The Glimmer Palace

by Beatrice Colin

  The clearing was out of sight of the road. Sitting on logs around the small bonfire was a family of Gypsies, two men, a woman, and three children. They were boiling up a pot of coffee. Behind them a horse was tethered to a tree. A cart loaded with belongings lay upended nearby.

  “Let’s go before they see us,” whispered Eva.

  But Lilly appeared not to hear her. Instead she took out the dead rooster and held it by its feet. She walked slowly toward the fire with her arm outstretched.The whole family turned.

  “We’ll share it with you,” she said, “if we can share your fire.”

  The men glanced at each other. Maybe, Lilly suddenly thought, they would attack them, or rob them, or even rape them.There were stories about Gypsies, about how they ate their babies and stole away small children. The wood on the fire cracked like a gunshot; she jumped and Eva let out a small, high-pitched scream.The men’s faces broke and they started to laugh. The children joined in. Only the woman did not smile. Then they spoke softly to one another in another language.

  After some discussion, one of the men stepped forward and, with a small bow, took the dead bird.While one prepared the rooster, first plucking it and then taking out its innards with a knife, the other man handed them small cups of coffee. It was as thick, sweet, and black as treacle. While they sipped it, the men argued. The smell, they explained in halting German, might attract attention. And so, after another long discussion, they began to dig a hole and fill it with the ashes and burning logs from the fire. The rooster was wrapped up in leaves and placed on top of the embers. Then the Gypsies scraped soil over it all until the bird was completely buried. Finally they collected the feathers and the bird’s bloody insides in a piece of newspaper, swaddled them in a cloth, and stuffed the bundle deep into a carpetbag.

  “They buried our rooster,” Eva whispered. The Gypsy who had taken the rooster heard her as he came back to the fire.

  “It will cook slow,” he said as he knelt down and began to stoke. “No one will know.”

  Lilly watched him. He was aware of her eyes as he picked up one of the children and began to play with him, tickling and throwing him in the air. And she wondered if she had ever been loved so naturally, so unconditionally, so casually.

  “Papa!” the child cried out. “Papa!”

  The Gypsy laughed and kissed him on the belly.

  “Hey!” a voice cried out from behind.

  Two men had jumped the stream and were coming toward them. One was a policeman. The Gypsies poked what was left of the fire and stirred the can of coffee. Lilly sensed their apprehension. They had taken a risk, and now they might have to pay for it.

  “Eva,” Lilly whispered quickly. “Speak to them.”

  “Me?” she replied. “Why me? I don’t know what to say to them.”

  “Please,” she insisted. “Say you’re looking for the baron’s estate. This is the country, there’s always a baron.”

  The policeman and the other man came to a dead stop right on top of the buried rooster. There was a sickening moment before Eva turned and spoke.

  “Good day,” she said.

  “Are you all right, miss?” the policeman said, looking with some suspicion at the Gypsies.

  “Oh, we’re quite okay now,” Eva replied. “These kind people saved our lives—I would have died without a coffee.”

  The men had been ready for a confrontation, but Eva’s upper-class accent disarmed them.

  “My friend and I came down from the city, from Berlin, this morning,” she went on. “I’m a friend of the baron, and we were trying to locate his estate. Maybe you can help us?”

  The Berliners the policeman had met before were sullen and monosyllabic. Sometimes their pockets sagged to their knees with stolen potatoes, and cabbage leaves sprouted from underneath their coats. But usually they revealed nothing: their loot had been either expertly hidden or already eaten. This young woman, however, was different. The policeman was a man who, despite all the power bestowed on him, could not help but defer to a higher class. His parents had been employed by the old baron as a gamekeeper and a cook, and he had grown up in awe of the family who employed them. Unmarried, past forty, and an ardent supporter of the kaiser, he still fantasized about marrying up.

  “Well, if it’s the baron you’re looking for, you’re way off track,” he said. “His place is on the other side of the railway.”

  “Oh, no!” Eva replied. “I knew we must have taken a wrong turn. I have no sense of direction, you know. Not like you.You’re a man who looks like he always knows where he’s going.”

