The Glimmer Palace (40 page)

But did this change the way we handle real love affairs and moments of crisis? he would ask. Did it give us new vocabulary to deal with heartbreak and euphoria? Of course it did, he would claim.What man could be spurned by his lover without consciously or unconsciously mimicking Harold Kraus in
The Loveless Alley
? And how many middle-class women aped Elisabeth Bergner in
Husbands or Lovers?
as they stared out of the window at strangers on the street below?

In the era before the big screen, there was declamation, gesture, and dialogue.The camera would employ all these elements, certainly, but the intimacy of the close-up, the jump cut, and the zoom could act as a much more accurate mirror for our souls. And Mr. Leyer would argue that we would never experience grief, love, jealousy, or despair in quite the same way again.

As Lidi’s popularity grew, at least three or four photographers would be waiting outside the studio. She refused to give interviews, but so many letters arrived every day that a secretary was employed part-time just to open them. And every premiere was met with rapturous applause and an increasingly hysterical crowd outside.

Stefan Mauritz always stood apart from the throng. He knew where she lived, he knew which route her drivers took to the studio. He knew which bars she went to on her nights off, and he knew that her best friend and former roommate was a lesbian. She had a lover, a Russian director, but she was still his wife. Why, he asked himself over and over, had Eva told him she was dead? Had Lilly asked her to? And if so, didn’t she realize he would see her now? Her face was all over the city, on billboards, on cinema posters, on the front covers of fan magazines. It didn’t make sense. But she had been dead and a part of him had died too. And now that she was alive, the dead part of him, his frozen, ugly part, still remained. He couldn’t approach her; the problem was insurmountable. He would try to forget her, forsake her, erase her. And yet no matter how hard he tried to resist, he was always drawn back, to the cinema, to her neighborhood, to the orbit of her world.

Lilly had noticed him, of course she had, but although there was something familiar about him, she couldn’t place him; he was only one specter or ghost from other, distant lives among many. Some of the young girls who sold themselves on Friedrichstrasse surely once were wards of St. Francis Xavier’s; the extras with their carnivorous eyes and beery breath all looked like the customers from The Blue Cat, and some of the women who shouted and waved so voraciously from behind the barricades at premieres resembled the women who punched one another at the Catholic hostel. All of them made her feel deeply uneasy, all of them gave her vertigo.

She decided to move out of the Adlon: too many people knew her there, too many people who always seemed to want more than she was able to give. The apartment she bought was modest. It was just off the Kurfürstendamm near Savignyplatz and had belonged to a Jewish concert pianist. After the murder of Rathenau he had decided to take up an invitation to teach at a conservatory in Paris. Lilly declined to take it furnished and moved in with only a bed, a bureau, and a vase for flowers. The rooms were all painted white. The floors were of polished wood. It was a blank canvas, a new start.

Ilya still lived in the same apartment near the station. He worked hard, harder than he had ever worked before, directing one film after the next without a break. And on the weekends he spent hours working on the script of a new project, a reworking of the story of Mary, Queen of Scots, called
The Queen of Sorrow
.

Something of Lilly was always with him now: her scent, which lingered on his clothes, the echo of her voice in his ears, the ghost of her kiss. And the more he tried to push her out of his mind, the more he thought about her. Since he had received the letter, he had rehearsed what he would say to Katya, the sympathy and the reassurance. But how could he explain Lilly? He had once been a man of honor. Not anymore.

One weekend, shortly after she’d moved, Ilya took Lilly to a cabaret in the basement of the Café des Westens called Die Wilde Bühne, or The Wild Stage. It was a dark, smoky, cavernous room where performers and writers such as Bertolt Brecht and Trude Hesterberg sang “Ballad of the Dead Soldier” and “Song of the Stock Exchange” on a small, cramped stage.

“Everyone drilled in liberty,” one of the performers enunciated. “Liberrrteeee.”

One of the acts was by Kurt Gerron, a man who would end up performing on a stage in a death camp. Dressed as a circus trainer wielding a whip, he sang about trying to tame “the beast humanity.” This beast, apparently made up of anti-Semites and greedy capitalists, of politicians planning putsches and war-hungry generals, was eventually tamed and brought to heel.

Lilly laughed until she wept. Ilya barely smiled.

“What’s the matter?” she asked him.

“It’s not funny,” he said.

