The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  In Venice they stayed at the Royal Danieli. For three days they were on their own – visiting churches and palaces, exploring the calle and the canals, with Viktor snapping pictures of Liesel with his sleek new Leica – but on the third evening they were invited by an acquaintance of Viktor to a party in an ancient palazzo on the Canal Grande. Beneath faded frescoes by pupils of Tiepolo, ancient Venetian nobility mixed uneasily with young men and women of sleek and dangerous good looks. One of these creatures trapped Liesel in a window seat and, in English as broken as her own, extolled the virtues of Fascism and the merits of modernity. ‘One day all this will be swept away.’ He sounded like a parody of what Viktor said when he was in one of his political moods. Sweep everything away! Out with the old, in with the new! But Liesel realised with some amazement that this Italian was referring to the whole city, and more than the city: the whole country in fact, this treasure house of art and history. Anything that wasn’t a product of the twentieth century, in fact.

  ‘That’s absurd.’

  He shrugged, as though her opinion meant nothing. ‘For example, the Grand Canal drained and turned into a motor road. That is the future.’

  ‘Then the future is peopled with barbarians.’

  ‘Are you suggesting that I am a barbarian, signora?’

  ‘I’m suggesting that you sound very like one.’

  It was then that someone interrupted them, a voice speaking English with a German accent, but speaking it far better than either she or the Italian. ‘Is this person filling your head with nonsense about how wonderful Il Duce is, and how the forces of modernity are being unleashed by Italian Fascism?’

  She looked round. He was smoking, holding two glasses of champagne in one hand and his cigarette in the other. He seemed older than the Italian, as old as Viktor maybe, with the look of a boxer in the early part of his career, before he has begun to suffer much damage – a bluntness to his nose, a heaviness to his brow. Putting his cigarette between his lips he held out one of the glasses towards Liesel. ‘Have a sip of French tradition. Even the Fascists will not be able to improve on it.’

  There was a swift juggling of champagne flutes. Curiously the Italian was no longer there. The newcomer raised Liesel’s hand to within a few millimetres of his lips. ‘My name is Rainer, I’m afraid. Someone has to be …’

  ‘Someone has to be? You mean, someone in your family? It is another tradition?’

  The man made a disparaging face. His hair was parted in the middle and rather long; as though, despite the well-cut suit, he wished to convey a certain bohemian look. ‘It was a joke. American style.’

  ‘But you are not American.’

  ‘I practise at their humour. One day that is all there will be to laugh at.’ He sipped and looked at Liesel thoughtfully. He was shorter than her by two or three inches and his eyes had an unashamed frankness about them. He examined her quite openly: her mouth (red, quaintly curved, she knew), her bosom (rather flat, she feared), her hands (rather long and strong for a woman). Had he been standing a few paces back she imagined he would have examined the line of her hips (broad) and her ankles (she was proud of her ankles). Perhaps he had already done all this before his approach. Somehow – why should she be concerned? – she wished that she was not wearing her spectacles. ‘And whose company do I have the pleasure of keeping?’ he asked.

  ‘Liesel Landauer’s.’

  Eyebrows rose. ‘Landauer? You are Jewish then?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘Apostate?’

  ‘My husband’s family—’

  He drew on his cigarette and blew a thin stream of smoke towards the painted ceiling. ‘Ah, I see. You are Frau Landauer and you have trapped a Hebrew into renouncing his religion for love’s sake.’

  She wasn’t sure if she quite liked this conversation, the word Hebrew pronounced with just a hint of contempt. ‘My husband’s family are Jewish, but they are not observant.’

  ‘And the beautiful Frau Liesel Landauer and her fortunate husband are from …?’

  ‘We are Czechish. These are our’ – she hesitated, the English word escaping her – ‘our Flitterwochen?’

  ‘Honeymoon, they say. Czechish? You are not that Landauer, are you? Motor cars?’

  ‘Well, yes—’

  The man’s face lit up. There was something comic about his expression, a sudden childish delight painted over mock seriousness. ‘I used to own a Landauer. A Model 50 – what they called the Torpedo. Unfortunately I aimed it at a bus and sank it.’

