The Glimmer Palace by Beatrice Colin

aside, the flags rolled up for next time, and handkerchiefs that had been waved used to wipe the faces of overtired children. Couples hurried home, their backs hunched in their coats, the smoke of their cigarettes floating behind them in dirty halos. Along Wilhelmstrasse and Dorotheenstrasse, the streetlights buzzed on, bright pink globes in the dusk. And with just a slight darkening of the sky, it started to snow, first a light flurry and then heavy flakes as big as five-pfennig coins.
    In the months following Hanne’s and the tall nun’s departures, a lull had descended on the orphanage. The building had been put up for sale and every day a new batch of prospective buyers wandered around, taking measurements or trying to visualize the dismally appointed dormitories as luxury hotel rooms, perhaps, or swanky new apartments.
    The orphans, suddenly released from all religious routine, never quite fell into a state of godless anarchy as was expected. Instead, out of respect for their beloved Sister August, the older children kept order, tucked up the younger ones at night, and stuck faithfully to the schedules and rules that she had devised. It was true that several packed up their nightgowns and made their beds for the very last time, but the majority decided to stay until the bitter end. The gates were open wide but there was nowhere, they realized, for them to go.
    Of the ones who stayed, nobody talked about the future. Nobody mentioned the coming sale. It was almost as if they could stave off the inevitable by just pretending it wasn’t going to happen.
    Since her spell in the infirmary, Lilly had seemed to have completely recovered. Back then she had grieved copiously and without inhibition for Sister August, for her friend Hanne, for the mother and father she couldn’t remember, for herself, until eventually she couldn’t cry anymore. And now she felt dried up, numb, barren. Tears would sometimes creep up on her unexpectedly, in the middle of reading a fairy tale to the younger children or cleaning her teeth, but most of the time she appeared, at least outwardly, to be fine. She rose in the morning, she ate her meals, and at the end of the day she fell asleep.
    One night, however, she woke up in the bed she used to share with Hanne and suddenly remembered the tin of rose money under the mattress. Most of the money was gone, but not all of it. Hanne must have expected Lilly to follow her. But the nights were so dark, the orphanage wall was so high, and the city outside was so huge that the idea of leaving of her own volition filled her with terror. She put the tin back under the bed and lay awake for hours, going over and over the old frames of her life until they became distorted, worn-out, drained of color, and finally she closed her eyes and prayed for the courage she so obviously lacked.
    In early December, after morning Mass, an old-fashioned hansom cab drew up at the gates. Three nuns climbed out and began to walk toward the orphanage, their black shadows spilling behind them. Lilly felt her heart start to race. Her temples throbbed and her knees felt as if they might buckle. The nuns must have found out how she had stolen roses and stayed out late.These were serious crimes.What would they do to her this time?
    But when the nuns’ gaze, taking in the gloomy orphanage and dripping overgrown gardens, happened to fall across a white-faced girl at the kitchen window, there were no thunderbolts or lightning strikes. She did not read disapproval in their eyes but pity.
    That morning, a special Mass was held at ten o’clock. At the end of the service, the children remained kneeling while they were informed that the orphanage had been sold. The buyer, a young man who had inherited his money from his family and was to blow the entire lot in one-tenth of the time it took to make it, planned steam rooms in the chapel and a row of treatment rooms where the classrooms were.The children looked around at the dark green walls