Metropolis, page 1
Metropolis
Ellie Midwood
Metropolis is a work of historical fiction, using well-known historical and public figures. All incidents and dialogue are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be considered as real. Where real-life historical persons appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are entirely fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the entirely fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Ellie Midwood
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
Cover design by: Melody Simmons
Cover image attribution: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Berlin_Potsdamer_Platz_009445.jpg
Contents
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Author’s Note
About the Author
Chapter One
Berlin, 1924
Margot watched as if hypnotized, while the silver coin of the moon floated on top of the opaque waters of the Spree. From the bridge on which she stood, she could see clearly that the river was stiff with ice on both banks but in between the shimmering crust, the water flowed freely. If Margot looked right under her feet instead of gazing forward as she had been for the past fifteen minutes – or was it half an hour already? – she would feel herself flying above the black waters as the current rushed forwards. Flying, free from all.
Leaning forward, she felt her arms strain to the utmost as the weight of rocks in her pockets began to pull her down. A persistent but gentle tug, lacking force to make her fall, as long as she held onto the ornate railing. She wished to go on her own terms, not by some ridiculous accident. When she was ready at last, she would open her arms and let herself sink gracefully into this onyx underworld beneath and let it embrace her and carry her down to where pain no longer had its power.
Soon. Just one more minute to go over her life. Just to remind herself that she lived it brilliantly and not in vain. Just to persuade herself that this was the right choice and there was no other.
It was that silent hour when the last of the party-goers and black-market dealers had finally gone to bed and the first factory workers hadn’t risen yet to meet a new day of misery. In the perfect stillness of the night, only the sound of her leather gloves clutching greedily at the railing could be heard and the gentle splashing of the water underneath.
Margot closed her eyes.
Someone stifled a cough in the distance.
Instantly startled, Margot pulled back at once. Elbows hooked around the wrought iron, she squinted at the solitary figure standing indecisively in the cold blue light of the lamppost. There were a good twenty paces between them and the only details she could make out were the long overcoat of the military type and the bare head full of black hair. Margot breathed out in relief at the absence of a helmet. Not a policeman then. Just a fellow wretch lost in the middle of the night.
The initial shock had passed. The silence began growing uncomfortable. Margot waited for the stranger to hurry past her pretending not to notice her altogether, much like passers-by pretended not to notice children’s outstretched, dirty hands or legless soldiers moving past them in their crudely-made carts, invisible, no longer needed, discarded like trash by the government that glorified them to a fascinating extent just a few years ago.
He could at least say something to her – beg her not to do it, prattle on about some soul-saving nonsense or the other; however, the man had not budged. Margot was growing annoyed. Was he planning to stand there and watch her do it? Was he one of those degenerate types who paid some crook from a private sex club to see someone getting tortured? There were enough of those kinds in Berlin, though, they were all men of means and ridiculous means at that. This fellow looked as though he had just parted with his last hat to purchase himself – what? A few pieces of bread? A few cigarettes? Hardly he could afford himself pleasures of that expensive, depraved sort.
“What do you want?” She cried into the night and heard the echo carry her voice away.
Such intentional rudeness went against everything Margot had been taught in her short life by a French governess and thoroughly well-mannered father but she had business to attend to and he was positively ruining her mood.
The man started, made a step forward but then retreated back into his position at once. “Oh… Nothing. I apologize for the interruption. It was unintended, I assure you. I had not seen you when I first set my foot on the bridge. Else I wouldn’t have barged in on you in such a manner. Please, accept my sincerest apologies.”
His hand flew to his head in an instinctual gesture to tip his hat. At the last moment, he must have remembered that he no longer had such an accessory and so, he satisfied himself with a somewhat embarrassed bow.
Margot regarded him more closely. Just now did she notice his pockets bulging in a tell-tale manner. In spite of herself, she began laughing mirthlessly.
“You too, then?” she called to the stranger.
“I beg your pardon?”
“Those are rocks in your pockets, aren’t they?”
The man passed his hand over his coat self-consciously. “Yes, I’m afraid.” Hastily, he put his hand up in a reassuring gesture. “I will leave you to it at once. I shall wait for my turn over there. I shall turn my back on you to give you your privacy. Or, if you prefer, I shall come back tomorrow night. Yes, perhaps, that would be a better arrangement, don’t you think?” He began backing away from her, bowing humbly. “Please, forgive me. I didn’t mean to—”
“Wait!” Margot called after him before he had a chance to disappear into the night. With utmost care, she turned around and wiggled her toes in her boots to get the blood flowing again. She must have been here longer than half an hour, she thought to herself. She was wearing fur-lined boots and her feet had gone numb with cold all the same. “I still have a couple of dollars on me, from what the moneylender gave me. Would you like to have a coffee with me? I have such an awful craving for coffee; I feel, I shall not die happy until I have it. We deserve our last meal, no?”
