The Glimmer Palace (6 page)

He looked pointedly at Sister August. Sister August looked back at him. Neither would look away.

“The Romans were fond, you know, of roses,” he continued. “They imported them from Egypt. I wonder if our dear Lord wore a wreath of Gallica thorns around his head at Calgary. Or Albas?”

The fourth man suddenly took three short strides and bent down on one knee in front of Tiny Lil.

“What an interesting face,” he said. “Let’s ask the would-be recipient of my charitable donation: What would you like . . . roses or textbooks?”

The room grew silent. Tiny Lil stared at the scuffed toes of her all-too-rapidly polished boots. There was a discernible pool of dirty puddle water brought in from the street on the parquet floor beneath her feet. A rush began to well up behind her face like an approaching sneeze; her eyes burned, her mouth pulled taut, her forehead creased. She gulped a deep breath and blew it out, slowly, through her nose.

“Tiny Lil?” Sister August said. “Answer him.”

The fourth man leaned forward a fraction. He was so close she could hear the almost inaudible clank of his medals jangling together on his chest. He was so close she could smell the extract of lavender in his soap. She glanced up. He was so close that she could see contempt only thinly masked in his eyes.

“Cat got your tongue?” he said, with just the tiniest hint of impatience.

Textbooks, textbooks, textbooks. Arithmetic and Latin. Literature and history. Sister August shifted in her seat and sighed out loud, as if this were only to be expected from an orphan. And Tiny Lil, who knew she wasn’t tiny anymore, was suddenly filled with fury. How dare she make her believe that she was about to claimed, to be wanted? How dare she bring her all the way to this room full of men simply to humiliate her? How dare she still call her Tiny Lil?

She looked up and she stared in turn into every pair of the expectant eyes except one.

“I think . . . I think . . . roses,” she said.

The fourth man laughed a short, mirthless little laugh.

“Orthopedic underwear,” proclaimed one of the three soldiers as he leapt to his feet. “I knew I knew the name.”

The Winter Garden

G
lass film studios, sheer and clear and filled with sun, glazed edificeswhere beautiful women blossom and handsome men wilt. And the light floods in all day for free; all you have to do is catch it.

Asta Nielsen, Danish actress, eyes as round as saucers, hips as narrow as a wink, walking down a city street. All of a sudden—Hey there, stop him!—a handsome young ruffian steals her purse. He turns and runs but accidentally drops his misbegotten handful. And in that pause, that wafer-thin moment when he stoops and she grabs his sleeve, Asta’s expression changes from indignation to recognition. He’s her long-lost darling brother, fallen on hard times.

But by and by here’s a policeman running down the street with a lady. He sees the brother beggar. The lady points her umbrella and says the words “It’s him, it’s him.” Before he can run, the brother is arrested, and Asta can do nothing but plead with her hands, her mouth, her saucer eyes, to no avail. Her purse, still lying on the cobbles, is snatched up by some opportunistic street kid. And as if God knew the script, right at that very moment a cloud covers the sun.

“Cut!” the director shouts. “Cut, cut, cut!” The film was so nearly in the can, and now they’ll have to shoot another day. Asta Nielsen swears softly in Danish and calls for coffee laced with something stronger.

Hanne Schmidt, flanked by her three younger brothers, stood on the doorstep of the orphanage and asked Sister August if she could speak to her in private. She carried the youngest boy on her hip and slapped the other boys’ heads when they picked their noses or fiddled with their buttons. Her heels were high and she wore a hat with a feather on it, rouge, and a line of lipstick. There was a yellow bruise on her left cheekbone just beneath the eye. The nun led them in, gave the boys bowls of soup, invited the girl into her office, and closed the door.

The girl—who, despite the clothes, could not have been more than twelve—told the sister that her mother had leapt from the roof of the newly built apartment building in which they had been living for a low rent while the plaster walls dried. They had a couple more weeks to go, the walls were still damp, but the reason for her suicide was her husband’s desertion.

The story was verified in the evening paper, although there was no mention of the woman having any children. Sister August prayed for all four of them and tried to take them up to the dormitories where she intended to place them, sardine-style, in any available bed.

“Oh, no,” said Hanne Schmidt. “I’m not staying.”

Nobody was really sure what Sister August had said to her, but the girl didn’t speak again for six months. After washing off the makeup, she was given a patched-up orphanage dress, boots, and a pillow and instructed to share with the girl at the end, the small one.

Tiny Lil didn’t object when the new girl started to take off her boots and then climb under her very own sheets. Most of the orphans in her dormitory had been doubled up already, and some even claimed that it was much warmer in winter that way. And so she shifted as close to the edge as she could and tried to ignore the air that whisked beneath the blankets and the pair of small, dirty feet that the new girl had tucked beneath her pillow.

Lights had been out for at least an hour but Tiny Lil couldn’t sleep. And she wasn’t the only one. The liquid glimmer of the new girl’s open eyes was clearly visible in the dark.

“I know you’re awake,” Tiny Lil whispered. “What’s your name?”

But the new girl simply sighed out loud and turned over.

Her silence did not crack in the following days, either. She sat with her head upon the desk in the schoolroom and ate her meals quickly and furtively, saving her bread or her potatoes to pass on to her brothers when she thought no one was looking. At bedtime she climbed into the bed they shared, but if any part of her touched Tiny Lil, she would immediately shift away as if stung by a rogue charge of electricity.

Sometimes when Tiny Lil woke in the middle of the night, the girl would be gone. She would lie awake for as long as she could, waiting for her to return. But when she opened her eyes in the morning, the girl would always be back, with smudges beneath her eyes and her pale hair hanging in strands around her face.

