The Glimmer Palace (43 page)

And Bernstein seemed only to make everything more difficult for himself, for the actors, for the audience.The script was locked off, or finished, before shooting started, but the actors were given new drafts every morning because Bernstein had been at it the night before with his pen.

“If I look permanently puzzled,” Lidi said years later, “it’s because I had no idea what was going on. My character went through so many rewrites that I had no idea who she was. And so I played it without any emotion, just in case it was the wrong one.”

Without Ilya to direct her, Lidi’s famously limpid eyes became cloudy, the perfect sweep of her cheek tensed, the curve of her eyebrows flattened into a frown. Anyone who had known Hanne Schmidt, however, would immediately have recognized her in Lidi’s portrayal of the Girl. Her hair was dyed blond again and her eyes were smudged with kohl, just like her former friend’s. And she wrapped her arms around herself and looked at the world with eyes half closed.To those who had never known Hanne Schmidt, however, Lidi simply looked angelically wrecked.

“I took uppers, I took downers,” she admitted a few years later. “Quite often at the same time. I had incurable insomnia and yet I would fall asleep on my feet during the day. My dressing room was filled with glass bottles full of different-colored pills, some from the doctor and some from Bernstein. I’d take a handful and wash them down with Scotch. I have seen the film only once. And I did not recognize myself.”

The film was released in 1926. It had taken two years to complete and cost five and a half million marks, almost three times as much as originally estimated. Even though it was launched with a vast party where girls dressed as robots handed out cocktails, and even though it was promoted with ten different movie posters that were pasted all over Berlin, it received a mixture of reviews ranging from the polite to the downright vindictive. In the first week of release, the queues outside the Ufa-Palast am Zoo were made up mostly of film extras with free tickets rather than genuine paying audiences. On the street it was said to be gloomy, ponderous, self-indulgent, patronizing. Lidi’s performance was lambasted as wooden, dull, blank, the love affair as unconvincing. In contrast, Charlie Chaplin’s
The Gold Rush
had just opened and would run for six months in Germany and take four million dollars at the box office worldwide.

Kinetic
, film historians argued in later decades, managed almost single-handedly to ruin the German film industry. Anyone who had any talent and sufficient income moved away after making the film: away from Berlin, away from Germany, away from failure. Writers, directors, camera operators, electricians—dozens of them—sailed to New York and then took the train to California. “The
Kinetic
Effect,” as it was sometimes labeled, flooded Hollywood with Germans. But it was also, many pointed out later, an ominous portent of what was to come.

Although Germany’s film industry was losing twelve million dollars a year, a buyer was sought. The liberal press empire founder Rudolph Mosse was offered the chance but turned it down. And so Ufa in its entirety, which at that point included 3.5 million square feet of studio space, the production companies, the subsidiaries, plus one hundred cinemas, was bought by Alfred Hugenberg for less than a fifth of the amount of its value.

Hugenberg, a small man with a bush of white hair and shabby clothes, was an archconservative, a dabbler in politics who would later enter Hitler’s first cabinet in 1933. He was also a tycoon who had created a media empire with a publishing company, an advertising agency, and a news bureau. Ufa was the final card in his pack.

The studios in Berlin kept producing low-budget comedies and documentaries. Ilya now worked constantly. He churned out melodramas with plot lines about warmhearted prostitutes and children and workers with irresolvable problems, low-budget horror films, and cheap thrillers to meet the quota of the Parafumet. Only one in five, however, were ever distributed to cinemas.

Lidi was still offered parts, but roles so small that it would have been publicly humiliating to accept them. She stopped going out. She fell into the habit of sitting at her window at night, where she would watch the blue spark on the wires of the streetcars recede. She had long since let go of her secretary and so her mail piled up until she threw it away, unopened.

It wasn’t surprising that Bill Frame’s invitations to dinner were never answered. As MGM’s agent in Europe, however, he wasn’t used to being ignored quite so blatantly. When he appeared in person in the lobby of her apartment building with a car waiting and a huge bouquet of hothouse flowers, she claimed she’d never heard of him and asked him to send her a card. He explained—as patiently as a man who was better used to saying the same words himself to the hundreds of actors, technicians, and dancers who would have licked his boots for the chance to sign with him—that he had done so already, over a dozen times.