  The policeman smiled and nodded.

  “But you do mean the young Baron von Richthofen, of course,” he said conspiratorially.

  His companion shifted from foot to foot and watched the Gypsies.

  “Oh, yes,” said Eva, “that’s the one.”

  “Inherited the title from his uncle,” the policeman told his companion. “After that terrible business in Berlin.”

  “Terrible,” Eva echoed.

  “One bullet through the temple,” he added. “Over a woman, I heard.”

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “I heard that too.”

  “Aren’t they Jews?” his companion added, not wanting to be left out.

  “The von Richthofens?” The policeman nodded. “Bestowed the title by the king of Bavaria a hundred years ago. Bankers.”

  “Bankers,” his companion repeated, and sniffed. Then he pulled a rag from his pocket and blew his nose loudly.

  “Well, you have been very informative,” Eva said. “The other side of the train tracks . . .”

  “Can’t miss it,” the policeman added. “We can escort you if you like.”

  “Oh, no,” she replied. “I’m sure we’ll find it now.When we’ve finished our coffee.”

  The policeman lingered, glancing over at the Gypsies, who, for the whole conversation, had remained silent.

  “And give him—” “And give him—”

  “Your regards.We will,” said Eva. “Thank you.”

  “My pleasure,” said the policeman. “Oh, and ladies, there are a lot of thieves around at the moment. A gang of them even stole this poor farmer’s rooster. So if you should see anything . . .”

  “We’ll come straight to the station,” Eva continued for him. “And ask for you.”

  “Ask for me, yes,” he said.

  The men jumped back across the stream, the policeman giving Eva one long last look before they turned the corner.

  “Wave to him,” Lilly whispered.

  Eva waved. He waved back.

  “Don’t ever make me do that again,” Eva said when he was gone. “What a horrible little man.”

  The Gypsies unearthed the rooster when it was getting dark. The embers were still glowing deep red in the pit. They peeled off leaves one by one.The rooster was charred on the outside but cooked right through.The younger man pulled the meat from the bones and began to divide it up onto a row of small tin plates.

  “Good?” the younger Gypsy asked Lilly.

  She smiled at him. “Very good.”

  Eva noticed the way his eyes lingered. But Lilly seemed oblivious. Eva thought about the way she had broken the rooster’s neck. Her nerve was almost unshakable. But as Eva watched her, it was suddenly clear by the way she held her head, the curl of her mouth, the flaring of her nostrils, that Lilly knew she was being observed and did nothing to acknowledge it. Her face was a shell, her eyes ornamental; she was resilient, beautiful, cold.

  Eva had known the truth from the first time she kissed Lilly’s cool marble cheek, but she didn’t want to admit it to herself. Maybe, the thought occurred to her, she was simply being used. Maybe she should ask Lilly to leave the apartment. After all, she owed her nothing. But the thought of losing her was almost too much to bear. Eva suspected she needed Lilly more than Lilly needed her.

  Lilly was thinking about what the policeman had told them. If it was the same Baron von Richthofen from the newspaper cutt
ing, then he had been her father. And if that was so, she was half Jewish. Although she felt no different and she knew almost nothing about Jewish culture, it seemed to make sense. Jews were integrated into German society, but they were still outsiders.

  By the time they had finished eating, the children were asleep, curled up by the fire in a pile of blankets.The woman glanced over at Lilly and finally smiled. Both her front teeth were missing. Nothing is what it first appears, she told herself. Nothing is what you first assume.

  “We’d better go,” said Eva. “We don’t want to miss the train.”

  Eva noted Lilly’s hesitation. She decided at that moment that she would not let herself be rejected, not by a girl she herself had found on the street. She stood up, came over, and put her arm around her. It was a gesture of more than simple friendship; it was an indication of ownership.

  “Next time I’ll steal two,” she said. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you, Lilly, my love.”