Hanne and her brothers were the last orphans that St. Francis Xavier’s accepted in 1910. There was simply not enough room for any more. As it was, some of the younger boys shared three to a cot. But the children didn’t stop coming. They came in rags and muddy clogs, in pairs and alone, dragging blankets or holding screaming babies.When she had enough to spare, Sister August gave them food. When it was all gone, she gave them a few pfennigs and blessed their filthy heads.

The general sent a couple of gardeners to tend the roses. Despite the poor soil and the lack of sunlight, they did exceptionally well.

Tiny Lil knew when they left the garrison of the Third Grenadiers that she had done something unforgivable. All the way home, the nun stared out the window and did not react when strangers crossed themselves or genuflected. At one point she looked down at her with an expression of such incomprehension that Tiny Lil would have howled an explanation at her had they not been surrounded by commuters on a rush-hour tram. And so she struggled to keep her face composed. Sister August clearly did not realize what she had done; she had no idea at all. And this hurt far more than accepting that she was just one more unclaimed, unwanted orphan all over again.

As they sped through the Tiergarten and she thought of the man with the mustache whom she had stared at on the way, a drop of hot salty liquid landed on her lip. It was a tear, her own tear, which she had wept without realizing. And so she turned around and wiped her face quickly with the back of her sleeve so that Sister August would not know or see or feel obliged to feel even slightly sorry for her.

The nun stared at the back of Tiny Lil’s head as the little girl wiped her face with her sleeve. Normally she would have chastised her for this, reminded her about the spread of germs and the cost of soap. But this time she said nothing. She was thinking about the general. She didn’t understand how it could have turned out this way, how he had managed to turn Tiny Lil against her. Maybe he was right. What did she know of life? And why had she chosen Tiny Lil? When she examined her motives, she realized that the girl had in fact chosen her first: from very early on Tiny Lil had singled her out. And despite what had just happened, she was flooded with love of the kind that she knew was inappropriate. This, she decided, had to change. It was a weak spot, a vulnerability. Besides, she could never be the parent that the girl so desperately needed. The tram began to slow; it was their stop. They climbed off wordlessly and walked back to the orphanage with a visible gap between them.

The general’s rose garden started an unfortunate trend.The economy was booming, and a number of wealthy benefactors followed his example. An industrialist bequeathed a full set of brass instruments. The director took up the French horn but could manage only the most rudimentary of Christmas carols. The rest of the instruments gathered dust in their cases; they couldn’t afford a music teacher.The orphans were also given a miniature train, a set of child-size Shakespearean costumes, and several dozen crates of a new kind of sweeteneddrink. Sister August was privately exasperated.They didn’t have the room for any more things. But after such relentless soliciting, they could hardly refuse them.

In December that year, a cabaret group came to St. Francis Xavier’s to put on a Christmas show for the children. It was the very same cabaret group that Tiny Lil’s mother had been a member of, the very same cabaret group who had sent her as a baby to the couple in the suburbs and who still felt vaguely responsible—the very same cabaret group who had sent her the doll with the wind-up smile that had subsequently been unearthed by one of the general’s gardeners and taken home for his daughter.

The visit had been organized by an actor named Wernher Siegfried. He had long black hair, which he swept back with olive oil; a large, forceful nose; and a weak chin, which he hid, when he remembered, with his hand. He thought he had been in love with the orphan’s mother and had once successfully consummated his infatuation in a boat hut on the shores of the Tegeler See in the early spring of 1899. While the rest of the cabaret group were drunkenly skating on the ice after drinking copious amounts of Liebfraumilch, he had coaxed the actress into the hut after she had twisted her ankle, not seriously, and was in need of sympathy and a shot of something stronger.

The Christmas show was a short musical play called
The Chocolate Sailor
. Set in a candy shop, its cotton-candy heroine was tied up with licorice laces by a greedy child. The highlight was a chase sequence, during which the cabaret group, dressed up as a box of chocolates, pursued the child—a small, middle-aged woman in a very short dress—with a huge candy cane through the audience.

Wernher cast himself as the sailor but spent much of the performance peering out at the audience and trying to work out which one was Lilly Nelly Aphrodite. His eyes fell on Hanne Schmidt, who looked about the right age. At the end of the show he marched down to the row she sat in and persuaded her to join him on the stage. He was unaware that Hanne Schmidt had not said a word since she had arrived and was less surprised than the audience when she took the stage, closed her eyes, and launched into the musical hit of a few years before, “Bower of My Heart,” unaccompanied.

Standing on her tiptoes, Hanne waved the ghost of a feather boa. She had a strong voice but sang without any hint of expression at all. And, sung at half its usual speed, the song seemed to ring with melancholy.

“Safe in the bower of my heart,”
she sang,
“a place strewn in blossom just for you, where always and forever, for all time and a day, the love I feel will never fade or be untrue.”

One of her front teeth was chipped and this made her consonants whistle. Her voice was low and just a little hoarse; when she hit the high notes, it cracked and threatened to break. But not until she had reached the last lines,
The blooms may wither on the vine, but I know you’ll always be mine
, did her voice trail off and her eyes open.

The applause was spontaneous and genuine. Hanne Schmidt barely even smiled in acknowledgment. She went back to her seat, picked at a patch on her orphanage dress, and seemed to be working on pulling out the stitching. Sister August did not move for more than a minute. She sat breathing in, out, in, out, as the children, the cabaret group, and even Hanne herself wondered if she was for the Turkish slipper.

“Thank you, Hanne,” she said eventually, and swallowed twice in quick succession. “Now, would you invite the actors into my study for tea?”

The bruises that had covered Hanne’s entire body when she arrived had long since faded. And although she was still thin, she didn’t look consumptive anymore. But there were still dark half-moons beneath her pale blue eyes, and her chipped front tooth meant that she seldom smiled. It was the damage that you couldn’t see, however, that Sister August worried about.