The Glimmer Palace

by Beatrice Colin

“My life,” Lidi was later quoted as saying, “in the later years of the war? I was not there, I was an Ersatzmensch, a fake person.”

  It was true that Lilly still wore her wedding ring and talked about her husband as if she had recently heard from him. But there were plenty of others who were living with untruths: plenty of wives who were not really married and mothers whose children looked like the French prisoners of war who were imprisoned in Spandau. Nothing was real, nothing was what it said it was on the box: the dried egg and dried milk from the market were really just white and yellow powder made of washing soda, starch, and powdered paint; the substance sold as flour was three parts ash, and the coffee was made of ground-up bark. With food, as with everything else, you had to close your eyes and swallow.

  In October 1917, just as Lenin had promised the kaiser, the Bolsheviks revolted. The czar was imprisoned along with his entire family and the huge country of Russia erupted into civil war. As the kaiser drank Herr Lenin’s health in vodka for bringing the bloody battles on the Eastern Front to a rapid halt, the government promised jam. In the markets of Berlin, hundreds queued all day. At five p.m. the crowd that had waited so good-naturedly in the rain was told that the jam shipment had been canceled. That night Gudrun wept openly. Somehow the idea of jam, which in peacetime was called poor man’s butter or children’s food, jam made of purple damsons or blackberries picked from the side of the railway, had grown in her mind until she could taste it, until she craved it, until she couldn’t eat another piece of so-called bread without it. It had come to represent hope, innocence, peace, and then, despite the promises, there was none to be had.

  In November, a scandal broke when it was disclosed that government officials in the area of Neukölln had been buying up food at prices well above the regulated level. The black market, despite all the authorities had said, was now demonstrably the only market. At Alexanderplatz market, one woman walked up to a bread stall and just took what she wanted without paying. Others followed her example and within minutes several tons of overpriced bread, vegetables, and food substitutes had been liberated. Gudrun came home with a jar of a pale watery substance labeled applesauce and three loaves of bread. They ate it all in one sitting, without guilt. The next day, however, there were far fewer stalls at the market, and dozens of police.

  Food demonstrations started to take place every other day. One woman hit a shopkeeper with his own broom and then, together with a group of her friends, chased him out of the neighborhood. The city was awash with rumors: The government had bought herring as a meat substitute, peace talks with the East had broken down, the herring had all been sent to Poland, the bread ration was about to be reduced again.

  And still the war rumbled on. As spring began to crack the ice of the trenches, the German army launched another offensive on the Western Front.They drove the Allies back forty miles and brought in more troops for a final push. It was, in hindsight, a last burst of bravado in the face of defeat. Even across no-man’s-land, the German soldiers could hear the smooth action of the Americans’ newly forged artillery and see the flush of their well-fed cheeks. But worse still were the times they couldn’t see their faces. Tanks, hundreds of them, rolled toward the German lines and broke through previously impregnable defenses.The Allies had eight hundred of them, the Germans twenty. At night the soldiers read about the riots in Berlin. Come home, their wives’ and mothers’ letters begged them. No wonder so many surrendered. No wonder so many of them deserted and began to walk the long way home.

  There is a photograph taken in the early days of 1918. Around thirty women in heavy coats and mufflers march through Treptower Park. Some smile for the camera, but most of them clutch their handbags in their fists and look primed for a fight. If the picture had been in color, you would have noticed that most of the women’s faces were tinged yellow. That’s how you could spot a munitions worker; the TNT gave them jaundice. Lilly is third from the left. She was one of one hundred thousand women who had walked out at nine a.m. on the twenty-eighth of January and been on strike for three days.

  Shortly after the photograph was taken, the striking munitions workers were joined by a group of Spartacists. Led by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, this radical group read Marx and opposed the war. They had gotten their name when Liebknecht, on flyers that derided the kaiser, had signed himself Spartacus. They wanted nothing less than an uprising on the Russian scale. They wanted a revolution. In their ranks, handing out leaflets and shouting “Down with the war!” was Eva Mauritz.