“Oh,” Lidi said. She looked up at him and his heart leapt. Even without makeup, she was lovely. And then, since she seemed to have run out of excuses and had nothing planned, she agreed to have coffee in a little place that she knew around the corner.

The café was shabby and the coffee revolting. Bill Frame, a six-foot Texan who had gone into the movies rather than the family oil business, adored her even more for it. As he watched her sip from her saucer all the coffee that the waitress had carelessly spilled, he tried to articulate—in the German he had been studying every morning for six months but was still struggling with—that
Kinetic
was a classic and her performance was groundbreaking. Lidi lit a cigarette and blew smoke into the air between them.

“Really?” she asked. “Even the director hated it. It was a failure.”

“You’re wrong,” he replied. “I loved it. It was an epic.”

Lidi looked at him and wondered if the flattery was simply a ruse. As far as she knew, it had never been released in America. But then he smiled at her with teeth so perfect that she suspected he had never suffered, not even from tooth decay, and she realized that he was guileless. He picked up his coffee, which had never been more than warm, and drained the cup. And then his eyes glistened with expectation as he leaned toward her.

“You must have thought about going to Hollywood,” he asked conspiratorially. “Everybody else is.”

She smiled and shook her head.

“My work is here.”

“What work? You haven’t worked for months. It’s over in Berlin for you and you know it,” he said.

She hadn’t known it until he said it. And once she knew it, she wished he hadn’t told her.

“But I don’t speak English,” she replied simply.

“You can learn,” he said, his huge hands grabbing handfuls of air. “And, more than that, can you think of a single reason not to?”

Lidi considered. And a reason came into her head despite herself: Ilya Yurasov.

“No,” Lidi told Bill Frame. “You’re right, I can’t think of a single reason.”

At the next table sat a group of unemployed men in coarse brown trousers and stained yellow shirts. They smoked and spat and read a newspaper called
Der Angriff
, subtitled
The Oppressed Against the Exploiters.
Frame, whose attention was focused solely on the German actress, did not hear the dirty jokes they shouted or sense the way they took up more space in the room than their physical mass should have allowed.

At that point Frame had never heard of Joseph Goebbels, who had been appointed Gauleiter of Berlin the previous year. Dr. Goebbels, a small man with a deformed foot and a powerful voice, had been sent to introduce National Socialism to the middle classes of the city. In a year he had completely reorganized the party, recruited a private army, orchestrated a number of parades, and encouraged his bodyguards to fight Communists in the street to provoke agitation. He would become minister of propaganda but was at that point focusing on recruitment, opening up hostels for the unemployed with free food and board, but only for members of the party.

In the back of the steamed-up café in April 1927, as Bill Frame helped Lidi, the actress, with her coat, the men, who had recently been promoted to storm troopers, ordered another round of beer and argued over a bag of posters that the Gauleiter himself had handed to them that morning and that they were supposed to post all over East Berlin. And then one of them pulled out a leaflet and began to read.

“Each area or local group is to report all Jews living in the area, including as far as possible baptized Jews, with details on their persons, age, occupation, and address. This is necessary in order to develop reliable statistics on Jews in the whole population.”

They glanced around the café, at the old Russian man in the corner who sipped sweet black tea with lemon, at the young boy with the long nose and brown eyes who was stacking bottles, at the young woman with gray eyes and a long coat who was on the point of leaving, whom none of them could place but all claimed that they had “poked.” And then they all fell silent. Their division officer had arrived.

When Kurt saw Lilly, he froze. He would have to pass her to reach his men. She was with a large man, a man who spoke German with the rounded consonants of an American. Kurt raised his hand to hide his face. He had four deep gashes down his cheek.

“Kurt?” Lilly said.

She had seen him. Kurt started to crumple a Nazi flyer in his pocket into a ball. Her eyes were searching his, taking in his face and the fact that he couldn’t raise his eyes and greet her.

“Are you all right?” she asked.

He shook his head.

“What’s happened?” she asked.

Finally, Kurt let his eyes stray to hers. He tried to empty them of everything, the night before, the fight, the pain of her nails as they tore into his cheek, the coldness of the blade as it pressed into flesh. But she saw. She seemed to look right into his heart and see it all.

