The Glimmer Palace (27 page)

Two weeks after they had seen Stefan’s name on the list, a package arrived through the post from the war ministry. It was stamped with the insignia of his regiment. Eva opened it. Inside were a bread bag, an identity tag, and an army watch.

“He’s not dead,” Lilly said.

Eva’s eyes were sharp with tears and spite.

“What did you say?”

Lilly held the package up to her face and inhaled.

“His wedding ring—where is it? This is just an identity tag. Maybe he lost it. It’s a mistake.”

Eva left it all lying on the kitchen table and went to her room. Lilly pulled out the Remington typewriter. She would write to the war ministry, to his regiment, to prisoner-of-war camps, to all the hospitals that took injured men from his division. She inserted some paper and started to type.

Later, Lilly was stirring some potato soup, the last of her rations for the week. A stack of letters lay on the kitchen table. Eva hadn’t come out of her room all day.The soup was ready.

“Eva?” Lilly said as she knocked softly on the door. “Are you all right?”

For a moment no sound came from the room, and then the door swung open. Eva was standing there, her face fixed.

“No,” she said. “I’m not all right. How can you make soup?”

“How can I make soup? We have to eat, Eva,” Lilly said. “And I’ve written letters.”

“You wasted your time.”

Was Lilly’s work futile? A temporary respite from what might be the truth? She wasn’t ready to believe it yet.

“What else can I do?” Lilly said. “I have to do something.”

As Eva watched, Lilly’s eyes dulled, but her skin was still aglow. She turned to go back to the kitchen but Eva placed a hand on her shoulder and stopped her.

“What else can I do?” she repeated.

Eva gazed at her mouth, her eyes, and then her mouth again. And then, very suddenly, she pressed her lips to Lilly’s. Lilly was momentarily taken aback, but she wasn’t surprised. The kiss, however, was tempered with anger; if only, Eva told herself, Lilly hadn’t been so attractive—if only her lips, her ears, her neck hadn’t been so desirable—then this wouldn’t have happened; she wouldn’t have felt angry with herself, angry with Stefan, angry with the whole world, in fact, and everyone in it. It was her fault: it was all Lilly’s fault.

Lilly could almost smell Eva’s misery; she could sense the wetness of her palms and the cantering of her heart. She stiffened but she did not pull away. How could she? She had lost a husband but Eva had lost a brother. Maybe this would help her, comfort her, calm her. But Eva took her stillness as compliance. Her kiss grew steadily more insistent; her tongue probed into Lilly’s mouth; her hand slipped down onto Lilly’s breast. What had begun as a gesture of comfort had become something else. Lilly pulled back, but Eva would not let her go.

“Eva,” she said, “you have to stop.”

“I wanted you first,” she whispered. “I found you first.”

Lilly’s face started to burn. Was this how Eva saw her, as something to be claimed? And her heart seized up.

“Do you feel nothing for me?” Eva continued.

“Not like that. Not like I loved . . . love . . .” she corrected herself.

Stefan. The unspoken name hung between them like a sheet of lead. Eva’s shoulders started to heave, not with sadness, but with pure hot fury. Lilly had used her, misled her, duped her. Finally Eva let her go, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Lilly turned, but Eva could see that her eyes were cast downward and her arms hung limply at her sides. At last Eva had her. And so she played another card.

“The day we ran you over,” she said, “you were wearing a uniform. You never went to that school, did you?”

“Why do you ask me now?”

“Tell me!”

“No,” Lilly said. “I didn’t.”

It was at that moment that Lilly realized that Eva had maneuvered her into a corner with the skill of a champion chess player. What she had lost, however, was not immediately evident.

Eva stopped talking. For three long days she did not say a single word to Lilly. On the fourth day Lilly could stand it no longer. She opened her suitcase and started to put things inside it. She made a semblance of packing, folding, sorting, closing, but as she put on her coat she realized she had no idea what it was she had packed. Eva would change her mind, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t let her go. Lilly found Eva sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of hot water in front of her, her body taut, her eyes impassive.

