The Glimmer Palace (21 page)

The winter was long and cold and damp. It was dark by three-thirty. All the rooms were unheated except the landlady’s parlor, so they kept their coats and boots on until they were ready to undress and go to bed. No wonder they spent as little of their time there as possible. On their day off, Lilly and Hanne passed the time in dance halls, where they were spun round and bought drinks by lonely soldiers on leave. Or they went to the movies and cried all the way through. And when they had no money left and they had to stay in, they practiced waltzing in their room, prompting the Frau, as they now called the landlady, whose bedroom was directly below theirs, to bang on her ceiling with a broom.When they finally went to bed, they would lie awake and talk, often until two or three in the morning, about the future, when they would both be famous actresses or dancers or singers and they would live together in a big apartment with Hanne’s brothers.

One night Hanne admitted that she was in love with the so-called film producer even though she had doubts that this was what he really did. He still provided her with a steady supply of butter and chocolate and bottles of wine in return for meeting him twice a week.

“You’ll know it when you feel it,” she told Lilly. “It’s down here, deep down in your belly. Like a hunger.”

But hunger was an abstract concept to them both, at least at that point in time. Hanne’s boyfriend’s black-market gifts were so generous that sometimes they had to force themselves to eat them. And they grew careless. When the landlady found a stale cream cake behind the wardrobe and a piece of pork loin wrapped in brown paper in the pocket of Hanne’s coat, she confiscated them both and threatened to inform the authorities unless Hanne passed the food directly to her. And so Hanne threw her things into Lilly’s suitcase, told her she’d come back for her, and left Kreuzberg the very next morning.

The film producer was suitably horrified when he opened his front door on a weekday morning to find the girl from The Blue Cat on his doorstep. He gave her twenty marks, hailed a taxi, and subsequently broke off all contact. Hanne had no option but to return to Kreuzberg again. Lilly could tell what had happened just by the look on her face. She climbed into bed, fully dressed, and lay with the covers over her head. Lilly sat down on the edge of the mattress as Hanne’s body, swathed in blankets, began to shake.

“Don’t,” she said. “Don’t cry.”

The shaking didn’t stop but increased. And then Lilly realized that she wasn’t crying at all but laughing.

“You should have seen his face,” Hanne said as Lilly pulled back the covers. “It was the funniest thing ever.”

And they laughed until they wept, until they were doubled over, until they were gasping for air. But at some point Hanne’s hilarity turned and Lilly suddenly realized that her tears were real and her shakes were in fact sobs.

“I loved him,” she said.

Hanne stopped eating and would have starved to death had not the landlady, who took her back without asking any questions, nursed back her appetite with looted Belgian chocolate that she had been saving for a rainy day. And when that was finished and there was no more, they began to feel hungry all the time and Hanne admitted that it was nothing like being in love after all.

Although most of the theaters and cabarets had closed in August out of respect for the war, it was soon perfectly obvious that it was not going to be all over by Christmas, as had been so optimistically predicted. People still needed to be entertained; in fact, it was argued in cafés from Potsdamer Platz to Savignyplatz, a little distraction was needed now more than ever before, and so one by one the theaters and cabarets opened again. The Bulgarian wrote a whole new show. Gone were the large hats, the saucy clothes, and the double entendres. Hanne’s new costume was loosely based on a nurse’s outfit and her songs were laments to her soldier sweetheart. Every evening finished with a rousing rendition of “The Gates of Paris Are Open (Just Like My Heart),” which always brought the house down.

Then beer production ground to a virtual halt. Most of the land used for growing hops had been turned over to growing edible crops, and nearly all the breweries in Germany were forced to close. A few still operated; the government had to make some concessions to the proletariat palate, but the beer was of poor quality and questionable alcoholic content. The Bulgarian had to buy his pilsner on the black market and put his prices up accordingly. Many of his regulars began to nurse a single drink for the entire evening. Business, which had always been a little shaky, as the Bulgarian was in the habit of getting so drunk he would hand out free drinks in the hope of “making the evening go with a boom-di-boom,” was now precarious. Hanne and Lilly, he told them with a shrug, would have to make do with tips.

