly upward curve. She was increasingly petulant, undeniably tetchy, and openly hostile to her audience. But the more contempt she threw at them, the more the men began to adore her. Every time she sang, pulled postcards of herself from her stocking tops, or placed tall glasses of beer in front of her clients, it was as if it were for the very last time. And if they didn’t do as she suggested and buy her a drink, give her a tip, or purchase a postcard, they were punished. Once or twice, in front of packed houses, she poured beer over a customer’s head again, but now it was met by thunderous applause.

“The worse you treat them, the more they admire you,” the Bulgarian used to say with a shrug. And in her case, at least, it was true.

Maybe her popularity was because she appeared on the verge of walking out forever. In fact, she believed it was only a matter of time. She had been spending the afternoons with a film producer in a small hotel that rented rooms by the hour. He was a man who wore spats, his hat tilted at an angle, and a Rolex watch. He was married, of course, and hadn’t promised her anything except work as an extra in his next project. But he could be persuaded, cajoled, she was convinced of it. In the meantime, she blew her tips on fancy frocks and face cream from Paris and managed to ignore all but the most irresistible advances.

Hanne stared at her former friend from the orphanage in her dressing room mirror, but this time she didn’t comment on her clothes. Lilly had been almost erased from her mind. Only when she was drunk, when she had been dumped, or when she was broke did she give in to memories of St. Francis Xavier’s, the roses, her brothers, and her former friend. The feeling would pass, however, she would sober up and vow not to think about them again. But now that Lilly was here, she realized that she had missed her much more than she had allowed herself to believe. She blotted her lips on a rag before she spoke.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“Fine,” Lilly replied. “I’m . . . I’m a . . .”

Lilly drew a breath and let it out again slowly. She tried to start again but the words didn’t seem to want to come out. She stared at the gaslight fittings, as if they held the clue to her sudden arrival. She wished she hadn’t come. She glanced at herself in the mirror. She barely recognized herself anymore. Her mouth was raw. Her face was puffy and her eyelids were red. Hanne turned in her seat and finally faced her.

“You’re . . . ?” asked Hanne.

Lilly looked her in the eye at last. And her former friend’s face softened as if the mask she wore had now fallen away.

“I need to see a lady,” Lilly whispered.

arek, the penniless poet, may have been destined for great things but never made it past relative obscurity. Only two poems from this period ever made it into print, in a short-lived monthly journal called
Spunk!
Both were musings on the fickle nature of love.

When the previous housemaid fell pregnant and pointed the finger of blame at her supposedly impotent husband, the Countess was devastated. But he gave as good as he got. She later admitted that it could have been her fault; she shouldn’t have been standing in the way when he hurled the crystal vase, a present from her first mother-in-law, at the wall. And what is more, she should have gotten rid of the aesthetically offensive vase before he had picked it up in the first place.

The doctor stopped the bleeding but he could not prevent the scarring. Marek wept but the Countess could not. Instead she sat in the doctor’s office, watched a train shoot past, and thought about throwing herself in front of it.

So when her husband returned with a huge hotel bill and one paltry poem, she did not greet him with the warmth of a wife’s embrace. And when he sacked the cook and it was clear he was paying a little too much attention to the new maid, the Countess hired another cook, a lively mother of five who had an adequate mastery of electrical appliances, and ordered her husband out of the kitchen.

One evening in spring Lilly found a package with her name on it lying on the kitchen table. It was from Marek. Inside was a journal with thick blank pages and a fountain pen filled with India ink. She sat down and on the first page she wrote her name.

“Lilly Nelly Aphrodite,” the penniless poet read out over her shoulder. He had come into the kitchen so quietly she hadn’t heard him.

“Someone must have had high hopes for you,” he said.

As she sat and he stood behind her, the ink started to drip from her pen onto the paper. Very slowly, he laid his hand on the crown of her head and stroked softly, so softly, down to the nape of her neck.

“Lilly,” he said. “Nelly . . .”

She shivered.

“Aphrodite . . . a gift for my muse.”

Lilly stood up very suddenly. She turned and faced him. Ink was still falling in drops as big as apple pips and splashed onto the kitchen floor.

“Well, good night,” he said. And with a bow of his head he left the room.

The next day he strolled by as if nothing had happened. Maybe she had been mistaken. Maybe nothing had happened. How could it? She was a housemaid. He was the Countess’s husband. And her face blushed as she scrubbed the table with baking soda and her eyes stung with salt. That night she looked at herself closely in the small speckled mirror above the sink in her room. In the twilight she pulled her hair loose from the band she used to tie it back, she ran her finger along the curve of her cheekbone, and she tried to see herself as Marek might see her. Could he desire her? Could he want her? Could he be in love with her? She was thirteen. He was in his thirties. A bell rang. The Countess was calling her, but she still never used her name; she never called her anything but “girl” or “you” or “she.” And as Lilly quickly tied her hair back and became a maid with no name again, she insisted to herself that on all counts she was bound to be wrong.

After all those years at the orphanage surrounded by other children, the silence of nothing but her own thoughts was almost too loud to bear. And so when her name came echoing through the lower floor of the villa, long and low, no wonder it made her feel like someone again, someone who was worth something.

