and the greasy cupola and tried to make themselves believe that they would be leaving. Most of them couldn’t remember living anywhere else.
The health spa man had bought the orphanage on the condition that he start work in two months’ time, and since his had been the only offer, the nuns were in no position to negotiate. Twenty babies and toddlers were to be shipped to America, their passage paid for by a Catholic charity. Of the rest, it was decided that the youngest would be sent to the St. Catherine’s Orphanage in Munich, while the others would be handed over to a charity,The Adoption Society, which would place the children in households as farm laborers or domestics.
Hanne’s brothers were five, six, and nine, with white-blond hair and big blue eyes. They still waited for their sister every day at the front door and had to be coaxed to meals with promises that, were she to return when they weren’t there, she would be sent straight to them. Lilly had assured them that their sister would come back to fetch them. But as the days turned to weeks, she gradually stopped believing it. And so, on the day of the nuns’ announcement, she had gathered Hanne’s brothers together and made them a promise: despite the dark, the high wall, and the ever-expanding city, she would try to find their sister and bring her back.
The nights were darker, much darker than she had expected, the wall higher, and the city far bigger than she remembered. But the rose money helped to make her bold. As she took one tram and then another, rode the S- and U-Bahn back and forth, walked for miles through cavernous streets, Lilly learned that St. Francis Xavier’s was as calm, as perfectly still, as the dead center of a wheel. All around, Berlin was in a state of flux.You could sense it, taste it, smell it, from the mannequins in shop windows, whose outfits changed for the morning rush hour and again for the evening promenade, to the omnibuses, the cars, the bicycles, and the taxicabs, which raced round Potsdamer Platz from dawn until dusk. Nothing was fixed anymore. Nothing was nailed down. You could never guarantee, absolutely, that the spot in which you stood would look the same from one day to the next. Streets would be dug up practically overnight, landmarks demolished, and classical façades covered with tarpaulin, only to be unveiled a week later faced with bright new advertisements for chocolate or pianos or perfume.
In shops and department stores, on street trolleys and street corners, Lilly examined faces and asked questions. She found dozens of girls with pale gold hair and bare arms that they casually wrapped around themselves. And they all knew a Hanne Schmidt—it was a common name—but only old ones, fat ones: a Hanne Schmidt with five children or a medical condition, a layabout husband or an invalid mother, never Lilly’s own fair-haired, rose-selling Hanne.
Sometimes Lilly wondered if she had walked past her friend in the street and failed to recognize her. Sometimes she imagined Hanne in the poorhouse dressed in rags, her eyes red-rimmed from weeping, her long white legs blotched with sores. And sometimes she would dream she found her lifeless and blue, her body lying limp beneath a railway bridge, or propped up on the backseat of a tram, a knife pushed into her heart. The mornings after the nightmares were the hardest.The city she walked through seemed filled with dark corners and cold basements, places where a girl like her could disappear. But if anything happened, who would look for her?
On the day of Franz Josef’s visit, the day when the kaiser had been informed of Russian involvement in forming the Balkan League and was concerned enough to call a meeting of the Grosser Generalstab, but not concerned enough to cancel the military parade, Lilly turned and walked through the crowds back up the Unter den Linden. She glanced from face to face as the people poured past her. She peered under hats and into car windows,
The health spa man had bought the orphanage on the condition that he start work in two months’ time, and since his had been the only offer, the nuns were in no position to negotiate. Twenty babies and toddlers were to be shipped to America, their passage paid for by a Catholic charity. Of the rest, it was decided that the youngest would be sent to the St. Catherine’s Orphanage in Munich, while the others would be handed over to a charity,The Adoption Society, which would place the children in households as farm laborers or domestics.
Hanne’s brothers were five, six, and nine, with white-blond hair and big blue eyes. They still waited for their sister every day at the front door and had to be coaxed to meals with promises that, were she to return when they weren’t there, she would be sent straight to them. Lilly had assured them that their sister would come back to fetch them. But as the days turned to weeks, she gradually stopped believing it. And so, on the day of the nuns’ announcement, she had gathered Hanne’s brothers together and made them a promise: despite the dark, the high wall, and the ever-expanding city, she would try to find their sister and bring her back.
The nights were darker, much darker than she had expected, the wall higher, and the city far bigger than she remembered. But the rose money helped to make her bold. As she took one tram and then another, rode the S- and U-Bahn back and forth, walked for miles through cavernous streets, Lilly learned that St. Francis Xavier’s was as calm, as perfectly still, as the dead center of a wheel. All around, Berlin was in a state of flux.You could sense it, taste it, smell it, from the mannequins in shop windows, whose outfits changed for the morning rush hour and again for the evening promenade, to the omnibuses, the cars, the bicycles, and the taxicabs, which raced round Potsdamer Platz from dawn until dusk. Nothing was fixed anymore. Nothing was nailed down. You could never guarantee, absolutely, that the spot in which you stood would look the same from one day to the next. Streets would be dug up practically overnight, landmarks demolished, and classical façades covered with tarpaulin, only to be unveiled a week later faced with bright new advertisements for chocolate or pianos or perfume.
In shops and department stores, on street trolleys and street corners, Lilly examined faces and asked questions. She found dozens of girls with pale gold hair and bare arms that they casually wrapped around themselves. And they all knew a Hanne Schmidt—it was a common name—but only old ones, fat ones: a Hanne Schmidt with five children or a medical condition, a layabout husband or an invalid mother, never Lilly’s own fair-haired, rose-selling Hanne.
Sometimes Lilly wondered if she had walked past her friend in the street and failed to recognize her. Sometimes she imagined Hanne in the poorhouse dressed in rags, her eyes red-rimmed from weeping, her long white legs blotched with sores. And sometimes she would dream she found her lifeless and blue, her body lying limp beneath a railway bridge, or propped up on the backseat of a tram, a knife pushed into her heart. The mornings after the nightmares were the hardest.The city she walked through seemed filled with dark corners and cold basements, places where a girl like her could disappear. But if anything happened, who would look for her?
On the day of Franz Josef’s visit, the day when the kaiser had been informed of Russian involvement in forming the Balkan League and was concerned enough to call a meeting of the Grosser Generalstab, but not concerned enough to cancel the military parade, Lilly turned and walked through the crowds back up the Unter den Linden. She glanced from face to face as the people poured past her. She peered under hats and into car windows,
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