  She laughed. ‘The bus or the Torpedo?’

  ‘Both, actually.’ He raised his glass. ‘To all Landauers, and those who ride them.’ They drank, although Liesel wasn’t quite sure about the toast. Landauer cars or Landauer people? And was there something vaguely suggestive about the word ‘ride’ which surely meant riding a horse as well as a vehicle? Shouldn’t it be ride in them? But her English (they were still speaking English) was not good enough to be certain, and thankfully, just when she felt a warmth in her face and the insidious discomfort of perspiration beneath her arms, Viktor appeared beside her and the conversation slipped into German. There were formal introductions, a sharp shaking of hands, a bowing, and the faintest clicking of the stranger’s heels. ‘Herr Landauer,’ he said, smiling in that knowing way he had, ‘may I congratulate you on your wonderful motor cars? And your wonderful wife.’

  It might have come to nothing, a mere curiosity, a passing acquaintance, like drivers of Landauer cars who meet on the open road and acknowledge each other’s passing presence with a comradely wave. But they agreed to meet again. Rainer von Abt had something to show them. He smiled mysteriously when they asked, but declined to explain. ‘A special treat for the two honeymooners.’ He would meet them at the landing stage outside their hotel at nine o’clock the next morning.

  The next day was one of beaten silver, like the plate you could buy in the shops near the Rialto bridge – the shimmering silver of the water turning this way and that to catch the light and fracture it in a thousand different directions. Above that the sleek zinc of a high layer of cloud and between the two, like a layer of decorative enamel, the buildings of the city – pink and gold and ochre and orange. At the appointed time von Abt arrived in the stern of a water taxi. He was dressed in white – white flannels, white linen jacket – and looked as though he might be headed for a tennis game. ‘Buon giorno!’ he exclaimed. He handed Liesel and Viktor down into the boat while giving commands to the pilot in what seemed to be expert Italian. The engine bubbled and spluttered and edged the boat – all gleaming wood and brass – out into the stream. ‘Avanti!’ their host cried, and they turned and headed out into the basin of St Mark’s, the narrow hull sliding past mooring posts and rocking gondolas and evading the stuttering vaporetti like a sheep dog running past cows. There was a sensation of floating in light, of being gently buoyed up by the breeze and the luminescence of the water. Liesel felt the wind of their motion flatten her dress against her.

  ‘No wonder the great colourists came from here,’ von Abt observed, noticing her expression of delight. ‘Imagine spending your whole life bathed in light like this. If you were bathed in ultra-violet all that time, you’d come out black like a nigger. Here you come out white and pure, with colour in your heart.’

  Viktor put his arm around her waist, as though defending her against such poetic thoughts. ‘Where are we going, von Abt?’ he called above the engine noise.

  ‘My secret! But like all secrets in Venice, it cannot be kept for long.’

  The boat headed along the great curve of the Riva degli Schiavoni, away from the pink confection of the Doge’s Palace and towards the red-brick buildings of the Arsenale. It slowed and finally moored at a public garden beside the mouth of a small canal. Von Abt climbed ashore and led the way into the gardens as though there was no time to be lost, while Viktor and Liesel strolled after him, holding hands and laughing at the absurd adventure and at the urgent enthusiasm of this strange ma
n with the boxer’s face and the poet’s vision of the city. ‘A homosexual,’ Viktor whispered in her ear.

  She was outraged by the idea. ‘Surely not!’

  ‘You can tell. At least I can tell.’

  ‘Tell what?’ asked von Abt over his shoulder.

  Viktor grinned at Liesel. ‘That you are a poet.’

  ‘Ah!’ The man raised an imperious finger. ‘A poet, yes; but not a poet of words. I am a poet of form.’

  ‘A dancer then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘A sculptor?’

  ‘A poet of space and structure. That is what I wish to show you.’

