Free The Glimmer Palace by Beatrice Colin Page B

but she could not do it. Instead she smoothed down the faded photograph on the dog-eared postcard and put it back in her pocket.
    Since that day, however, she hadn’t needed to avoid Sister August anymore: the tall nun rarely came out of her room except for meals and Mass. Sister August had been ordered to go back to Munich to discuss the play, the orphanage finances, and her next position. The actor, Wernher Siegfried, had pocketed the remainder of the three hundred marks and had never come back to pick up his costume. And so, in light of this, there had been suggestions of a return to administration, a noncontact post with less responsibility. Every day, however, Sister August paced up and down before her window, practicing lines of defense and calculating budgets. She did not want to leave the orphanage and go back to licking envelopes. She had made it what it was.This was her true calling; the children needed her, and she them. If only they would give her one more chance.
    She did not notice the two girls that night as they appeared very briefly on the other side of the iron entrance gate and headed toward the city center. She did not catch sight of the basket of pale pink, deep red, and milk-white roses. Night had fallen and she hadn’t turned on the lights. She closed her eyes and would doze fully dressed until waking stiff and cold the next morning at five a.m.
    The tingle-tangle was on Oranienburger Strasse. From inside came the braying of laughter and the smell of beer and damp wool. Hanne and Lilly divided the flowers in half.
    “Remember, always pick couples, and never men on their own. And don’t bother with women: they never buy anything.”
    “What is this place?” Lilly asked. “Have you been here before?”
    “My dad used to come here,” Hanne said. “It was his favorite tingle-tangle.”
    Lilly watched as Hanne gazed distractedly along the street.
    “Aren’t you worried he might be here?” asked Lilly.
    Hanne shrugged. She still couldn’t talk about her father. The last time she had seen him, he had punched her in the face. If she saw him again, she would punch him back. She had grown two inches in the last year. She wouldn’t be scared of him anymore. Not that he would even recognize her. Dressed in a shapeless orphanage dress, she felt almost safe, a girl still, even though her girlhood had been stolen two years earlier, when she was ten.
    Inside the tingle-tangle, a woman started to sing and some of the chattering momentarily ceased. Lilly breathed in the smell of the night, stale beer, tobacco, men’s sweat, engine grease, and the scorched metal of the tram tracks. The street outside was streaked with color: red, blue, and orange light blurred in the puddles. In the air was the peppery taste of possibility. And hanging above it all, making her giddy, was the soft green scent of the general’s roses.
    The bar was lined with men from the construction sites. In the middle of the floor were tables and chairs where courting couples drank hot chocolate or schnapps from tiny blue glasses. Girls dressed in white poplin and stripy stockings flirted with boys wearing braces and dust-covered boots. On a small stage at one end, a woman in a tightly laced dress played the piano. Hanne and Lilly moved quickly round the tables offering pink and white Perpetual Damasks or cream and scarlet Bourbons for fifty pfennigs each.
    “Will you kiss me if I buy you one?” said one boy of about seventeen to a girl who wore a hat decorated with a huge silver feather.
    “What, kiss a boy from Pappelallee?” she laughed. “What would my father say?”
    The boy chose a dark red Bourbon, half closed. He pulled out five coins from his waistcoat pocket and slammed them down on the table. Lilly watched as the girl leaned across the table and kissed him slowly, softly, on the lips. She pulled back, stared into his face, and smiled. With one movement he reached for the seat of her chair and pulled the chair, the girl,