“I suppose . . . I suppose I should go,” Lilly said.

Eva nodded. Lilly was so taken aback that she felt physically winded. So she had been wrong.

“Will you at least see me to the door?”

As Lilly stepped across the threshold, she turned and her eyes met Eva’s. Lilly swallowed twice. “If . . . when . . . he comes back . . .” she said.

“I’ll be in touch,” Eva said.

When the door closed, Lilly did not walk away. Her head slowly dipped forward until it was resting on the dark wood paneling. On the other side of the door, Eva pressed her ear to the wood and listened, waiting to hear the sound of footsteps going down the stairs. When she heard nothing, she pulled away. Her fingers ran along the grain of the wood, back and forth. She traced a face, a mouth, two eyes. And then she balled her hand and thumped it on the door.

The footsteps were neither hurried nor slow. Eva listened as they receded down the stairs and out onto the street. And then, room by room, she bagged up any evidence of her former friend and threw it all down the garbage chute.

illy found a job in a munitions factory and lodgings in Rixdorf with a widow called Gudrun, who also worked at the factory. Lilly slept behind a blanket partition in a tiny attic room and shared a communal bathroom with seven other families. After twelve-hour shifts, she and Gudrun would take it in turns to queue for food. But no matter how exhausted they were, they had to remain alert at the factory. One woman fell asleep on the production line and lost her hand. Another dropped some powder, caused a small explosion, and killed three of her friends.

Lilly’s job was to secure washers around the metal casings of howitzer shells. They were covered with thick black grease, grease that ingrained itself into her palms and made them itch. The machinery around her stamped and whined with such intensity that Lilly’s ears rang for hours afterward. All she thought about when she worked was to put the washers in the right place. All she did was count the number of shells—one, two, three, four—and when the clock struck the hour, she started over again. She did not think about the war or about Stefan and Eva. At least, not during the day. At night, despite herself, her dreams took place on the sun-soaked banks of the Wannsee or in the Steglitz apartment as torrential rain fell outside.

“My life,” Lidi was later quoted as saying, “in the later years of the war? I was not there, I was an
Ersatzmensch
, a fake person.”

It was true that Lilly still wore her wedding ring and talked about her husband as if she had recently heard from him. But there were plenty of others who were living with untruths: plenty of wives who were not really married and mothers whose children looked like the French prisoners of war who were imprisoned in Spandau. Nothing was real, nothing was what it said it was on the box: the dried egg and dried milk from the market were really just white and yellow powder made of washing soda, starch, and powdered paint; the substance sold as flour was three parts ash, and the coffee was made of ground-up bark. With food, as with everything else, you had to close your eyes and swallow.

In October 1917, just as Lenin had promised the kaiser, the Bolsheviks revolted. The czar was imprisoned along with his entire family and the huge country of Russia erupted into civil war. As the kaiser drank Herr Lenin’s health in vodka for bringing the bloody battles on the Eastern Front to a rapid halt, the government promised jam. In the markets of Berlin, hundreds queued all day. At five p.m. the crowd that had waited so good-naturedly in the rain was told that the jam shipment had been canceled. That night Gudrun wept openly. Somehow the idea of jam, which in peacetime was called poor man’s butter or children’s food, jam made of purple damsons or blackberries picked from the side of the railway, had grown in her mind until she could taste it, until she craved it, until she couldn’t eat another piece of so-called bread without it. It had come to represent hope, innocence, peace, and then, despite the promises, there was none to be had.

In November, a scandal broke when it was disclosed that government officials in the area of Neukölln had been buying up food at prices well above the regulated level. The black market, despite all the authorities had said, was now demonstrably the only market. At Alexanderplatz market, one woman walked up to a bread stall and just took what she wanted without paying. Others followed her example and within minutes several tons of overpriced bread, vegetables, and food substitutes had been liberated. Gudrun came home with a jar of a pale watery substance labeled applesauce and three loaves of bread. They ate it all in one sitting, without guilt. The next day, however, there were far fewer stalls at the market, and dozens of police.

