“Would you like some?” she asked. She handed him the bottle but he didn’t drink.
“How is your eye?” he said.
Lilly was momentarily puzzled. And then her hand flew to her face.
“My eye? It was nothing,” she said.
“Can I take a look?” He traced her eyebrow very gently with his little finger.
“You have a scar,” he said.
“It’s nothing.”
“I never thought I’d see you again,” he whispered. “But I came back . . . and there you were.” She held his gaze.
“Kiss me,” he said.
Without hesitation, trepidation, or guile, she kissed him. Stefan let go of the bottle and it rolled down the gentle slope toward the lake and began to spill its contents in slow dark gulps.
Afterward she pulled back and stared at the uhlan’s face. Ever since he had come back from the front, she had had trouble sleeping. She felt as though she had helium in her blood. Ignore it, she had told herself. It won’t happen. But it had. It was happening. She touched his cheek and ran her finger along the blue graze of his skin. His mouth was so, so soft. There was nothing hard about him, nothing brittle or flinty or cruel. He was not Marek or Eva or Otto. He was Stefan—a name that sounded like a secret, whispered.
The uhlan had come to the conclusion that his life would be short. He had decided he would never have children, become a partner of a legal practice, as he had once planned, or take his grandchildren to the park. When he looked up and saw Lilly at the front door of his uncle’s flat, he was instantly sure that it meant he would die within the year. Why else would this young girl he had fantasized about be there—a girl who seemingly had no sweetheart, no family, no one. And he did not resist. He offered himself to his fate with an open heart and a distinct lack of guilt. He wasn’t the only one.The city was full of the newly wed and the newly widowed, half dressed in white, the other in black.
Stefan slipped his hand beneath the arch of Lilly’s back and pulled her down beside him. He could, he told himself, spend days, weeks, just looking at her throat; he was completely addicted to the clean, sweet scent of her; he was mesmerized by her voice. He wanted her so badly he ached.
“Stop,” she said on the banks of the Wannsee. “Not yet.”
Ten days later Stefan married Lilly in a private service in the side chapel of the Church of St. Michael near the Oranienplatz. He had found a Catholic priest who would marry them without notice. In the registry she signed her name in full. She was almost sixteen. He was twenty. Although he had sold a painting to a jeweler for a pair of simple gold wedding rings, they had neither the right forms nor their birth certificates. The priest ignored the paperwork: the soldier was returning to France first thing the following morning.
The rain started during the ceremony and didn’t stop. It streamed down the gutters and pooled in great floods on the street. Outside Stefan’s window, the leaves turned overnight. In shades of gold and amber, red and orange, they blazed briefly before being blown away by gusts of sodden wind.
As Lilly and Stefan lay naked in the reflected light from the window, their bodies seemed to be drawn with water, their skin shimmering with drops and rivulets and tiny tides. Stefan kissed Lilly’s face, her eyes, her ears, her neck; she was so fragile, so lucent. It was as if, at that moment, the rain that cascaded down outside was inside, too, in his room, in his bed, in his blood. He reached down and ran one hand along the inside of her thigh while the other found her breast.
Lilly’s body stiffened; she had to fight a rising panic in her chest. The last time, she told herself. Don’t think about the last time. She kissed his face, then found his ear and whispered.
“Teach me.Teach me how to love you.”
Stefan’s hands stopped. He was momentarily puzzled. Did she mean the emotion or the actual act itself? Although he would never admit it, he had no experience of sex; he only knew the bare mechanics from the filthy talk of the other men in his barracks. At the front he had been issued with a book of coupons, each of which he could exchange for ten minutes with a prostitute. He had waited in line, but when his turn had come he had taken one look at the elderly whore from Hamburg and lost any inkling of desire. And now Lilly was staring up at him, her breath fast, her eyes alight with expectation. He pulled back and sat up.
“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.
Not Marek but the Gypsy. Lilly focused on the Gypsy and the way he had loved the child. It had looked so easy, so effortless. But now, as the rain poured down and the hours slid past too fast, her limbs, her hands, her heart felt as though they were made of wood. Although she had shed a skin with Eva, unwrapping herself on the inside was much, much harder.