That night they fought as they walked back to her new apartment. And as they passed beneath the linden trees whose black branches clutched at the orange light that streamed onto the night pavements, it was suddenly clear to Lilly that something had changed. He was angry with her.

“Don’t you have any political views?” Ilya asked.

“Of course.”

“Or are you a Jew-hater, like all the rest of you Germans?”

She didn’t answer.The question was so clearly ridiculous. Most of their friends in the film industry were Jewish.

Later, Lilly would wonder what had gotten into her. Maybe it was the wine that had cost several million marks a glass. Maybe it was the inflation—of currency, of her public persona, but mostly of her feelings for Ilya—that made her act the way she did; she had offered herself to him unconditionally and he seemed not to have noticed. And so there, in the street, as the whores and pimps wandered by, as the taxis loitered and the last streetcars idled, everything suddenly unraveled.

“How dare you,” she said.

The first blow hit him across the cheek. The second on the chest. The third he caught in midair. Neither of them would look away. Neither of them would concede. The alleyway smelled of urine and damp. Up against a wall pitted with bullet holes and encrusted with old paint, Ilya tore her dress open. His grip was firm, her clasp was firmer; they were a single entity, one breath, one skin, one intent.

And then it was over, the point lost, the hurt scattered, nothing healed, everything dispersed.

Lilly closed the front door of her apartment behind her. And the rooms, so fresh and white during the day, now looked like an empty stage set, spartan, cold, impoverished. Her dress was ruined, her skin was bruised, her lips were raw. She lay on the floor and wept. anne was rich at first. Despite the fact that prices had been

steadily rising since the armistice, she bought clothes imported from Paris and smoked Italian cigarettes. She spent afternoons at the movies or shopping or taking tea. But in the evening, while her husband was otherwise engaged, at the cinema, or visiting his daughters, she would wander along the Friedrichstrasse and the Tauentzienstrasse, the streets around the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church and up and down the Kurfürstendamm. Here you could buy an envelope of morphine or pick up a tart. Young boys, their faces thick with powder and rouge, offered themselves to businessmen. Girls in school uniforms kissed each other in doorways or beckoned to passersby. The prettiest women were usually men, the ugliest were said to be the best in the sack, and everyone whispered the same phrase over and over,
“Möchtest du spazierengehen?”
—“Like to take a walk?”

One night at the Kleist Casino, the air heavy with the tickle of cocaine and the divans alive with the writhing of silk on bare flesh, as she placed her bets and took her chances, as the roulette ball rattled round with that low hum that promises everything, Hanne looked up and there, standing on the opposite side of the table with his hands in his pockets, was Kurt.

“Like to take a walk?” he whispered. By the time the ball had chosen its destination—zero, no winners—they were gone.

It was a Saturday in November, 1923. Every morning for weeks on end, a layer of ice had covered the city, frosting the rooftops and the threadbare branches of the trees. The freezing temperatures stilled the leaves, froze the grass into spikes, and glazed Lilly’s windows opaque with white. A horse and cart made its way to the market, the horse’s breath rising in plumes into the frigid air. A newspaper seller had set up outside the station and cried out, “Murder in Schiller, murder in Schiller, murder in Schiller Park!”

She rarely had visitors and that morning she wasn’t expecting anyone. So when there was an assertive knock on the door, she ignored it. A hand knocked again, more insistently this time.

“Please,” a man’s voice pleaded. “A moment of your time.”

Lilly immediately recognized Edvard’s voice. She opened the door and he stepped inside. Two months had passed since Lilly had last seen him, and he was quite changed. He wore a suit cut for a younger, slimmer man, with a bright blue neckerchief bought for him, she guessed, by Hanne. And yet his shirt was stained and his face had a sunken look.

“Hanne wrote down your new address. I hope you don’t mind?”

“Are you all right?”

Edvard nodded.

“May I sit down?”

Only there wasn’t a chair. Although he didn’t want to admit it, not there, not then, everything was not all right.The inflation had ruined him. Debts meant that he had been forced to sell his entire stock to a business acquaintance from New York who bought the lot for less than the cost of his return ticket. His former wife had gone to live with her mother and vowed she would never let him see his children again.

“I kept a record,” he began, and brought out a notebook. “As her only friend, I think you should know.”

He put on his spectacles and stated that Hanne had been incapacitated through drug use not less than a dozen times.

“I found her injecting,” he said. “With a syringe. Morphine, probably. Or opium. She used my—our—money, until it ran out.”