The landlady agreed to let them stay on for a reduced rent but wouldn’t feed them anymore. And so began a time when they would leave The Blue Cat at midnight and head straight to the queues for the bakery or the butcher or the grocer. For four or five hours they would stand in lines with women, children, and boys too young to fight, and wait. Lilly would be swaying on her feet by the time the shop opened at dawn. And then, no matter how orderly they had been, the crowd would turn into a mob and surge forward as hundreds fought over a few overpriced seed potatoes or a pound or two of butter. Lilly, although she used her elbows and shoulders with as much dexterity as the next person, often came back empty-handed. Hanne, however, always managed to bring back something: a piece of pork, a jar of jam, or a newly baked loaf.

“How do you do it?” Lilly asked her. “It doesn’t matter how long I wait, I always get pushed to the back. It’s so unfair.”

“There’s always a way,” Hanne said vaguely, “once you set your mind on something.”

Christmas that year was eerily beautiful.The streetlights had been turned off months before to save on electricity.There were no festive decorations or brightly lit shop windows. Instead, stubs of candles were tied with wire to the branches of a large tree that had been placed on the Auguste-Victoria-Platz outside the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church, and the tiny flames were tended so that they flickered for the whole of Advent. It was here that Lilly would sometimes find herself, drawn to the lights like a moth. She was not alone. Hundreds of hungry people hung around the fringes, eyeing the plates of cakes and hot wine that the church handed out after every service. But she did not join the queue. Instead, she stood as close as she could to the tree and inhaled, as if the smells of Christmas alone were enough to sustain her.

In February 1915, Germany’s dwindling petrol supplies were allocated to the military.Trolley cars would be stopped at random by the police, to save on fuel, and all the passengers would have to get out and walk. Lilly’s soft kid leather boots didn’t last out the month. She pushed cardboard and newspaper into the soles but every night her feet would be wet and blistered. New shoes were well beyond most people’s means, even if you could find them. Boot makers were working day and night to produce boots for the army. Hanne had several pairs of stage shoes, a pair of rubber galoshes, and a pair of heavy leather boots bought before the war, but her feet were three sizes bigger than Lilly’s.

Lilly would soon have to endure the shame of asking for a secondhand pair from a benevolent society. Despite the weather, she had already seen hundreds of people without shoes, or with shoes in such poor condition that they might as well have not been wearing them at all. She knew that those without shoes would be the first ones to fall ill should the city be struck by an outbreak of influenza or diphtheria. And so one day, as the wind howled down from the river Spree, she lined up outside the Brides of Christ, a church hall near Potsdamer Platz. Whole families also waited in line, with barefoot children and babies in knitted socks. But then word reached her that they had only men’s shoes left and she reasoned with herself that her boots might last another week after all.

It was around this time that a policeman started drinking in the afternoon in The Blue Cat. That time of day was always busy, even though the winter light fell through the windows and lit up the peeling paint on the walls and the scuffed, unsanded floor. With snow thick on the ground outside and the air filled with dozens of burning cigarette ends, the bar gave the impression of warmth if not the real thing. Only those with the steeliest resolve would leave after one drink. The rest would linger on, counting up their coins for another—until, that is, the policeman appeared—and then, with a communal shiver, they would finish their drinks, stamp the water out of their boots, and pull on their coats.

Despite the food shortages, he was fat, with greasy blond hair and a permanent film of sweat on his upper lip. Berlin was full of policemen, in plain clothes or uniforms, men who were said to be on full alert for any signs of civil disobedience. The Bulgarian instructed Lilly to give him a black-market beer on the house and, if he asked, to tell him it was old stock.

“Old stock,” he’d said with a guffaw. “Funny, I’d have sworn it tasted Polish.”

One day he came in with a pair of small, shiny black boots. He handed them to Lilly.

“Here,” he said. “Special delivery. The soles are only cardboard, but they were all I could get.”

“How much? I don’t think I can afford . . .”

“They’re paid for,” he said.

The policeman’s eyes ran up and down her body.They lingered on her breasts.

“By whom?” Lilly asked.

