vulnerability. Besides, she could never be the parent that the girl so desperately needed. The tram began to slow; it was their stop. They climbed off wordlessly and walked back to the orphanage with a visible gap between them.
The general’s rose garden started an unfortunate trend.The economy was booming, and a number of wealthy benefactors followed his example. An industrialist bequeathed a full set of brass instruments. The director took up the French horn but could manage only the most rudimentary of Christmas carols. The rest of the instruments gathered dust in their cases; they couldn’t afford a music teacher.The orphans were also given a miniature train, a set of child-size Shakespearean costumes, and several dozen crates of a new kind of sweeteneddrink. Sister August was privately exasperated.They didn’t have the room for any more things. But after such relentless soliciting, they could hardly refuse them.
In December that year, a cabaret group came to St. Francis Xavier’s to put on a Christmas show for the children. It was the very same cabaret group that Tiny Lil’s mother had been a member of, the very same cabaret group who had sent her as a baby to the couple in the suburbs and who still felt vaguely responsible—the very same cabaret group who had sent her the doll with the wind-up smile that had subsequently been unearthed by one of the general’s gardeners and taken home for his daughter.
The visit had been organized by an actor named Wernher Siegfried. He had long black hair, which he swept back with olive oil; a large, forceful nose; and a weak chin, which he hid, when he remembered, with his hand. He thought he had been in love with the orphan’s mother and had once successfully consummated his infatuation in a boat hut on the shores of the Tegeler See in the early spring of 1899. While the rest of the cabaret group were drunkenly skating on the ice after drinking copious amounts of Liebfraumilch, he had coaxed the actress into the hut after she had twisted her ankle, not seriously, and was in need of sympathy and a shot of something stronger.
The Christmas show was a short musical play called The Chocolate Sailor . Set in a candy shop, its cotton-candy heroine was tied up with licorice laces by a greedy child. The highlight was a chase sequence, during which the cabaret group, dressed up as a box of chocolates, pursued the child—a small, middle-aged woman in a very short dress—with a huge candy cane through the audience.
Wernher cast himself as the sailor but spent much of the performance peering out at the audience and trying to work out which one was Lilly Nelly Aphrodite. His eyes fell on Hanne Schmidt, who looked about the right age. At the end of the show he marched down to the row she sat in and persuaded her to join him on the stage. He was unaware that Hanne Schmidt had not said a word since she had arrived and was less surprised than the audience when she took the stage, closed her eyes, and launched into the musical hit of a few years before, “Bower of My Heart,” unaccompanied.
Standing on her tiptoes, Hanne waved the ghost of a feather boa. She had a strong voice but sang without any hint of expression at all. And, sung at half its usual speed, the song seemed to ring with melancholy.
“Safe in the bower of my heart,” she sang, “a place strewn in blossom just for you, where always and forever, for all time and a day, the love I feel will never fade or be untrue.”
One of her front teeth was chipped and this made her consonants whistle. Her voice was low and just a little hoarse; when she hit the high notes, it cracked and threatened to break. But not until she had reached the last lines, The blooms may wither on the vine, but I know you’ll always be mine , did her voice trail off and her eyes open.
The applause was spontaneous and genuine. Hanne Schmidt barely even smiled in acknowledgment. She went back to her seat, picked at a patch on her orphanage dress,
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