The Glimmer Palace (32 page)

“Take them,” she had said when Lilly protested. “I can’t go out dancing alone, and you can’t tango in a pair of boots.”

“I can’t tango in a pair of shoes, either,” she replied.

“Just put them on, for God’s sake.”

Hanne was tired of taking the lead, of presenting Lilly with solutions that she never took advantage of. And the worst thing was that she still thought she had a choice. Lilly put them on.

“There,” said Hanne. “They’re a perfect fit. And I’ll teach you to dance.You must be the only girl left in Berlin who can’t.”

In winter 1919, the new republic had banned fishing in lakes with hand grenades and social dancing, or
Tanztaumel
. Five dance halls had been raided and closed down. But the fact that it was illegal only made it more attractive. Since the war had ended, dancing had become more than just a craze in Berlin: it was a mania, an obsession, an addiction. In secret halls and private clubs, in parks and even in the streets, workers and boys, soldiers and war widows and businessmen and whores danced the tango, the fox-trot, the cakewalk all night to the syncopated tunes of Scott Joplin or James Reese Europe.

The boarders in the room below eventually gave up banging the ceiling with a broom. For three hours, as Hanne played “Broadway Rose” or “Tiger Rag” over and over, they counted steps and spun around, they raised their knees and threw back their heads, they clasped their arms around each other and narrowed their eyes with concentration.

“I think you’ve got it,” Hanne said eventually.

Hanne, who had learned it all from another actress while waiting for their scene, was a competent teacher.With each new dance, Lilly grew in confidence. Dancing, she realized that night, was an anesthetic. It made her feel high, energized, sexual even. Like Hanne, she swung her arms and rocked her hips. She tossed her head and clicked her heels; dancing was all about movement, about how glorious the body is, about being alive and young and vital, about holding on to time by dancing every single beat out of it. And once you started, she now saw, it was almost impossible to stop.

Just off the Friedrichstrasse, above a former restaurant, the Bad Boys’ Ball was packed. When they arrived, a black jazz band from New Orleans was already playing in the corner. The slide of the trumpet and the giddy beat of the drum were infectious, rhythmic, undeniably erotic. Couples moved together, rubbing faces and bodies. One woman, frustrated by the restriction of her skirt, leaned down and ripped it up to her thigh. Not to be outdone, another girl ripped hers up to her waist, revealing her garters, her stockings, and her lack of underwear.

Although the music, the so-called devil’s music, had come from the slave songs and rhythms of the marching bands of the Deep South of America, in Berlin in 1919, jazz had taken on a whole new meaning. It was everything the kaiser’s empire had condemned. It was the sound of liberation: from starvation, from grief, from virginity, from conformity.

“What did I do after the war?” Lidi responded to an interviewer years later. She laughed as her face lit up with memory. “I danced,” she said. “For a whole year, almost all I did was dance.”

At three a.m. at the Bad Boys’ Ball, the hall was raided. Four hundred arrests would be made, including the band. Everyone would eventually be released without charge. By October, the republic would reverse the law, making dancing legal again, and drop all state censorship. The ban on fishing with grenades in lakes, however, remained.

Hanne and Lilly joined the crush as the crowds swelled toward the back door of the Bad Boys’ Ball. They all poured out into the clear spring night, their feet aching and their ears still ringing.

“Look,” said Hanne. “It’s the polite Russian from the boardinghouse.”

The Russian was with a big group of friends, both male and female, both Russian and German.

“Hey, Ilya,” one young woman called. “Everyone’s coming back to my place.You want to come?”

“I’m so sorry, I’m working early,” he told her with a bow. “I most humbly apologize.”

Ilya, so that was his name. Lilly took in his smart black suit and polished black shoes. The cuffs were beginning to fray and the style was prewar, but he had a way of wearing his clothes that made them look expensive. He was in his late twenties, she guessed, a man, not a boy. He caught her looking at him and she glanced quickly away.

“Come on,” said Hanne. “Let’s go somewhere else. It’s only three.”

But the polite Russian had left his friends and was coming toward them through the crowd.

“A very pleasant evening,” he said to them both. And then his head tilted to the side. “I like it, your hair,” he said to Lilly. “Extremely becoming.”

