Free The Glimmer Palace by Beatrice Colin Page A

groups on the newest danger to the nation: the cinema. Proposing a blanket ban on filth in word and picture, Arnold, his dear Hilda nodding, reveals that the urban masses are squandering their hard-earned cash on the creations of squalid minds.What we need, he tells them all, is censorship.
    Censorship: to snip and cut, to shred and paste miles and miles of celluloid. Arnold’s mind drifts: as smooth as black silk stockings, as slippery as a concubine’s cunt pumping out of the machine in one unspooling lick. He feels a nudge. Wake up, dear, are you ailing? He clears his throat and then continues. Films, he utters to the silent assembled, are the devil’s handiwork. For a second it is so still you can hear the stroke of strung pearl on pure cashmere. And then Hilda, her timing perfect, begins to sob.
    Lilly placed one foot on the ledge that had once held her shrine to Jesus and the Virgin Mary and pulled herself up with her fingertips onto the top of the wall. Over the other side, a tram rattled past, its windows filled with golden light in the cool blue evening.
    The bricks were mossy and damp underneath her skirt. She sat astride the wall and waited for Hanne to pass her up the basket.
    “Hurry up,” she whispered. “Someone might come.”
    She could see shadowy figures underneath the arches of the S-BAHN across the street. The clip of a gentleman’s shoes approached from the park. A man walked below her, so close that she could have almost reached down and touched the top of his hat. When he had turned the corner, Hanne passed up the basket. Lilly took it and then let herself drop down softly onto the pavement.
    Hanne appeared a few seconds later and jumped down. It was nine in the evening.The main door was locked, but they had climbed out of the bathroom on the first floor. Nobody, Hanne assured her, would miss them until the morning.
    “You still want to?” Hanne asked her.
    Lilly nodded. The air was charged. She trembled although she wasn’t cold.
    “Don’t worry: she never goes out at night,” Hanne said.
    Since the night of the play, Lilly had avoided Sister August. If she ever heard the swish of her skirts approaching or the clank of her key chain, she would turn and walk in the other direction or duck into a dark corner. One day when she was heading to a class, however, the nun suddenly burst out of her room.
    “Lilly,” she had said. “Lilly?”
    Lilly’s steps slowed down and she stopped. Then she waited, her gaze fixed to the floor in front of her. Sister August had chastised herself over and over for not insisting that she see the play first.What had she been thinking of, to let a cabaret performer loose on her children? And now Lilly would not look at her. And she was suddenly overwhelmed with nostalgia for the little hand that had stroked her habit as she prayed for the kaiser on his birthday.
    She had also noticed that Lilly had found a friend. And although she was aware of a lessening of pressure, like a belt loosened by a notch or the removal of an uncomfortable pair of shoes, she was also uneasy. Lilly knew too little of life outside the orphanage, Hanne Schmidt too much.
    “I just wanted you to know . . .” she said.
    To know what? Lilly had wondered, her face growing hot and her breathing faster.That God was still watching her? That He was everywhere? Or that she still despised her? The phone began to ring inside Sister August’s room. She would have to answer it. But instead she took a few steps toward her and then awkwardly, clumsily, a little too roughly, embraced her. Lilly’s body stiffened. She waited for more words to come, but Sister August didn’t have any.
    She answered the phone before it rang off. Lilly went to the bathroom, locked herself in a stall, and pulled out the postcard of the Virgin with Sister August’s face stuck on, which she still carried in her pocket. She thought about ripping it into hundreds of little pieces and flushing them away. She thought about it