  Shortly after Lilly had left, Eva had met a woman in the Café des Westens. The woman was in her mid-thirties and called Lutz Ehren. She had made love to Eva in the ladies’ toilet and then invited her to a Spartacist meeting. The relationship didn’t last and Ehren left the party only six months later, but Eva joined the Spartacists and became a Communist.

  As a channel for her anger, it proved effective. How she had longed to reject the comfortable mediocrity of her own middle-class background! What better way to liberate herself politically and sexually? But her newfound political convictions did not completely cure her. Over the previous year, she had come to regard the girl who had toyed with her and then married her only brother as manipulative and poisonous, her motives suspect, and her departure deserved. And so she had rewritten what had happened on the day that Stefan’s possessions arrived. She had repeated it so often to herself that she practically believed it: how Lilly had torn up the letters that she herself had typed; how she had gone without leaving any way of contacting her, should Stefan’s regiment be mistaken and he be alive after all; how she had abandoned her.

  When they met face-to-face in the park as the placards waved and the crowds chanted antigovernment slogans, however, Eva was shocked. In reality the girl looked nothing like the image she had kept alive in her mind. She had a yellow tinge to her face and grease spots on her cuffs, and her nails were rimmed with black. But then Eva noticed that her eyes were still bright. She had forgiven her. And what was worse, she still had hope. At that moment Eva’s heart was filled with such animosity that later she was ashamed.

  “Any news?” Lilly asked. “Have you heard anything?”

  “I have heard they have butter in Munich,” Eva replied.

  As the protesters began to jeer and the government forces began to approach, as the sky threatened snow and the wind blew in from the north, Eva pushed her hair away from her face. On her thumb she wore Stefan’s wedding ring. Lilly had seen it, Eva was sure of it. Something in Lilly’s eyes finally faded. Now Eva had made her believe it: she had made her believe that Stefan, her brother, was dead. Even though he lay not a mile from the park, in his own bed, with his discharge papers on the dresser.

  The Last Train

  The government has bought the film industry. Backed up by the GermanBank, they’ve taken over the Tempelhof’s Oberlandstrasse, those huge glass studios built for light, and renamed it Ufa. Now they need extra staff, canteen assistants, office cleaners, and wardrobe girls. The pay is peanuts, but as soon as word gets out they’re hiring, they have to hire staff to hire staff.

  Today the trees are covered in catkins as soft and tiny as mink coats for mice. Inside, there must be more than a hundred women waiting.The walls are freshly painted and the floor is newly varnished, and nobody wants to lean or sit in case they leave a mark. Although they wear their best dresses, their smartest hats, and their jazziest shoes, if you looked closer you’d see that their stockings are still full of darns and their hems are edged with soot.

  Only the older girls get the jobs. Or the quiet ones or the ones who don’t know the difference between Henny and Pola. The rest can’t understand it. They weep and demand to see the boss, and when politely refused, they stamp and shout. And then they go back to their stone-cold apartments, where there is nothing to eat, and pace up and down with their coats on before running out to the Picture Palace or the Mozart Hall just in time to catch the last showing.

  The trains from the Western Fron
t usually came into Friedrichstrasse Station after nine in the evening. Most of the carriages carried coffins, coffins made of splintery fresh wood that still smelled of sap. These trains were always met by a few clusters of round-shouldered relatives who watched the disembarkment and then hurried from box to box, examining the names and rank numbers too casually scrawled in charcoal on the lids. And then, when they found their own, their lips would tighten and they would haul the coffin onto a handcart and wheel it away. Only those who could pay for the transportation and whose son or husband or father was still relatively intact got the body back. The rest, the missing and the blown-to-pieces and the unidentifiable, were buried without ceremony in the fields of France.

  It was late October 1918. Every night for the last week, Lilly had come to the station after her shift had finished. By this time it had already been dark for hours, an India-ink dark that seemed to saturate the night until the city and the sky blotted into each other. Inside the station, however, the light was a grayish orange color partly lit by the greasy filaments of the all-night café. Children, cocooned in blankets, lay top to tail in corners like nests of rats. Women as young as twelve and as old as sixty-five offered themselves without shame or reserve price, while on the street outside, or in Friedrichstadt, or in the city parks, hundreds of teenagers, so-called line boys, coolies, and doll boys, hung around dressed in sailor suits or morning coats.