  Their footsteps crunched over gravel. There were buildings among the trees, a strange mixture of styles, not at all ornate and ancient like the rest of the city, but newly built pavilions that might have housed cafés or restaurants, perhaps an orangery or greenhouse. In the furthest corner of the garden was a ponderous neo-classical building. Von Abt strode up the steps and led them into the echoing hallway. There were groups of people walking round and talking in hushed voices as though they were in church. Footsteps clipped beneath the high vault. There were framed designs mounted on display boards, and glass-topped tables with models made of balsa wood and celluloid. People peered and pointed, shifting their viewpoints like billiard players preparing a shot.

  ‘Why are you being so mysterious, Herr von Abt?’ Liesel asked.

  ‘You must call me Rainer, for I am certainly not going to call you Frau Landauer. And I am not mysterious. I am showing you everything I do, in the pure and unremitting light of day.’ He had stopped before one of the displays. The label was in Italian and English: Progetto per una Padiglione Austriaca; Project for an Austrian Pavilion, Rainer von Abt, 1928. ‘There!’ he said. ‘Ecco! Voilà! Siehe da!’

  Viktor made a small noise – ‘Ah!’ – just as though something had bitten him. ‘So!’ he exclaimed, crouching down to bring his eyes level with the model. He was looking across a green baize lawn, past miniature trees carved from cork, towards a low-lying box with transparent celluloid sides. There were small chairs inside the box, like the furniture made for dollshouses, and narrow pillars of chrome wire and a reflecting pool made out of the kind of mirror that a woman – that Liesel herself – carries in her handbag. The colours of the model were those that von Abt had extolled in their voyage down from Saint Mark’s: ethereal white, glaucous pearl, glistening chrome.

  Viktor straightened up with an expansive smile. ‘You are an architect!’

  ‘I repeat,’ replied Rainer von Abt, ‘I am a poet of space and form. Of light’ – it seemed to be no difficulty at all to drag another quality into his aesthetic – ‘of light and space and form. Architects are people who build walls and floors and roofs. I capture and enclose the space within.’

  *

  For lunch – ‘You must be our guest,’ Viktor insisted – they found a restaurant that boasted a courtyard where they could eat beneath the luminous leaves of a vine. They ordered moleche, soft-shelled crabs, and a white wine called Soave. They toasted each other, glasses clinking together across the table and catching the sunlight. They talked, of art and architecture, of painting and sculpture, of the nonsense of the Dadaists and the absurd found objects of Duchamp, of Cubism and Fauvism and a group of little-known Dutch artists whom von Abt admired. ‘De Stijl, they call themselves. Do you know them? Van Doesburg, Mondrian? Purity of line, focus on shape and proportion.’ The honeymooners did not know this latest group. They knew the word clearly enough – de stijl, the style – but the idea of a group of stylish, modern Dutchmen almost seemed a contradiction in terms. Liesel expressed her liking for the Jugendstil, the Young Style, and the artists of the Viennese Secession. ‘Klimt painted my mother when she was young,’ she told von Abt. ‘The portrait hangs in the dining room of my parents’ house.’

  Von Abt smiled at her. ‘If the daughter is anything to go by she must be a beautiful woman. I am sure that Klimt did her justice.’

  ‘It is a wonderful painting …’

  ‘All gilt and tinsel, no doubt. But …’ There was always a but. It seemed that von Abt moved round the world butting into obstacles placed in his way by the less intelligent, less gifted, less imaginative. ‘But as a style, what is the Secession? Wagner? Olbrich? Do you know their building in Vienna? Of course you do.’

  ‘I think it very fine. Bold lines, a statement of intent.’

  ‘But it looks like a mausoleum! Or a railway station! A building should not look like something! It should just be, a shape without references, defined only by the material it is built of and the conception of the architect. As abstract as a painting by De Stijl.’

  Viktor was nodding in approval but Liesel protested, ‘What building is abstract? An abstract building would let the rain in.’

  Von Abt’s laughter was loud and forthright, so that people at nearby tables looked round to see the source of the noise. ‘I am, you see, a disciple of the great Adolf Loos. You know Loos? He hails, I believe, from your home city.’

  ‘I have met the man,’ Viktor said. ‘I admire his work. It is a shame he felt the need to flee Město. But things are different now. The place is looking to the future.’