“Thank you.” Lilly smiled. “It’s all Hanne’s work.”

He nodded and looked at Hanne. Her hair was bleached, too, but instead of softening her features, it hardened them. She lit a cigarette.

“I would like to invite you,” he said with a bow, “to the Movie Palast on Nollendorfplatz. I play the piano there every night. Ask for me and you will be given free tickets at the door.”

He was looking straight at Lilly, a smile playing across his face. When he caught her eye, he bowed. She blushed but suddenly felt gauche and unsophisticated, flat-footed in her new French shoes.

“Thanks for the offer,” said Hanne. “Maybe we’ll take you up on it.”

Hanne linked her arm through Lilly’s and suggested they both head over to a private club, a very exclusive club that admitted only women.

Before they walked away toward Friedrichstrasse, before they hailed a cab and headed over to the H-Lounge on Bülowstrasse, Lilly turned.The polite Russian was standing in a pool of streetlight, watching them go. On his face was an expression that Lilly could not read.

“Dosvedanya, dosvedanya,”
Hanne said as the cab swerved through the empty streets. “Those Russians are everywhere.”

Like Ilya Yurasov, many of the Russians who had arrived in Berlin after the revolution had impeccable manners, learned as paying guests at the Carlton in Nice or the Ritz in Paris. Many were now doormen or waiters or bellboys. The others, well, they would be lucky to find a job at all. On any given night you could find dozens of czarist Russian officers in the cramped, dirty bunks of the homeless shelters, practicing their French as they sat it out until the Bolsheviks crumbled and dreaming of the day the czar, the Little Father, would come back to power and they could go home.

Before the war, Ilya Yurasov had worked as a director at the Khanzhonkov film studio in Moscow. On the Eastern Front he had been captured by the Germans and held prisoner in Lodz. In 1918 the armistice was announced and he was released. But instead of heading east like the rest of his regiment, he hitched a ride and ended up in Berlin.

From their first meeting when he barged into their room by mistake, Ilya Yurasov had seen something in Lilly’s face that he recognized. It was a symmetry of feature, a tilt of the eye, a gradient of lip, all of which reminded him of another woman. Though the girl in the boardinghouse really looked nothing like Anya Gregorin, the Russian actress, her face had the same quality, the same striking gaze. But that night as he stood on the street and she turned and looked back at him, the upward trombone slide of Ilya’s heart was quite, quite new.

That year cinemas were seldom less than packed. Some cinemas employed orchestras, but most recruited piano players to accompany the films. And when the lights went down and the piano started to play, as the red velvet curtains slowly parted and reopened on the cobbled streets of England or the mythic forests of Bavaria, the bathhouses of ancient Rome or the deserts of distant India, the audience laughed and gasped and wept as if enchanted by the play of light and shade and music.

The first film they saw was
The Golem
. At first Lilly watched the polite Russian as he played the piano in his shirtsleeves, his face illuminated by the throw of light from the big screen. But as the film progressed and the action unfolded against a series of nightmarish sets, as the music rose and fell in one crescendo after another, Lilly, like the rest of the audience, was drawn in. Would the golem catch the girl it had fallen in love with, or would it destroy the world instead?

They sat in their seats for long after the end titles had started to roll and the crowds had left. At the piano, Ilya rolled down his sleeves and pulled on his jacket.

“What did you think?” Ilya asked.

“It was quite terrifying,” Lilly answered. “I loved it.”

He laughed.

“Well, come again,” he said. “Anytime.”

Ilya Yurasov continued to give them cinema tickets. They were not, as they assumed, free: he paid for them by dipping into money put aside from his day job in the Afifa film-processing plant. And at the end of each film, when they thanked him, he bowed deeply and thanked them for being so kind as to come. But he did not ask either girl to come for a glass of wine or take a walk, as they both expected he might. The cinema tickets, he told himself, were purely a gesture of courtesy to two attractive young women. He could allow himself to go no further. He was a man of principle.

Hanne and Lilly saw all the latest films, often two or three times. Costume dramas like
Madame DuBarry
and
The Eyes of the Mummy,
starring Pola Negri, and when the censorship laws were abolished, pictures like
Lost Daughters
,
Hyenas of Lust
, and
A Man’s Girlhood
.

