The Glimmer Palace by Colin Beatrice

Author:Colin, Beatrice [Colin, Beatrice]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2008-07-24T00:00:00+00:00

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 Front 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.

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