The Glimmer Palace (5 page)

One day in May, when the children were lining up to be taught about ammonites by a young geologist, Tiny Lil was summoned. Sister August was clutching a letter with a military crest as a letterhead. She turned and surveyed Tiny Lil, taking in the scuffed boots, the stained apron, and the plaits she had slept in for two nights running.

“Here’s a clean pinafore,” she said, and handed one to her. “Now go and wash your face, brush your hair, polish your boots, and be back in the front hall in ten minutes.”

The pinafore was freshly laundered and stiff with starch. The nun had changed into a clean tunic and veil. Not a single strand of fair hair escaped from her wimple.

“The Number Eighty-two will take us there,” she told Tiny Lil as she buttoned up her coat. “We won’t have to wait long.”

It didn’t occur to the nun to tell the orphan where they were going. There wasn’t enough time for Tiny Lil to ask. The streets outside the orphanage were quiet in mid-morning. A horse and cart piled with coal trotted past, followed by a lone dog with a bone in its mouth. No one else was waiting at the tram stop.

Of course, Tiny Lil immediately decided that she had finally been claimed. A parent with amnesia, a favorite fantasy of hers; a distant relative; a set of rich and kindly foster parents had recovered their memory or accidentally discovered her existence or chosen her from afar, and now she was going to meet them. Why else would she have been singled out and taken from class with no notice? It had occasionally happened to other children, so why not to her?

Sister August was staring into the distance, her beautiful long-lashed eyes fixed on a point where apple blossom was blowing across the elevated train tracks like snow. As if she felt the girl’s gaze physically, the nun turned her head and glanced down at her companion. Tiny Lil grabbed hold of her hand and held it tightly. She was too old to have her hand held, they both knew that, but Sister August didn’t pull away. Tiny Lil felt her cheeks burn and her heart beat faster. And so she lifted Sister August’s hand to her lips and kissed it.

“I don’t want to leave you,” she whispered.

But the nun didn’t hear. A tram was approaching and came to a halt right in front of them with a screech of brakes and a sigh of pressurized air.

“Right on time,” said Sister August.The doors opened and the nun used both hands to propel Tiny Lil up the steps and onto the lower deck.

The tram was packed and there was only one seat. Several men immediately stood but Sister August would not take their place. Instead she sat Tiny Lil down and then grabbed hold of a leather loop that dangled from the roof. The heavy gold crucifix around her neck swung backward and forward like a circus performer.

As they sped away from the orphanage, Tiny Lil was struck by the difference between the city outside the walls and the one she had imagined. She rarely left the grounds and had become so used to the noise of trolley cars, the rattle of the S-Bahn, the regular rhythm of construction, and the thrump of military marches outside that she saw them in her mind as children’s toys, tin soldiers, train sets, and toy men scaling building blocks.

But when she boarded the Number 82 to Schlesisches Tor, it was as if she had stepped right out of her childhood.The city they crossed was bigger, much bigger than she had ever imagined. They passed huge palaces, black stone monuments, and enormous parks.The tenements seemed to lean inward and block out all the sunlight. The road was wide but maybe not wide enough. Polished automobiles, horse-drawn carriages, and dozens and dozens of bicycles sped past them and occasionally seemed about to hit them until, at the very last moment, one or the other veered away.

The most shocking thing as they neared the center of the city, however, was the sheer number of people. Hundreds and hundreds of men in suits and women in heels were striding along the pavements and swarming at the intersections. It was amazing, she thought then, a miracle that out of two or even three million she had been discovered; she had been found at last. And she tilted her chin up as they sped through an orange light.

Almost everyone had a newspaper. Almost no one spoke. The tram smelled of cigarette smoke, warm leather, horse dung, and something unfamiliar, a sourness that stuck in Tiny Lil’s mouth like a bad taste. One man with a huge curly mustache winked. Would her relative or foster parent look like him? She stared at him until he cleared his throat and went back to his newspaper. Another woman’s eyes traveled up and down her length, took in her worn-out boots and darned stockings. Her eyes, heavy-lidded and shadowed with black kohl, finally settled on her face. Tiny Lil looked away this time.