He snapped the book shut and took a deep breath, and his huge head slowly began to lower, as if the telling had sucked all the strength from him.

“I have been foolish,” he said, more to himself than to her. “Lilly, do you know where she is?”

Lilly could guess. But she hoped it was not so.

“Would you like tea?” she asked him without meeting his eye. “I have coffee too.”

He shook his head and stood up. He suddenly didn’t know why he was there. He knew all along she would not say.

“It’s him, isn’t it,” he said. “She’s gone back to that filthy Brown-shirt. . . .”

“I don’t know,” Lilly replied.

“I know what you’re thinking. I know you think that she simply married me for my, my . . . and now that I am, now that I am . . .”

He blinked twice and his eyes glistened. He could not say the words.

“All you want is to be known . . . for someone to look right inside you and say, ‘Yes, I can see to the bottom and it’s clear and pure as water . . .’ ”

He was breathing heavily now. Lilly thought of Ilya despite herself: his face, his eyes, his voice, his body. She knew what Edvard meant. Hadn’t Ilya once loved her like that? Or had she just imagined it? Lilly had been shaking when she finally plucked up the courage to make the call. It was a week since they had fought and she had managed to avoid him.

“Ilya?” she said.

“At last,” he said. “You didn’t return any of my calls. I was worried.”

The telephone line between them seemed to stretch. His voice sounded as if he were speaking from very far away.

“Lilly? Are you still there?”

“Tell me,” she said. “I know there’s something. There is, isn’t there?”

He paused.The silence hummed with static.

“Yes,” he replied eventually.

She closed her eyes. She knew it. But how bad could it be? A child, perhaps; a debt; not a woman—she prayed it was not another woman.

“Lilly . . .” he said, his voice full of regret. And she knew. It was another woman.

“Just tell me,” she said softly.

Ilya breathed deeply and in stops and starts he told her about Katya, about the last time he had seen her, about his promise.

That night Ilya had walked to the Cosy Corner and drunk vodka until closing time. But it had almost no effect on him. The weight of his secret had been lifted, but in its place he felt empty, drained, lost. She had broken off the relationship. He knew she would. He had another drink and then he went back to his apartment and lay on his bed, fully dressed, until morning.

Edvard seemed unaware of Lilly’s tear-stained face. He seemed not to see the clothes and book-strewn floor. He talked on and on without pause.

“I’ve given up everything,” he said. “And I tell you this. Love isn’t worth it. Don’t concede a thing. The more you give, the more you lose.”

“I’m sure you don’t mean that,” she replied. “She’ll come back, she always does eventually.”

Edvard gathered his face into a smile. But it was more of a grimace, his baggy eyes struggling to stay in focus, the pleats of his face pulled only slightly tighter.

“And I would take her back, because . . .” he said with a short guffaw, “the trouble is, I can’t remember the person I was before I met her.”

“That’s the trouble,” Lilly said. “That’s the trouble with love.” anne was at that moment in Munich with Kurt. He was one of

six hundred armed men stationed outside a beer cellar where three thousand people had gathered to hear the Bavarian government discuss the current political situation. After marching into the meeting, standing on a chair, and firing his pistol, Hitler announced a revolution and proclaimed the formation of a new government. The euphoria did not last long, however. After a shootout with the police the next day, a dozen Nazis were killed, the putsch collapsed, and Hitler was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison.

And the German mark kept sinking. A day’s wages, a widow’s pension, a family heirloom, a lover’s dowry, a virgin’s chastity—it was all worthless, it was all meaningless. One writer sold his book for a sizable advance. By the time the check arrived it didn’t even cover the cost of mailing the manuscript. The price of the cheapest seat in a theater was two eggs; the most expensive, a few ounces of butter. Factory workers were paid in bonds for boots instead of money. A young girl went to a party and swapped her clothes for a twist of cocaine. The man she ended up with had just sold his grand-mother’s pearls for a quart of cheap vodka. The cocaine was talcum powder; the vodka was cleaning fluid. Nobody was straight up; only fools were honest. Out on the street, in the squares and in the parks, all the statues were removed so they wouldn’t be stolen by thieves. You came home from a night out and you couldn’t get into your house, as someone had stolen the doorknob.Your roof started to leak and your phone didn’t work; the lead from the roof was gone along with the telegraph wires. And for once every girl’s mantra rang true: she had nothing to wear.