“Oh, that’s most generous of you but I have not a Pfennig to my name and I would never imagine imposing on you—”
“That is not an imposition in any manner! Please, you will do me a favor. I don’t have any need for these last few dollars. I’d rather spend them than let them go to waste. You will oblige me, truly.”
“Well, if you insist…”
He was already rushing to help her climb over the railing. If her situation wasn’t so positively devoid of any humor, Margot would have laughed heartily at such irony. How carefully, yet respectfully, he lifted her by her waist, fearing that she would slip and fall into the abyss as if she wasn’t planning to plunge there on her own a mere instant ago! Fate certainly had a warped sense of humor and particular here, in Weimar Berlin.
Up close, Margot saw that the stranger was a very young man, of her own age perhaps, in his early twenties, with liquid, black eyes and a longish, handsome face that missed a few appointments with the razor. He caught her staring at the dark stubble and rubbed his hand over it in visible embarrassment.
“Forgive me, please… Such an unseemly view, I’m well aware. I shall understand completely if you don’t wish to be seen with such a bum like myself—”
“You are no bum. Not any more of a bum than the rest of us Berliners, at any rate.”
“But I am! I know what I look like…”
“Oh, do be quiet!”
Margot emptied her pockets but instead of throwing the rocks away, she arranged them into a neat pile by the railing.
“Margarete von Steinhoff.” She offered him her hand.
“You’re nobility, on top of everything else. Now I’m positively embarrassed.” He made a move to kiss it but Margot made a point of shaking his hand instead. He smiled, baring a row of beautiful teeth. “Ernst Weniger, at your service—” He stumbled upon the title. “Herzogin von Steinhoff?”
“Flatterer and not a very good one.”
“Your coat confused me.”
Margot grinned crookedly at her ermine collar. “I decided to dress for the occasion.”
“I see.” Ernst’s face also drew to a smile. “What is it really?”
“Gräfin. But I would much rather prefer it if you call me Margot. Do you mind if we say du to each other? I can’t bear all that ceremony. Not tonight, at any rate. Tonight, I need a friend.”
“It will be my honor to call myself your friend, Margot. Even for a few hours.”
The streets were still deserted when they set off in the general direction of the Reichstag. In the distance, a dog barked hoarsely. Against the
“Do you know anywhere we can go?” She turned to her new acquaintance, at a loss.
The grimace he made didn’t escape her attention, even in the shadows of the night. “I do, but… it’s a seedy kind of a place. A real dive, if I’m entirely honest. I play the piano there in the evenings and they feed me for it,” he added, even more embarrassed. “A lady like yourself will find it most disagreeable.”
Margot, however, was difficult to discourage at this point in her life. “Do they serve coffee?”
“They do.”
“The real kind or the malt one?”
“The real one, if you have the money.”
“I have four dollars. The dollar rose again according to today’s stock market news. I believe it shall be enough for a real coffee and for a rum in it, too.”
“In that kind of place, it shall be enough for an entire dinner.”
Under the smoke-stained ceiling, a few dim lights burned. The burly man behind the bar – Ernst’s acquaintance, judging by the friendly manner in which he had seized the young man’s hand in his bear paw – was wiping the bar in wide, lazy strokes. Opposite the window, painted with frosty designs, a red-haired woman with a severely rouged face was counting the notes. Satisfied with the night’s earnings, her face brightened up. She called for another Kümmel.
In the corner near the piano, a well-dressed man smoked a thick cigar, looking just as out of place as Margot with her ermine coat and leather gloves. Soon, a young man rushed in from the outside, his porcelain cheeks colored with blush and nearly threw himself at the well-dressed man’s feet, apologetic and nervous. The well-dressed man only brushed his cheek with the back of his hand and looked at him tenderly. Margot recognized English speech when he began saying something softly to the young man, arranging the seat for him and fussing over the youth’s overcoat.
A few tables away from the couple, three profiteers were going over their ledger, from time to time breaking into a heated discussion concerning the ham that was going bad in some warehouse. The roulette table was abandoned for the night; only the billiard one still tolerated assaults from the two unsavory characters, who were loaded to such an extent that they missed the balls more often than they hit them.