  “Going somewhere, miss?” they asked her.

  Lilly averted her head and kept on moving. Sometimes she squinted deliberately up at the destination board and often she glanced nervously at the station clock, but if anyone had watched her, really watched her, they would have noticed that she never bought a ticket. Instead, she paced the marble concourse where it was most brightly lit, tried to avoid eye contact, and waited.

  Someone at the munitions factory had a brother at the front. He had come back on leave with a story about meeting a girl with a broken tooth who had once been a ward of St. Francis Xavier’s in Berlin. Her name was Hanne. He went back to the front with a letter. A letter came back three months later written in a hand Lilly did not recognize. It informed her that Hanne would be returning to Berlin in the last week of the month. As Lilly read the letter for a second time, she had felt a familiar swell of relief: she had found Hanne again. And now she was restless and agitated with waiting. She couldn’t stand another day, another hour, without her. Hanne was coming home. Lilly was coming home, too, for Hanne was home, or the closest thing Lilly had ever known to it. But how could she tell her about Eva, about Stefan? Where would she start? And so she decided to wipe out the whole episode, just as Eva had wiped her out. It did not happen, she told herself; I was not there.

  “Miss,” a policeman called out. “The station is to be cleared. The kaiser is expected.”

  Beyond him, there was already the shiver of a disturbance. Shoulders jerked in coats and handfuls of damp jacket were pulled until their seams stretched and the cotton thread snapped. A man let out an angry yell, a woman swore, a baby began to cry. And then, although she couldn’t see him, she could hear the clipped footsteps of Wilhelm II and his entourage approaching.

  The war still pounded on in the East and in the West. Lilly read in the newspaper that negotiations with the Russian delegation had broken down when Trotsky had walked out. At home, a million workers in twenty cities had gone on strike, and the Spartacists were said to be plotting more demonstrations. Street battles between the reds and the whites were a daily occurrence. And then there was the influenza, the so-called Spanish flu, which came not at all from Spain but from the U.S.A., brought over by farm laborers turned soldiers. At first it was the old who died, or the very young, or the very poor. But then another strain took hold, more aggressive than the first, and wiped out scores of the young and previously healthy. At this point it had been put to the kaiser, in terms less delicate than he was used to, that the army was collapsing, that the men could no longer be trusted, that Germany was losing the war. Wilhelm II, however, would not give up. He suggested the German naval fleet might save the day and secure the country’s honor. And he insisted on a final push, another stab on the Western Front. Join the army, then, his increasingly skeptical advisers advised him. See for yourself.

  Although Lilly may not have guessed it as he bowed his head and pressed a handkerchief to his eyes against the filthy air, Wilhelm II was close to breakdown as he climbed aboard the royal train, which was bound for Spa in Belgium. He did not see the young woman who watched him from behind the raised arm of a policeman. He did not know that his hasty departure from Berlin would not be brief, as he anticipated, but would in fact be permanent. And as he settled himself into the royal compartment, the train started to move forward, and he poured himself a cup of English breakfast tea, he felt a little better. He watched the blackened city hurtle by and wondered if his valet had brought biscuits.This would, however, be the last time his silver train would ever glide above the silver Spree, past Museum Island, Zoo, and Charlottenburg, and down through the Grunewald. Only a few months later, eighty wagons headed to Holland loaded up with his furniture and pictures, photographs and movies, helmets, and, in a carriage all to themselves, his three dachshunds.

  Another coffin train had just pulled in on Platform Three, filling the station with steam and soot and the sour smell of hot metal. A few passengers disembarked: a couple of officers, a half-dozen white-faced nurses, and, right at the back, without a coat, Hanne Schmidt.

  “Tiny Lil.” Hanne’s voice cracked and she started to cough. “Don’t kiss me, I’ve got a cold.”