  This seemed to please von Abt. He praised the virtues of his master, the intelligence, the sense of pure uncluttered form. He drew spaces and constructions before them on the table cloth to illustrate his ideas; he cast towers into the sky and – as Viktor later put it – castles into the air. He extolled the virtues of glass and steel and concrete, and decried the millstones of brick and stone that hung about peoples’ necks. ‘Ever since Man came out of the cave he has been building caves around him,’ he cried. ‘Building caves! But I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air. I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit.’

  Glass Space, Glasraum. It was the first time Liesel had heard the expression.

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Viktor, glancing thoughtfully at his wife and then back to the architect, ‘perhaps you could design a Glass Space for us.’

  Commitment

  That evening they dined by candlelight on the balcony of their room, watching the glimmering boats, the gondolas and the sandalos, pass below. There was the slap of the water against wooden piles, not the rhythmic sound of the sea but a hurried noise, like cats lapping in the darkness. ‘What do you think of our friend?’ Viktor asked.

  ‘A curiosity. He’s very full of energy.’

  ‘Almost too full. You find him attractive?’

  ‘He would attract a certain type of woman.’

  ‘But not my Liesel?’

  She smiled. ‘Your Liesel is attracted only by you,’ she said comfortingly.

  He took her hand across the table. ‘When you say things like that, I would happily take you immediately, right here at the table.’

  ‘How outrageous. People would complain and we would both be arrested by handsome carabinieri and carried away to that awful gaol that we saw in the Doge’s Palace.’ They had invented this kind of talk over the few days they had been together. It was something new, something slippery, daring. Schlüpfrig. Previously such banter had been about strangers; this was the first time that the subject of their amusement was someone known to them, and whereas previous jokes had appeared harmless enough, this seemed more dangerous.

  ‘What do you think of my suggestion that he might build us our house?’

  ‘Is he to be trusted with something so precious?’ she asked. ‘We must see his work, mustn’t we? Get references, that kind of thing.’

  They had already spoken with architects about the new house. They had discussed proposals, shaken their heads over gables and towers, questioned ornate and mullioned windows, even marched round a balsa wood and celluloid model of something that one studio had suggested. But nothing had seemed right for Viktor’s vision of the future, his desire not to be pinned down by race or creed, his determination to speak Czech as well as German, his insistence on reading Lidové Noviny, his talk o
f inovace and pokrok, innovation and progress. ‘Let the world move on,’ he would say. ‘We’ – he meant those newly created political beings, the Czechoslovaks – ‘have a new direction to take, a new world to make. We are neither German nor Slav. We can choose our history, that’s the point. It’s up to us, don’t you see? People like us.’

  And now there was this fortuitous encounter with a young architect in the amphibious city of Venice, a man whose architectural ideals seemed to be of the future rather than the past.

  ‘I can send a telegram to Adolf Loos. Von Abt claims to have studied under him.’

  ‘Claims? Do you doubt his word?’

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, we will see. We must arrange to meet him again. Interview him.’ He was suddenly businesslike, a disconcerting manner that he could put on at a moment’s notice. One expected him to gather papers up from the table in front of him and tap them into some kind of order and slip them away inside a leather briefcase, then call for a car to whisk him away to another meeting. ‘We must find out for ourselves what his ideas might be. He gave me his card. I will give him a ring.’

  ‘Can’t we leave that kind of thing until we’re back home?’

  ‘Why wait? Why not strike while the iron is hot?’

  The meeting with Rainer von Abt took place the next day. He was summoned to their suite at six o’clock in the evening, ostensibly for cocktails but actually to be grilled about the possibility of his designing their house. It was a fine evening, with the windows open and the slop and stir of the water outside like the presence of some large feline animal. Liesel stayed out on the balcony, smoking and sipping her drink and looking out over the basin of St Mark’s towards the Isola San Giorgio, while the two men remained inside the room to talk. She was conscious that von Abt glanced towards her from time to time. She told herself that she was unmoved by his attentions. He was short, dark, bouncing in that boxing manner of his, whereas what she admired was tall and angular and almost stooped when standing or sitting, as though making a concession to people of lesser height than he. Viktor. A man of qualities, a man who was altogether admirable.