As the tram turned the corner into the Kurfürstendamm, a large woman with a huge bag stuffed with clean laundry stood up. She joined the shoving crowd at the exit doors and then hauled herself and the bag down the stairs. The bell rang and the tram pulled off. Tiny Lil watched the woman pick up the bag from the pavement and heave it onto her head. As the tram sped away, the woman took a step into the road and the bag toppled and fell, spilling her laundry all over cobblestones.

Sister August and Tiny Lil rode down the boulevard to Charlottenburg. The bell rang again and the tram rapidly came to a halt. Sister August took her hand again and they climbed down onto the street. Almost at once they set off at such a fast pace that Tiny Lil had to run to keep up.

The street was lined with shops and department stores, each window more amazing than the one before: mannequins with floor-length fur coats and feathered hats; a toy monkey twirling a trapeze while a dancing bear spun to a silent waltz; a stack of satin boxes in reds and blues and greens topped by a single tray of chocolate-covered cherries.

“Murder in Berlin North!” shouted a boy on a bicycle, a huge bag of newspapers in his basket. “Man slays his whole family with an ax!”

“What did he say?” Tiny Lil shouted up at Sister August. But her voice was drowned out by a hurdy-gurdy that was playing outside a tobacconist’s.

“Keep up,” the sister commanded. “And jump over the puddles, don’t wade through them.”

Tiny Lil jumped, but her feet were already wet.

The music of the hurdy-gurdy overlapped with the wheeze of an organ. On the other side of the road, on a vacant lot, two girls of about her age rode round and round on the horses of a painted carousel. Maybe, she thought, she would do the same, maybe even later that day. Farther along, on a construction site, men with cloth caps and vests were digging sand and nailing wooden struts together. The rhythm of the hammer was briefly in time with a passing horse and trap. Everything seemed to be moving, escalating, rising. Even the new apartments, which were being constructed on the next block, seemed to grow an inch as she passed.

“Excuse me,” said Sister August to the woman with a grubby hem who was strolling at half the speed of everyone else. The woman turned and by the look on her face it was clear she was about to say something rude. But then she saw the sister’s habit and moved aside.

“God bless you,” she muttered, and rapidly crossed herself.

They paused at an eight-sided green pillar covered in advertisements for theater shows, magazines, and exhibitions while Sister August checked her leather-covered notebook. Then she snapped the book shut, turned on her heel, and took the first street on the right. As a girl, the nun had been taught to march by her father, and now—even when she wasn’t aware of it—she stepped to a strict one, two, one, two.

Halfway down the street was the garrison of the Third Grenadier Guards.Two flags on poles flapped in the wind. Men in uniforms with hats under their arms strolled down the curved marble steps in twos and threes, and from deep inside came the slow and uneven tick and ratchet of an inexpert typist.

“I’m expected,” said the sister to an elderly man behind a small ornate desk.

He pulled out a fountain pen and very carefully made a note in a large gilt-edged book. Women weren’t usually allowed entry to the garrison, only grieving mothers and, on special request, daughters under the age of twelve.

“The first floor,” said the man. “And then straight ahead.”

Sister August and Tiny Lil hurried up the steps and along a wide corridor. Here on the first floor, the walls were covered with portraits of tight-lipped generals, commanders, and captains of the Prussian army. At the end of the hallway a set of double doors was wedged open. A huge chandelier fitted with electric bulbs lit the room beyond. Cigar smoke drifted out, yellow and opaque. Tiny Lil noticed that Sister August’s hands were moist. She paused to wipe them both on a white handkerchief she pulled from her pocket.Then she smoothed down her face and stepped through.

Three soldiers were sitting on gilt chairs while a fourth was reclining on a velvet daybed. He was in charge, that much was immediately obvious. The others perched, balancing cups of tea on their knees.They were talking about how much money a colleague had lost at gambling. The nun and the orphan stood in the doorway and waited, the girl looking from one face to the next to the next to the next and finally back to the nun again.

“Gentlemen, we have guests,” said the fourth man. He stood up and the other three immediately followed suit. He took a step forward to shake the nun’s hand. He was at least six inches shorter than she. The flicker of his eyelid revealed that she wasn’t quite what he had expected.

“Do come in and sit down,” he urged.