“It was an accident,” he whispered, his voice as soft as a boy’s.

Lilly left the café, the storm troopers, the American, and Kurt, and stumbled out into the road. Trams, cars, bicycles, careered past. She paced the curb, back and forth.

“Hey,” said the American, suddenly appearing at her elbow. “What’s going on?” “What’s going on?”

“I need a taxi,” she said. “I need it now.”

“Is there anything I can do?” he asked.

A taxi rounded a corner and came toward them.

“No,” said Lilly as she hailed it.

“Well, don’t leave it too long to get in touch,” he said as she climbed inside. “I’ll be leaving this crazy town of yours in a couple of months. And you should too.”

As he closed the door, she gave him a look he would never forget. It was a look that was both question and answer.

The door to Kurt’s apartment stood open a couple of inches. The main room was in darkness even though it was already midday. Light spilled around the closed shutters, throwing everything in the room into silhouette.

“Hanne?” Lilly said.
“Hanne!”

As she stepped across the threshold she was immediately hit by the sweet, acrid smell of alcohol and stale cigarette smoke. She paused, listened, and was, she realized, suddenly, unaccountably scared.

“Lilly . . .” a small voice came from the bedroom. “I’m so glad it’s you.”

Hanne was lying curled up in bed, underneath a sheet. For a moment Lilly was so relieved that she sat down on the edge of the mattress and held her own face in her hands. From an apartment upstairs came the muffled sound of a gramophone playing the same song over and over, the tune audible, the lyrics muffled.

“I met Kurt,” Lilly said. “Hanne . . . I was so worried.”

She reached over and took her friend’s hand. It was cold. Hanne had barely moved at all since Lilly had come into her room; there was a stiffness about her, a tenseness in her shoulders. And then Lilly noticed that there was another smell in the room, the metallic, visceral smell of congealed blood. Very slowly she lifted the sheet. Lilly clamped her hand over her mouth.Tears spilled from her eyes.

“You stay here,” Lilly whispered. “I’m going to get an ambulance.”

Hanne reached out and grabbed Lilly’s wrist with surprising force.

“No,” she whispered. “Don’t leave me. I prayed to God that you would come, and here you are.”

“But, Hanne, you need to go to the hospital.”

“I’ll go soon, I promise,” she said. “But I’m so cold. Get in beside me. Please?”

Lilly took off her coat and shoes and climbed into the bed. Her body curved around her friend’s from behind; her arms folded around Hanne’s waist, her knees curled into the backs of Hanne’s knees, and she held her, the way they had once held each other at St. Francis Xavier’s.

“What has he done to you?” Lilly whispered.

“I forgive him,” Hanne whispered. “Tell Sister August. Tell her she made a Catholic out of me after all.”

Hanne’s breathing was regular and deep. Lilly closed her eyes and impossibly, or so it seemed afterward, her breath fell in step, in, out, in, out.

When she woke up it was dark outside. The gramophone upstairs was silent.

Hanne’s neck had been slit, her legs gashed open, her abdomen stabbed. Both eyes were blacked in with bruises and wept mascara. Only the calligraphy of her track marks remained untouched.

Kurt gave himself up without resistance. He was charged and sentenced within a month. He claimed reduced responsibility due to war wounds and gross provocation, and the judge, having looked briefly at Hanne’s past record of employment, drug use, and marital infidelity, gave him a six-month suspended sentence.

The Sisters of St. Henry had just installed a telephone. The nun who answered it clearly didn’t quite believe that her voice could actually travel all the way from Munich to Berlin without a huge amount of human effort.

“Can you hear me?”
she yelled.

“Yes,” Lilly replied. “I’m looking for Sister August. It’s a personal matter.”

“Just a moment,”
the nun shouted.
“I’ll fetch her.”

In the long moments before Sister August was fetched, Lilly began to shiver. She had not wept for Hanne Schmidt. Not when she greeted the police and showed them the body, not even when she had packed up Hanne’s possessions and taken them home. She had simply told herself that Hanne had done it again. She had walked out on her without notice, without a backward glance. But in that ache of time while the nun was being fetched and the silence of the telephone line wailed, she accidentally let herself realize that this time she wouldn’t let herself be found again.This time she was really gone for good.