  The Uhlan

  Soldier, stand at ease and smile for the film crew. Holy cow, it’s Kurt!Kurt Stark, thefilm director. How are you? It’s been years. Tell me about your wife, the very wonderful actress, Henny Porten. I adored her in Das Liebesglück der Blinden.What an actress—untrained too. How long have you been married now? How often do you write? Is it true it’s every day?”

  Dear Henny,

  I was filmed today for the newsreel. Maybe both of us shall appear on the same cinema screen. Me at the front. You in your latest film. Dear Henny, Henny dear, the night drags on beneath the cruel trench moon. And the beat of the bombs goes on. I don’t think I can stand it. I long for the white light of the stage or the blank, white square of the projector. I long to be clean again.

  A month later, many miles away, a hand-span across the European plain at least, Henny Porten stands on a film set with a telegram in her hand. And on the page, each typed letter looks as if it had been made with so much conviction the typist must surely have been history himself. Her fingers run over the imprint of the letters through the paper as if she were reading Braille: Kurt Stark, stop, killed in action, stop.

  In August 1916, news started appearing in the papers about a major British offensive on the Somme.Thousands had been lost in just a few hours. And yet the British hadn’t gained more than a mile. Germany was still winning.

  A list of missing presumed dead was pinned up once a week outside the Reichstag. Huge crowds of women swarmed around the building, politely waiting their turn. And at regular intervals throughout the day, however, those unfortunate mothers, sisters, or lovers who recognized a name would start to scream and have to be carried away, their bodies limp, their hair undone, their eyes glazed. The others wasted no time in pushing into the space they had left. The pages were pinned high and the print was small.

  It was so hot that summer that Eva kept the shutters closed all day. The apartment cooled down in the evenings, so they sat in the drawing room with the windows open. Eva often talked about Stefan, about how funny he was as a boy, about his plans to be a lawyer, about his favorite color, about anything that came into her head. Once or twice a week, however, funeral cortèges would slowly make their way along the street below: a single horse pulling the wagon, bunches of wildflowers scattered on the coffin. And Eva’s words would falter and she would clutch her arms around her middle as if trying to hold herself together, as if trying to soften the blow she suspected might come any day.

  “What would you like? A glass of water?” Lilly would suggest. But still, what Eva really wanted from Lilly was never offered.

  One evening, there was a knock at the door. It was past nine. Eva blanched. It could only be bad news: a telegram, perhaps.

  “Let me go,” said Lilly.

  She unlocked the door and opened it a crack. Outside stood the uhlan, fumbling in his kit bag.

  “Lost my key,” he said.

  And then he looked up.The door suddenly swung open. Eva leapt onto her younger brother and hugged him so hard he almost fell over. He dropped his bag, smiled, and kissed his sister’s hair. But his eyes never strayed from Lilly’s face.

  Stefan was so thin that his eyes seemed bluer and his hands longer. His face was tanned but it had an ashen hue. He told them that after his horse had been shot from under him and there were no more to be had, he had become a stretcher bearer. More than half of his regiment, he added, had been killed since the start of the war. He had two weeks of leave, fourteen days before he had to go back to the front. He ran out of words after this.

  They brewed him coffee, which he only sipped. They cut him slices of K-bread, which he broke but didn’t eat. They filled the bath with freshly boiled water, opened a new packet of French soap, and listened at the bathroom door as he climbed in. They could hear nothing but the faint slosh of water settling. It was so quiet that Eva wanted to go in and check on him. But Lilly held her back. Instead they sat in silence until they heard the cascade of water as he rose and climbed out.

  On the first day he went to bed and slept for fifteen hours. On the second he ate everything he could find in the cupboard, then he went out for a few hours and came back with a bag of army provisions procured from a “contact.” On the third day he fell in love.

  That morning the air was stifling and the sky was cloudless. It was already late September, but instead of lessening, the summer heat remained, oppressive and harsh, scorching the linden leaves brown before they fell and turning what was left of the grass yellow. At Eva’s insistence, they had taken the S-Bahn from Friedrichstrasse to Grunewald with a picnic blanket, a basket full of bread and jam, and a bottle of cheap wine. In the country the trees offered some shade, and they strolled along a leaf-strewn forest path with Eva in the middle, her arms linked through both her brother’s and Lilly’s.