Sister August and Tiny Lil sat down on the gilt chairs and were offered cups of tea.

“Thank you, no,” said Sister August, answering for both of them.

The three soldiers sat down again, on a desk, on a windowsill, and on the remaining chair. None of them, Tiny Lil suddenly realized, seemed remotely interested in her.

“Well,” said the fourth man, who had remained standing. “Let’s get straight down to business, then, shall we? To what do we owe the pleasure?”

The nun launched into the speech she had prepared in her head the previous evening. She started with facts and told them how the growing population had produced hundreds of unwanted children. She explained that despite increasing pressure on her resources, she had turned the orphanage around and was educating the children in her care to a much higher standard than before. She regretted that, although she had some money from the trust fund left by the factory owner, it was not enough.

“I know his name,” said one of the three soldiers who perched on the windowsill. “Wait, let me think.”

“I need more books,” she continued. “So that I can truly implement a proper curriculum. I will use any money you may generously offer to donate for this purpose.”

The fourth man rested one arm on the marble mantelpiece. His leather boots were polished a rich chestnut brown and his brocade tunic was covered with medals. As he listened, however, a bead of sweat appeared, then dripped down his temple. His finger tap, tap, tapped on the marble.

“You want us to buy you more Bibles?”

Sister August blushed despite herself.

“We have enough, thank you,” she said. “No, it’s textbooks we need.”

“But really, Sister, what kind of education are you going to give these unfortunates?” he said. “The lives of obscure saints, no doubt. Fire and brimstone. Heaven and hell. Rather irrelevant, don’t you think, in a modern world, in the twentieth century?”

“My superiors require that the school has a spiritual aspect, but—”

The general guffawed.

“But you know nothing of life, Sister. You know nothing of love, of passion, of loss.You are a woman and yet you are not. Is that not true?”

Sister August was so shocked she was momentarily rendered speechless. The silence was broken only by the dainty clink of three teaspoons on china.

“What’s your name?” the fourth man said.Tiny Lil didn’t immediately realize he was addressing her. Four sets of eyes gazed in her direction. “You, yes, you, girl.”

“Lilly Nelly Aphrodite,” she said very quickly. She glanced up and saw the puzzled looks on the soldiers’ faces.

“Tiny Lil,” she said a little louder, even though at eight she wasn’t tiny anymore.

“Well, Tiny Lil,” the fourth man proclaimed with a wave of his hand, “as my men know, I give to dozens of good causes: the poor, the sick, the dying. Even to poor little unclaimed and unwanted children like you. But although I deal every day with the mostly mundane, like our dear kaiser, I am an aesthete at heart.”

He hesitated.

“You do know what an aesthete is?”

“No,” she whispered.

“I am propelled by beauty. Moved by the sight of the first bud opening in spring. Inspired by the singing of a thrush. . . . I love the arts, painting, opera, horticulture.”

He paused to check on the impact of his words. The three men were nodding sagely. Sister August’s mouth was pulled taut.When his eyes fell on her, he smiled ever so slightly.

“And so, much as I am swayed by your wonderful work, Sister”— he picked up a letter from his desk— “August, I must . . .”

Sister August stood.

“I don’t think I made myself clear,” she said.

“I haven’t finished,” the fourth man said softly.

Sister August sat down again. There was a shuffle, a small general rearrangement of legs and bottoms and boots.

“Even though I am a Lutheran, a Protestant, as most of us are in the North, my dear Sister,” the fourth man said, “I would like to offer you a rose garden, a rose garden for the enrichment of the souls of all those unfortunate children. For what can be more illustrative of the pain and the beauty of human existence than the juxtaposition of rose petal and thorn?”

“Textbooks,” Sister August said, “would be a much more practical—”

“La Luna,” he interrupted. “A beautiful tea rose, bred by a Frenchman, I think, Gilbert Nabonnand. As pink as a little girl’s buttock.”

Sister August started to breathe more rapidly.

“Chinas, Damask Perpetuals—now, there’s a bloom. Cross the first with the second and you get the Bourbon Rose. You must have the Schneekönigin,” he continued, “an interesting variety although hard to cultivate . . . the Snow Queen—all white, of course, but completely lacking in scent.”