“Who do you think?” he said. “Your friend, Hanne.”

Lilly’s face flushed. Hanne had no money for new boots, or at least none that she knew about.Then the policeman started to laugh.

“And she earned it, by Jove, she really did. That Hanne’s worth every penny, lads.”

He raised his eyebrow, glancing around at the remaining crowd to make his meaning clear. And then, furtively, he reached out and with one hand he cupped her breast. Lilly swung her fist straight into his fat face. It wasn’t the force of the blow that made him fall from his stool but the sheer surprise. He fell straight back and hit the wooden floor with a rounded thump. Laughter erupted from the regulars. Lilly came out from behind the bar to find him lying quite still, his eyes staring at the dark blue cornice. And then he sat up.

“If you were a man, I’d kill you for that,” he said.

Hanne, summoned from her dressing room by the Bulgarian, suddenly appeared at his side. She looked from Lilly’s face to the policeman’s.

“He was telling lies about you, Hanne,” Lilly said.

“Was I? Ask her,” the policeman said. “Not many girls want to get paid in boots.You’re a couple of tarts. I should bloody well arrest the pair of you.”

He started to get to his feet. Lilly moved instinctively and, with one shove, knocked him into a table. Once more he lay sprawled on the ground, this time covered with spilled beer and broken glass and cigarette ash. No one laughed this time.

“Put them on,” Hanne said as he lay there. “Like he said, they’re paid for.”

The Bulgarian was given no choice in the matter. Either they went or he was under arrest.

The landlady did not take pity on the two girls this time and gave them a week’s notice. Their room was to be rented out to a war widow with a baby who came with a ration book and a guaranteed income, albeit small, from the government. On the following day Hanne left Lilly in a coffeehouse with the understanding that she was going to secure a room for them both from an old contact. Night fell, the coffeehouse closed, but Hanne didn’t return.

It is claimed by some analysts of human behavior that the pattern of a relationship, be it with friend or lover, is thrashed out within the first few weeks of meeting. It could have been true that Hanne set the pattern very early on. Maybe, no matter what she said or did, Hanne was always going to leave Lilly when she was least expecting it, and Lilly, for her part, instinctively knew it. Hadn’t she done it once already? And when Lilly returned to Kreuzberg that night, she wasn’t surprised to find that Hanne had already been, gone, and taken everything that belonged to her.

ister August, who was now known as Nurse von Kismet, did not recognize the teenage prostitute immediately. The girl, who was about sixteen, was suffering from malnutrition. She had been sent to the military hospital after collapsing outside a garrison near Ypres.

“We can’t admit you,” she said. “There’s no room.”

The girl had claimed she had come to France looking for her missing boyfriend. But that’s what they all said. None of them ever bought a return ticket. Brothels were tolerated near the front lines. The men preferred German girls to French. It wasn’t only sex, they pointed out. In fact, sex was often the least of it.

In May 1915, Lotte von Kismet had been at the front for six months. Her organizational skills were soon apparent, and in addition to her nursing duties she was put in charge of admissions. No other nurse worked quite as tirelessly as the former nun. Even the doctors were in awe of her seemingly inexhaustible work ethic. And if she was ever blunt rather than tactful, direct rather than polite, her fellow nurses put it down to her height, a disadvantage that had given her a strength of character that did not waver when her modesty was compromised when she was forced to wear aprons that just and only just skimmed her shins.

“Name?” she commanded.

“It’s me,” she said. “It’s Hanne.”

Nurse von Kismet stopped filling in forms and looked up. And her weathered face softened as first joy, then disappointment, and then compassion washed across it. Something stopped her from reaching across and hugging her former charge. The years of servitude to the Lord had given her boundaries that she still struggled to break down.

“Hanne,” she said. “Oh, Hanne. Look at you.”

Hanne Schmidt wore a grubby dress and high-heeled shoes. Her arms and legs were so thin they looked as if they would snap under the merest pressure, like bread sticks. She said she had lost her coat. And yet her cheeks were smooth and her eyes were bright. Her spirit had not been broken.

“You look the same,” Hanne said. “Even without the habit.”