The Glimmer Palace Read Online Free PDF

madam,” says Hans von Friedrich, whose grasp of mathematics is rudimentary. “But I seem to have run out of film.”
    Tiny Lil loved Sister August. Although it was sinful, she loved her more than the Virgin Mary, she loved her more than Jesus. At mealtimes she sat not beside her, as that wasn’t allowed, but at the nearest possible table. At Mass she sang the responses in Latin, loud and clear so she would be sure to be heard. She hovered around Sister August’s closed door, waiting to be asked to run an errand or pass on a message. And once, and only once, when she was sitting behind her in a special service for the kaiser’s birthday, she leaned over, inhaled the clean almond smell of her, and ran her finger down the stiff brown slope of her habit.
    Sister August noticed, of course she did, but she had so much more to think about than one little girl’s attachment to her. According to the Berliner Morgenpost , the population of Berlin had risen to more than two million; it had doubled since German unification in 1871. Orphans were being deposited at St. Francis Xavier’s at the rate of a dozen a week. Some were not even genuine, but the overspill of the large families who were leaving their farms in Silesia or Pomerania and moving into two-roomed apartments in Wedding or Rixdorf. An ever-increasing number of other babies had just been dumped on the doorstep in milk crates or cardboard boxes with no sign as to where they had come from or why.
    The director, a distant cousin of the founder—a man who sat at a large, empty mahogany desk all day and never seemed to actually do anything—did not appear to think it was a problem.
    “The more, the merrier,” he sometimes said. Or, “Let them eat cake.”
    He was large and lugubrious, and suffered from excessively sweaty hands and chronic catarrh. He employed a series of women as secretaries whose only visible duties were to type his correspondence, hang up his coat on a polished brass peg, and make him coffee with exactly the right amount of sugar. Some days he looked deep in thought as he leaned back in his leather chair, with an expression that suggested he was mulling over the nature of philanthropy or the ethicalproblems stirred up by Fontane’s new novel, Effi Briest. In fact, he spent much of his time wondering whether to make a pass at the women he had hired and, if he did so, if he could keep an affair on the boil without his wife finding out. It was a fantasy, fortunately for all concerned, that never got further than the brush of a damp hand on a well-padded bottom or a lingering Christmas kiss.
    It was to him, in an attempt to involve him somehow, that Sister August brought the orphans who had gone way beyond the limits of so-called acceptable behavior. Uncomfortable with children, as he had only one son, whom he had sent to boarding school, the director would tell the children to lie across a piano stool and then he would beat them on the bottom with a slipper up to ten times, depending on their crime.
    “It obviously works,” he told the nun. “Just look at Tiny Lil.”
    However, the slipper, a Turkish shoe with fancy embroidery, was flimsy and soft. The director’s aim was poor and his blows were feeble. It was not the physical pain that made the director’s slipper beatings so distressing, but the unpleasantness of being beaten by a man whose hands dripped and who coughed loudly and repulsively after every stroke.
    The sister regarded the director with notable and understandable disdain. He was scared of her and attracted to her in roughly equal measure. And when she spoke, it was not unusual for him to fail to hear a single word, so smitten was he by the bloom on her perfect virgin’s cheek.
    “So you’ll do it today,” she would say after suggesting once again that he write to the founder’s family to solicit more funds.
    “Of course,” he would answer, although he didn’t know what she was talking about, as he hadn’t been listening.