For a moment neither of them moved. Then Lilly took a long, deep breath. A swell of sadness rose and then fell away. She focused on the back of Stefan’s neck, the nape, where the curve of his perfect head met the line of his spine. She reached up and touched him. He shivered.
“There,” she whispered.
She picked up his arm and ran her finger along the inside of his elbow.
“And there.”
But he still wouldn’t turn.
And so she took his large hand and held it within her two small hands and pressed it to her chest, to her heart, until he finally shifted round and faced her again. Speak with your eyes, the actor’s words suddenly came back to her. I have fallen in love with you, her eyes said. Believe me. And he understood and something within his face opened, capitulated, released.Without losing his gaze, she placed the hand over her breast. Then she reached and cupped her hand around his neck again, and slowly but firmly pulled him back down until he was lying beside her.
“I just need to learn you first,” she whispered. “All of you.”
In the half-light of the rain, Lilly explored Stefan’s body with her fingertips, from the tidemarks of sunburned skin around his wrists and his collar to the hair on his toes, from the pale angles of his shoulder blades to the conch curl of his ears. Finally she moved down the center of his body from his chest, to his belly, to his penis. Stefan’s eyes opened; he reached down for her.
“Come to me,” he whispered.
And then, with a rattle of keys and the moan of hinges, the front door slammed.
“I’ve got schnapps!” Eva shouted down the hall. “Three bottles of kümmel! A pint of Bavarian beer!”
She didn’t do it deliberately, Eva told herself later. She loved her brother. She just wanted to celebrate. What is a wedding without a party, after all? And so, later, as the three of them sat round the kitchen table and Eva talked, Stefan started to drink, just as she knew he would.They carried him to bed at midnight. He was so drunk that he had passed out.
“Maybe if we’d had something to eat?” Lilly had said as she began to unbutton his shirt.
“I’ll do that,” snapped Eva. “He’s still my brother, you know!”
The uhlan was reported missing in action in November 1916. Lilly saw his name immediately. Stefan Mauritz—that was all: no details of his regiment or on what front he had been fighting. Her eyes ran over the list again just to make sure. But there it was: Stefan Mauritz. She would have to turn and tell Eva. Her heart thundered and her hands clenched and she could not. And then she felt a hand on her arm.
“There.There,” said Eva. “Didn’t you see it?”
They had come to the newspaper’s office for a first edition. The newspapers printed up the casualty lists before the Reichstag posted them. “You have to pay for bad news now,” somebody said. Every morning at seven, the pavements outside the Berliner Morgenpost office were thronged as people queued to buy their copy before the paper reached the newsstands. Eva took the newspaper out of Lilly’s hands and they pushed their way through the crowd. She headed across the Königsplatz and they walked west through the Tiergarten to the radiating circle of the Grosser Stern. One solitary motorcar chugged around the huge fountain and veered back toward the Brandenburg Gate. And then it was
only delivery boys on bicycles, their baskets piled high with newspapers and brown paper packages, whistling or shouting out to each other as they sped along side by side.
Eva marched down the Siegesallee toward the zoo, and Lilly walked a few steps behind. Neither broke down. Neither wept. Neither spoke. They passed a small beer tavern, locked up for the war, and stopped a little farther on, on a bridge over a lake. They listened to the sounds of the animals from the other side of the perimeter wall of the zoo; the distant screech of parrots and the low blare of an elephant, the bark of a sea lion and the hollow howl of an ape. Then Eva picked up a rock from the ground. She hurled it into the water, where it shattered the smooth surface.
“Down with this war!” she shouted into the thick winter air. “Down with the government! Down with the kaiser!”
Lilly did not respond. Instead she started to shiver. She shivered as if she had been the lake’s surface, shattered by the trajectory of a rock. A young woman pushing a pram walked toward them. Her baby started to scream in huge drawn-out sobs. A lump rose in Lilly’s throat, and she concentrated on taking air into her lungs and letting it out again, on breathing. The young woman passed and the baby’s screaming gradually receded.