  For long moments nobody spoke. Then Eva started talking and kept talking about anything that came into her head, from the price of butter to the names of trees. At this point she attributed her brother’s reticence to the presence of Lilly, the girl she had invited to stay in their house without asking his permission. She thought he was angry; she assumed that he wanted to be alone with his family, that he did not want to have to keep up some pretense of hospitality on his days of leave. Nothing could be further from the truth. And as soon as they arrived at the lake, Stefan sent Eva off to borrow some wine-glasses from the Swedish Pavilion.When she returned, however, with three tumblers and a flask of overpriced kümmel, her brother, Lilly, and the picnic basket were gone.

  Eva was twenty-two in 1916. And she had never kissed a man except once, at a party in 1912, when she had been invited to dance by her tango tutor. He had strutted her out onto a terrace and, overcome with a sense of drama, had pulled her into a clinch. She politely obliged and returned the kiss. But the tastes of brilliantine and garlic were so overpowering that she pushed him away and canceled the rest of the lessons.

  The only man she had ever loved was Stefan. Since the death of her mother, her love for him had grown until she had sworn to herself that she would never leave him, that she would always live with him, that she would never forsake him for anybody else. And she expected nothing less from him in return.

  When she went back to the spot in the forest where she had left the basket and found Lilly and Stefan gone, she was a little puzzled. At first she walked back and forth along the bank of the lake shouting their names. She looked for them for more than an hour and then walked back to the S-Bahn station alone. At this point she assumed that one of them had become ill and had had to return without delay to the city. She was not angry. It simply did not occur to her that they would hide from her deliberately.

  Lilly and Stefan heard Eva’s calls but didn’t reply. They sat out of sight of the path in a small hollow that overlooked the lake.

  “Sometimes I need complete silence,” Stefan whispered. “And my sister, though I love her dearly, does go on so. . . .”

  “STE . . . FAAAN!” Eva shouted nearby. “LIII . . . LLY!”

&
nbsp; “We shouldn’t be doing this,” Lilly whispered.

  Lilly was about to stand up when the uhlan took her wrist and held it.

  “Please,” he said. “Please?”

  His eyes pleaded with hers. His grip around her wrist slipped down until he held her hand. He smiled, a half-smile that softened the sharp new angles of his face. Eva’s calls grew more distant; she was walking swiftly back down the path, away from them, toward the station. Lilly stared out across the lake.

  “Don’t feel bad,” he said. “I’ll take the blame.”

  The schoolgirl—Stefan still called her that in his head, even though he knew she was no longer one—the schoolgirl brushed a strand of dark hair from her face. He had occasionally thought about her when he was at the front. When the enemy was firing and the barbed wire was snaking in the air above his head, he had found himself going over his life in minute detail. And he vividly remembered the way the car had spun around the corner as the figure of the girl in the middle of the road had come hurtling toward him; the way his foot had pushed into the floor as if pressure alone could prevent them from hitting her; and, afterward, the way she had looked up at him, shoeless, ragged, but still defiantly alive.

  And now she was real, she was here, and he realized that he had barely taken her in at all. Her wrists, her lower arms, her tiny hands were so fine, so flawless. She was wearing a pale blue dress that, despite the fact that it had a high collar and long sleeves, clung to her, revealing the slender body beneath. As the occasional leaf began to drift down from the trees and the heat haze began to rise, she sat and stared out across the lake. He would not let thoughts of the war, of what he had seen, come into his head. He was alone with the schoolgirl with a whole beautiful day ahead of them. Nothing else mattered. Nothing else.

  The uhlan stretched, a long, languid, glorious grasp of air and space. She had almost forgotten how men were: their different scale, their limbs longer and their movements more generous. He pulled the cork from the bottle with his teeth and handed it to her. She hesitated and then held the bottle to her lips and drank. And while she did so, his eyes never strayed from hers.