Margot watched them and was aware of Ernst watching her in a subtle manner, most likely wondering at her reaction. Instead of shock or disgust, genuine interest shone in her eager, dark-brown eyes. Margot was very well aware of what else he saw before his eyes, a young woman with the cadaverous complexion of a London child dying of consumption, though, with lips still full of color. However, even that was a sham – a mere smear of what was left of her last tube of lipstick. She saw him shift his gaze to her dark, almost black hair, gathered in a bun on the nape of her neck and scowl when instead of pearls or diamonds he noticed two small, empty holes in her ears. His expression grew even more wistful when he regarded her high cheekbones, which stood out far too much on her face now, turning a former sophisticated, fashionable look into an outright starved one.
As soon as the food arrived, she threw herself onto the pork chops and consumed them in mere minutes, holding them between her slender fingers instead of using a knife and a fork.
Catching Ernst’s gaze on her once again, Margot grinned at him atop the last bone. “What? Never seen a countess eating like a savage?”
“No,” Ernst admitted. “Never seen a countess to begin with.”
“I always wanted to try it.”
“Pork chops?”
“No. Eating like this. It tastes better, don’t you find? No matter how far civilization progresses, there will always remain something primal in us. Perhaps, Darwin was right and all we are, indeed, are mere animals.”
“We are,” Ernst replied softly. “Animals and the cruelest ones at that.” All of a sudden, all light had seemed to have gone out of his face.
Margot had guessed the direction his memories pulled him in. She regarded his black overcoat more closely. Sure enough, she recognized the military brass buttons, the familiar cut of the collar, the black dye running in a few places where the rain or the snow must have soaked it, betraying its original field-gray color underneath. “Have you been to war?”
“Yes.”
“For how long?”
“Just a few months, at the very end. But that was enough.”
“I should imagine. One day would have been enough for me.”
Ernst looked at her for some time.
“May I ask you something, Margot?”
“Of course.”
He had just opened his mouth but didn’t know how to proceed and ended up gesturing toward her expensive coat, her gloves, her cashmere shawl, the bridge not too far from here, invisible yet frighteningly close. “Why?”
She raised her brows, faintly amused. “Why what? Why the bridge? To tell you the truth, I was actually planning to open the gas and kill myself that way – hanging revolts me, you see. However, unfortunately, just this morning as I dressed up and decided to go through with it, I had discovered, much to my dismay, that they turned off my gas because I had not paid for it. Prior to that, I had made several attempts to acquire laudanum or morphia or at least some sleeping pills from the pharmacist but they know what people buy them for nowadays and don’t wish to be held responsible. There was an option of throwing myself under the train but that’s just…” She shuddered theatrically. “I don’t deny it, there’s something eternally romantic in Anna Karenina but I prefer something less extreme if I can help it.”
“I meant to ask…” Ernst paused again and cast another questioning glance at her. “I’m a veteran who doesn’t receive enough from the government to even buy a rope to hang myself. But you… you…”
“Me, what? All I wear is all I own, except for an evening gown, in which I was planning to kill myself with gas and a few pieces of furniture still left in my house. But even that is useless. In a few days, I shall become homeless. Yesterday the official from the bank came with some gentleman who had apparently purchased my house – I couldn’t afford to pay for it, you see. My mother died right after she gave birth to me and my father shot himself a few months ago when he lost all three of his factories and whatever he was trying to speculate on the market. And I? I have all this fine, proper education for a lady and no working skills that are actually needed in this world. No one is hiring healthy young men like yourself; surely, I have even fewer chances for survival than you.”
“I’m not healthy either. Twenty-five-percent disability.” When Margot looked at him inquisitively, Ernst pointed at his chest. “My lungs. Gas.”
Margot remembered his gentle coughing on the bridge. “Ach. Yes. I see. I’m sorry.”
Ernst only shrugged. “Perhaps, it will turn out to be beneficial in the water. I imagine, my lungs will fail almost immediately.”
“Lucky you.”
“Prost.” Ernst lifted his beer Stein in the air in a mock salute.
Margot wiped her fingers on the dubiously white napkin and lifted her Stein, with a chipped handle, as well. “I’m very glad to have met you, Ernst.”
“Thank you for treating me to my last supper.”
Margot waved his thanks aside.
“Have you any family at all?” she asked instead.
The unexpected question had seemed to upset him. He even rubbed his eyes, as if trying to chase off whatever kind, loving face stood before them. Instantly, Margot felt guilty for prying.
“My parents live not too far from Berlin.” His voice was far-away, hollow.