  When her coughing had subsided, Hanne looked around, at the squalor of the station, at the homeless, at the coffins. But she did not seem to see any of it.

  “Berlin,” she said. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  Lilly gave Hanne her coat, took her bag, and then guided her to the S-Bahn. And as they sat on the train as it rattled its way through the city, Lilly could not stop looking at Hanne, the way she sat with her eyes closed and her face angled toward the dull, dirty compartment light. Hanne turned and gave her a half-smile. But Lilly did not look away. If she stopped looking even for an instant, she suspected, Hanne would disappear again.

  Gudrun was not pleased to see Hanne. She took in the heeled shoes, the scuffs worn almost through, the bulging carpetbag, the silk stockings, and the dress cut above the knee. She noticed the way Hanne stood with her weight all on her left leg, her right turned out just a little so the light stroked the inside of her thigh. It was obvious she was not a nurse, as she so casually claimed, but she did not take in the flush of her cheek or register its significance.

  “You can stay for tonight,” she told her. “But that’s all.”

  Hanne glanced around the tiny room divided in two with a blanket.

  “I wasn’t planning to,” Hanne replied. “Is there anything to eat?”

  “No,” said Gudrun.

  Hanne sighed. And then she put her hands into the carpetbag and brought out a package wrapped in brown paper. Inside was a loaf of rough bread, some real coffee, and a couple of bashed tins.

  “What’s in the tins?” Gudrun asked.

  “Pâté de foie gras de Strasbourg,” Hanne replied.

  “Where did you get it?” Lilly asked.

  “Don’t ask,” she said as she opened the tin with a penknife. “Don’t ask.”

  And so Lilly didn’t ask about her time at the front. One day, Hanne supposed, she would tell her how it had been, how she had risen quickly through the ranks to become the highest class of whore, servicing officers and generals for hard currency instead of coupons. It wasn’t unusual. She was young, she had been certified free of venereal disease by a doctor, she could carry a tune, and, after a few weeks of decent meals, she had started to put on weight. Look at what would have happened to her if she had taken Sister August’s advice, she told herself. She would have looked like Lilly and Gudrun: starving, jaundiced, poor.

  But she did tell her one t
hing without prompting.

  “I met Sister August,” Hanne said. “At the front. In a hospital. She asked about you.”

  Sister August. The name gave Lilly a jolt. How long had it been? she wondered. Five years? Six? A vivid memory came back to her, a clumsy embrace in a corridor, the nun’s arms encircling her, a searching glance that seemed to read her inside and out. And she suddenly longed to see her again: her face framed by the wimple, her feet in men’s shoes. She longed to smell her clean almond smell and meet her blue-eyed gaze.

  “How is she?”

  “Well, she’s not a nun anymore,” Hanne said. “Now she’s just plain old Nurse von Kismet.”

  Lilly tried to see Sister August in a different outfit, in civilian clothing. She remembered the night they had followed her to the Tiergarten. She had seemed like another person entirely then: an impostor, a sinister doppelgänger. But the world had turned upside down. Now Sister August didn’t exist, and the other woman did.

  “The last thing I heard was that she was working on a hospital train. Somebody said it was bombed.”

  Lilly’s eyes widened and two spots of color appeared in her cheeks.

  “Bombed? But she’s all right, isn’t she?”

  “People just disappear and you never know.” Hanne shrugged. “That’s the worst of it.”

  And then she sneezed twice and spread the pieces of bread with pâté. Lilly claimed she had already eaten, but the truth was that she had lost her appetite. Gudrun and Hanne ate one, two, three, four slices, until there was nothing left but the empty tins and the inedible crust.

  “That was the best meal I’ve had since my wedding day,” Gudrun said. “What did you eat on yours, Lilly? You must have had a decent meal when you got married.” And then she cleared her throat and wiped her mouth with a torn napkin, aware that she had said something she shouldn’t have.

  “You’re married?” Hanne said, and looked around the room, almost as if expecting a husband to suddenly appear.