Food demonstrations started to take place every other day. One woman hit a shopkeeper with his own broom and then, together with a group of her friends, chased him out of the neighborhood. The city was awash with rumors: The government had bought herring as a meat substitute, peace talks with the East had broken down, the herring had all been sent to Poland, the bread ration was about to be reduced again.

And still the war rumbled on. As spring began to crack the ice of the trenches, the German army launched another offensive on the Western Front.They drove the Allies back forty miles and brought in more troops for a final push. It was, in hindsight, a last burst of bravado in the face of defeat. Even across no-man’s-land, the German soldiers could hear the smooth action of the Americans’ newly forged artillery and see the flush of their well-fed cheeks. But worse still were the times they couldn’t see their faces. Tanks, hundreds of them, rolled toward the German lines and broke through previously impregnable defenses.The Allies had eight hundred of them, the Germans twenty. At night the soldiers read about the riots in Berlin. Come home, their wives’ and mothers’ letters begged them. No wonder so many surrendered. No wonder so many of them deserted and began to walk the long way home.

There is a photograph taken in the early days of 1918. Around thirty women in heavy coats and mufflers march through Treptower Park. Some smile for the camera, but most of them clutch their handbags in their fists and look primed for a fight. If the picture had been in color, you would have noticed that most of the women’s faces were tinged yellow. That’s how you could spot a munitions worker; the TNT gave them jaundice. Lilly is third from the left. She was one of one hundred thousand women who had walked out at nine a.m. on the twenty-eighth of January and been on strike for three days.

Shortly after the photograph was taken, the striking munitions workers were joined by a group of Spartacists. Led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, this radical group read Marx and opposed the war. They had gotten their name when Liebknecht, on flyers that derided the kaiser, had signed himself Spartacus. They wanted nothing less than an uprising on the Russian scale. They wanted a revolution. In their ranks, handing out leaflets and shouting “Down with the war!” was Eva Mauritz.

Shortly after Lilly had left, Eva had met a woman in the Café des Westens. The woman was in her mid-thirties and called Lutz Ehren. She had made love to Eva in the ladies’ toilet and then invited her to a Spartacist meeting. The relationship didn’t last and Ehren left the party only six months later, but Eva joined the Spartacists and became a Communist.

As a channel for her anger, it proved effective. How she had longed to reject the comfortable mediocrity of her own middle-class background! What better way to liberate herself politically and sexually? But her newfound political convictions did not completely cure her. Over the previous year, she had come to regard the girl who had toyed with her and then married her only brother as manipulative and poisonous, her motives suspect, and her departure deserved. And so she had rewritten what had happened on the day that Stefan’s possessions arrived. She had repeated it so often to herself that she practically believed it: how Lilly had torn up the letters that she herself had typed; how she had gone without leaving any way of contacting her, should Stefan’s regiment be mistaken and he be alive after all; how she had abandoned her.

When they met face-to-face in the park as the placards waved and the crowds chanted antigovernment slogans, however, Eva was shocked. In reality the girl looked nothing like the image she had kept alive in her mind. She had a yellow tinge to her face and grease spots on her cuffs, and her nails were rimmed with black. But then Eva noticed that her eyes were still bright. She had forgiven her. And what was worse, she still had hope. At that moment Eva’s heart was filled with such animosity that later she was ashamed.

“Any news?” Lilly asked. “Have you heard anything?”

“I have heard they have butter in Munich,” Eva replied.

As the protesters began to jeer and the government forces began to approach, as the sky threatened snow and the wind blew in from the north, Eva pushed her hair away from her face. On her thumb she wore Stefan’s wedding ring. Lilly had seen it, Eva was sure of it. Something in Lilly’s eyes finally faded. Now Eva had made her believe it: she had made her believe that Stefan, her brother, was dead. Even though he lay not a mile from the park, in his own bed, with his discharge papers on the dresser.