“That’s where I want to be,” Hanne breathed at the end of each film. “Up there.”

The money that Hanne had made during the war ran out, but by this time the film producer’s business was doing well: the market for cheap soft pornography was booming. Hanne was in increasing demand and was so busy having costume fittings, read-throughs, and screen tests that she gave up looking for more respectable employment on the stage.

Lilly found a part-time job as a cocktail waitress in the Kakadu Bar on Joachimstaler Strasse. It was a huge warren of a place with a dance palace, cabaret, vegetarian restaurant, and bar. Over every table in the dining room hung a parrot in a cage. To summon the mâitre d’ or the waitresses or even just for the hell of it, the customers would tap their knives on their water glasses and, in an old man’s voice, the parrots would squawk, “The bill, the bill.”

At first the novelty of the parrots attracted huge crowds, who found the parrots hilarious. But when the parrots let their droppings fall into the soup or glasses of beer below, or when they contracted strange parrot diseases and feather by feather plucked themselves bald, the joke began to wear a little thin. By Christmas the bar would be populated mostly by tourists, foreign journalists, and whores.

Although they were both working, Lilly and Hanne still stayed out until five every night, dancing the tango with Greek millionaires, the fox-trot with politicians, and the cakewalk with sailors. And yet Lilly found herself thinking about the polite Russian from the boardinghouse, about the timbre of his voice, about the slant of his eyes. Her obvious preoccupation, however, did not put her dance partners off. They came back for more and each time danced closer and held her tighter.

“Tell them you’re sapphic,” Hanne said. “It works every time.”

None of the men Hanne danced with were given so much as a second glance. None of them but one.

Kurt had lost all of the fingers on his left hand in the war: long, fine fingers, judging by the fingers on his right hand, with immaculate fingernails and sensitive tips. Hanne had spotted him at the Walterchens Dance Hall in Janowitz-Brücke. She said she noticed his eyes first: huge, dark pupils eclipsing the irises. And then she had become aware of his face. He was, she said later, the prettiest man she had ever seen. And she had never had anything pretty, she said, never, ever. She had walked right over and asked him if he wanted to dance. He had announced he did not know how. She tried to teach him but he wouldn’t be taught. At the end of the night, however, he let her kiss his mutilated knuckle.

Kurt was addicted to morphine. A field doctor had prescribed it when he blew off the fingers with his rifle in late 1917, and when he returned to Berlin, his own doctor obliged him with repeat prescriptions. Kurt claimed he was in too much pain without it. It wasn’t the fingers, or the space where the fingers had once been, but his entire body that ached and craved and hollowed itself out with longing for its previous completeness.

Besides, Kurt was in the Freikorps, the government troops. You didn’t ask him what he did all day or where he had been. Sometimes you could tell just by his face anyway.

It was called White Terror.That spring the Freikorps, under a man called Noske, were said to have executed twenty-four sailors in Französische Strasse. Even though they had only come to collect some money from the paymaster’s office. Even though they were mostly unarmed. By the time martial law was announced in March, the Freikorps were rumored to have murdered more than two thousand people.

Right from that very first evening when Hanne picked him up in the dance hall, Kurt spent every night in their rooms at the boardinghouse. He would sometimes arrive at midnight, smelling of beer and stale tobacco. And then Lilly would lie in her bed and try not to listen to the regular beat of the bedstead banging the wall. She would try not to hear his muffled gasps and shouts, Hanne’s laugh and her sobs; she tried not to notice the harsh words he uttered or the sound of Hanne’s voice as she soothed him, the words inaudible but the tone unmistakable.

And sometimes he would turn up at three in the morning with pooled eyes and a hollowed-out face. And then, as soon as he was let in, he would fall asleep on the sofa, on the floor, even standing up, with his back to the front door. The next day he would sit on the divan with a blanket wrapped around his shoulders and his eyes would follow them around the room, back and forth, back and forth, until they both put their coats on and left.

“What am I going to do?” Hanne would say. “What am I going to do? I’ll ask him to go.Tonight I’ll tell him it’s finished.”