“It’s not certain,” Lilly said. “He might be wounded. Mightn’t he?”
“Why do you care?”
“He’s my husband, Eva.”
Eva let out a small exhalation of derision. And then she turned away. Lilly watched the slow flight of a swan above as it flew toward the river Spree. They had been married for six weeks, and in that time they had spent just one night together. What Eva clearly suspected was true: the marriage had not been consummated.
At first Eva felt that she had hidden her true feelings remarkably well. When her brother and Lilly had eventually come back from Wannsee, their faces flushed with the cold and their clothes covered in fragments of leaf and bracken, she had looked from one face to the other and immediately guessed what had happened. Although she insisted that she didn’t mind when they confessed where they had been, Eva felt, in fact, as if she had been garroted.
Of course, Lilly asked to borrow a dress for the wedding, and of course Eva obliged. But as she watched “that girl,” as she had now started to call her—that girl whom she had found scooping up entrails from the street like a beggar—marry her very own brother, wearing her very own favorite blue dress, she felt enraged, betrayed, heartbroken. How dare Lilly steal away Stefan? And how dare Lilly give away so easily the one thing she had withheld from her for so many months? Eva had loved her; she loved her still. And one by one she bit every single fingernail right down to the quick.
“Congratulations,” she had said with a forced smile after the ceremony. “You go home. I have something to do. I’ll be back later.”
When Eva had revealed what she had in her purse, she became a “regular customer” once again at the butcher’s. She was invited into the back shop, where she swapped her mother’s diamond engagement ring for the alcohol. And then she hurried back through the rain, against the wind and the falling leaves that danced in the air like huge pieces of dirty brown confetti, to spoil her brother’s wedding night with smuggled Polish schnapps.
Two weeks after they had seen Stefan’s name on the list, a package arrived through the post from the war ministry. It was stamped with the insignia of his regiment. Eva opened it. Inside were a bread bag, an identity tag, and an army watch.
“He’s not dead,” Lilly said.
Eva’s eyes were sharp with tears and spite.
“What did you say?”
Lilly held the package up to her face and inhaled.
“His wedding ring—where is it? This is just an identity tag. Maybe he lost it. It’s a mistake.”
Eva left it all lying on the kitchen table and went to her room. Lilly pulled out the Remington typewriter. She would write to the war ministry, to his regiment, to prisoner-of-war camps, to all the hospitals that took injured men from his division. She inserted some paper and started to type.
Later, Lilly was stirring some potato soup, the last of her rations for the week. A stack of letters lay on the kitchen table. Eva hadn’t come out of her room all day.The soup was ready.
“Eva?” Lilly said as she knocked softly on the door. “Are you all right?”
For a moment no sound came from the room, and then the door swung open. Eva was standing there, her face fixed.
“No,” she said. “I’m not all right. How can you make soup?”
“How can I make soup? We have to eat, Eva,” Lilly said. “And I’ve written letters.”
“You wasted your time.”
Was Lilly’s work futile? A temporary respite from what might be the truth? She wasn’t ready to believe it yet.
“What else can I do?” Lilly said. “I have to do something.”
As Eva watched, Lilly’s eyes dulled, but her skin was still aglow. She turned to go back to the kitchen but Eva placed a hand on her shoulder and stopped her.
“What else can I do?” she repeated.
Eva gazed at her mouth, her eyes, and then her mouth again. And then, very suddenly, she pressed her lips to Lilly’s. Lilly was momentarily taken aback, but she wasn’t surprised. The kiss, however, was tempered with anger; if only, Eva told herself, Lilly hadn’t been so attractive—if only her lips, her ears, her neck hadn’t been so desirable—then this wouldn’t have happened; she wouldn’t have felt angry with herself, angry with Stefan, angry with the whole world, in fact, and everyone in it. It was her fault: it was all Lilly’s fault.