“Lilly,” the poet sang one day. “I’ve brought you a peach.”

He placed it on the window ledge behind the sink and for a moment they both looked at it.

“I want to watch you eat it,” he whispered.

She wiped her hands on her apron as he sliced it into four pieces with a pocketknife. Inside, the flesh was heavy with juice.

“Go on,” he said.

She picked up a piece. She raised it to her mouth. He was so close she could smell him: cotton dried in sunshine, lavender soap, and the sweet sourness of his sweat. She raised her eyes to his. He looked from her eyes to her mouth to the peach and back. A hot rush coursed through her.

“I can’t,” she said.

“Why not?” he said.

“I’m not hungry,” she replied.

She looked away. He took her chin in his hand and turned her face around.

“Liar,” he said.

She ate the peach. She sucked all the juice from it, and then tore the flesh from the skin with her teeth and swallowed it.

“There,” she said, wiping her mouth on her sleeve.

“Well?” he said. “How was it? What did it taste like?”

Lilly turned back to the dishes piled in tepid water in the sink. “Like a peach,” she replied.

“Like a peach that was waiting for this very moment, this very second and not before, to be eaten,” he added.

She could feel the heat of his breath on her neck. How could he say such a thing? She blushed with equal amounts of anticipation and shame.

“Lilly Nelly Aphrodite,” he said below his breath. And then he strolled out of the kitchen, whistling.

The Countess’s daughter was coming home from school for the summer, and for the first time ever, the Countess began to get up at eight in the morning and go to bed at nine at night. She opened all the windows, and the curtains tailed out in the breeze. She left instructions for Lilly to buy flowers and order sugared almonds and English tea. A portrait of a little girl in a white dress with a sailor collar was placed on the mantelpiece.

On the day of the daughter’s arrival, the clock seemed louder and the minutes felt longer. At five o’clock her train would arrive at Anhalt Station. As an afterthought, the Countess placed her husband’s publications on the table in the center of the dining room.

At exactly ten past two, the telephone rang.The poet answered it. Lilly heard the tone of his voice shift.The Countess’s former mother-in-law had decided it was preferable for her granddaughter to spend the summer in the country, given the unstable political climate in the city. She urged the poet to persuade her former daughter-in-law not to call her back; they were going out for a picnic.

The Countess tried to stab the poet with the letter knife. She missed his heart but hit him in the hand. The telephone was ripped from the wall and ended up in the garden. The poet’s publications disappeared forever. The doctor, summoned by taxi, arrived at three and stayed until six. The cook had prepared a three-course dinner. It was all thrown away.

That night the poet came to Lilly’s room. She opened her eyes in the darkness and there he was above her, his right hand bandaged and his face scratched. She had no idea how long he had been there.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I was looking for the water closet.”

She sat up.

“I don’t think you should be in here,” she said.

For a moment neither spoke.

“She doesn’t love me, you know. She doesn’t understand me. Not like you do.”

“But you don’t even know me,” she whispered.

Lilly could feel her face burn. Her heart beat so violently in her chest that she feared it was visible. And yet she felt paralyzed as she sat there in her white nightgown, her hair unbraided and her legs bare beneath the covers.

“But I’d like to. Should I go now?” he asked softly.

She nodded. He let out a short snort of laughter.

“Let me,” he said.

But it was a statement and not a question.

It was true that she had imagined his kiss on her lips. It was also true that she had imagined the taste of his dark skin and the salt of his sweat. She had even imagined the caress of his hand on her breast. But she had never imagined this. He held both wrists above her head and launched himself upon her. His sudden weight was such that she couldn’t breathe. He reached below and ripped the cotton of her nightgown; his knee wedged her legs apart. And then the bluntness of him forced its way into her resistance. She cried out but he muffled her mouth with his palm. And then he started to push; he pushed until she was sure she would split. Lilly closed her eyes and willed it to be over. And soon it was, with a groan and a hot wetness between her legs.

The blood on the sheets came out. She stood shivering at the sink as the tap water turned from red to clear. It wasn’t me, she told herself again and again. I wasn’t there. And as she washed all traces from her body with a damp cloth, she half believed it. In the middle of the night, when sleep still wouldn’t come, however, she listened to the dark. Even though he was two floors above, she could hear the ratchet of his snore. And she started to shake and could not stop.

The next morning Lilly found the Countess slumped over her bed fully clothed. On the wooden floor below the bed was an empty medicine bottle lying in a pool of sticky dark liquid. For a few seconds Lilly simply stared. A shaft of morning sunshine illuminated the Countess’s body. Even from the doorway, Lilly could see the jagged scar, the scar that ran from her left eye to the corner of her mouth. The pull of the pillow below her face dragged her lips into a tiny ironic smile. One slipper had fallen off to reveal a pale foot with long, evenly spaced toes.

And then Lilly noticed a shallow movement, the twitch of an eye: the Countess was still breathing. She hauled the Countess upright and slapped her face. The cheek was white and clammy. She slapped again. A small pink rose appeared.

“Wake up!” she shouted.

The Countess opened her eyes but did not focus. Her head lolled. Lilly rubbed her hands, her arms, her legs, and then, when there was no response, she shook her shoulders.