Lilly could almost smell Eva’s misery; she could sense the wetness of her palms and the cantering of her heart. She stiffened but she did not pull away. How could she? She had lost a husband but Eva had lost a brother. Maybe this would help her, comfort her, calm her. But Eva took her stillness as compliance. Her kiss grew steadily more insistent; her tongue probed into Lilly’s mouth; her hand slipped down onto Lilly’s breast. What had begun as a gesture of comfort had become something else. Lilly pulled back, but Eva would not let her go.
“Eva,” she said, “you have to stop.”
“I wanted you first,” she whispered. “I found you first.”
Lilly’s face started to burn. Was this how Eva saw her, as something to be claimed? And her heart seized up.
“Do you feel nothing for me?” Eva continued.
“Not like that. Not like I loved . . . love . . .” she corrected herself.
Stefan. The unspoken name hung between them like a sheet of lead. Eva’s shoulders started to heave, not with sadness, but with pure hot fury. Lilly had used her, misled her, duped her. Finally Eva let her go, wiping her mouth with the back of her hand. Lilly turned, but Eva could see that her eyes were cast downward and her arms hung limply at her sides. At last Eva had her. And so she played another card.
“The day we ran you over,” she said, “you were wearing a uniform. You never went to that school, did you?”
“Why do you ask me now?”
“Tell me!”
“No,” Lilly said. “I didn’t.”
It was at that moment that Lilly realized that Eva had maneuvered her into a corner with the skill of a champion chess player. What she had lost, however, was not immediately evident.
Eva stopped talking. For three long days she did not say a single word to Lilly. On the fourth day Lilly could stand it no longer. She opened her suitcase and started to put things inside it. She made a semblance of packing, folding, sorting, closing, but as she put on her coat she realized she had no idea what it was she had packed. Eva would change her mind, wouldn’t she? She wouldn’t let her go. Lilly found Eva sitting at the kitchen table with a cup of hot water in front of her, her body taut, her eyes impassive.
“I suppose . . . I suppose I should go,” Lilly said.
Eva nodded. Lilly was so taken aback that she felt physically winded. So she had been wrong.
“Will you at least see me to the door?”
&nbs
p; As Lilly stepped across the threshold, she turned and her eyes met Eva’s. Lilly swallowed twice. “If . . . when . . . he comes back . . .” she said.
“I’ll be in touch,” Eva said.
When the door closed, Lilly did not walk away. Her head slowly dipped forward until it was resting on the dark wood paneling. On the other side of the door, Eva pressed her ear to the wood and listened, waiting to hear the sound of footsteps going down the stairs. When she heard nothing, she pulled away. Her fingers ran along the grain of the wood, back and forth. She traced a face, a mouth, two eyes. And then she balled her hand and thumped it on the door.
The footsteps were neither hurried nor slow. Eva listened as they receded down the stairs and out onto the street. And then, room by room, she bagged up any evidence of her former friend and threw it all down the garbage chute.
illy found a job in a munitions factory and lodgings in Rixdorf with a widow called Gudrun, who also worked at the factory. Lilly slept behind a blanket partition in a tiny attic room and shared a communal bathroom with seven other families. After twelve-hour shifts, she and Gudrun would take it in turns to queue for food. But no matter how exhausted they were, they had to remain alert at the factory. One woman fell asleep on the production line and lost her hand. Another dropped some powder, caused a small explosion, and killed three of her friends.
Lilly’s job was to secure washers around the metal casings of howitzer shells. They were covered with thick black grease, grease that ingrained itself into her palms and made them itch. The machinery around her stamped and whined with such intensity that Lilly’s ears rang for hours afterward. All she thought about when she worked was to put the washers in the right place. All she did was count the number of shells—one, two, three, four—and when the clock struck the hour, she started over again. She did not think about the war or about Stefan and Eva. At least, not during the day. At night, despite herself, her dreams took place on the sun-soaked banks of the Wannsee or in the Steglitz apartment as torrential rain fell outside.
The Glimmer Palace Page 20
