The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  ‘It is quite a proposition,’ von Abt remarked when Viktor had finished what he had to say. ‘Quite a difficult proposition.’

  ‘Why difficult? Build a house.’ Viktor held his hands open as though to show the simplicity of things. ‘Difficult for me, perhaps, but surely straightforward for an architect. If you asked me to build you a motor car …’

  ‘Ah, but you build a motor car for a market, don’t you? You might wish to build a motor car to your taste, but actually you build a motor car for a market.’

  ‘Precisely,’ Viktor agreed. ‘The same with a house. Only the market is me alone. And my wife.’

  ‘That is exactly the problem with such a commission. You, your wife.’

  ‘We are a problem?’

  ‘The situation creates a problem. You want someone to build a house, four walls—’

  ‘Maybe more, maybe more than four.’

  ‘—and a roof. Doors, windows, upstairs, downstairs, the whole rigmarole. Servants’ quarters, I imagine …’

  ‘They must go somewhere.’

  ‘Quite so. But it’ll be working to order.’

  ‘Rooms for the children,’ Liesel called from the balcony.

  Von Abt smiled and inclined his head towards her. ‘Rooms for the children, indeed. However, I wish to do different things than mere construction. I wish to create a work of art. A work that is the very reverse of sculpture: I wish to enclose a space.’ And he made a gesture, using both his hands, the space between them as fluid and shifting as the air out of which he modelled it. ‘So. It is not like a client making demands and the artisan or the factory worker listening to those demands and doing what he is told. It is me making my vision in concrete and glass.’

  Viktor glanced towards Liesel and smiled. She didn’t know how to read him in this kind of encounter. She was learning how to read him in matters of love and companionship, but she had never seen him in negotiation with a client or a workers’ representative or a supplier. He was smiling, sitting back to consider the matter, with his elbows on the arms of his chair and his hands in front of his face, his long fingers steepled together like the groins of a Gothic vault and his mouth composed in a quiet and confident smile. ‘Show me,’ he said.

  ‘Show you?’

  ‘Yes. Prepare some drawings. The kind of thing you would wish to do. The kind of’ – he paused – ‘space you would wish to enclose. Just sketches.’ Almost as an afterthought, he added, ‘The site is sloping, quite steeply sloping. Overlooking the whole city. Do you know Město? Perhaps you don’t. Below the hill is a park – the Lužánky Park. It used to be known as the Augarten but of course the name has been changed. Where we live, everything has two names. Austrian. Czech. It is the way of our world. So, you must imagine a house at the top of a hill, quite a steep hill, and below it a sloping field, and then laid out before it the whole of the city. A magnificent prospect. Make some drawings.’

  Von Abt held out his hands helplessly. ‘But how large? I have no information, no idea of what you want.’

  ‘A family home. I have made that clear. A home for my wife and me and our eventual children. Say’ – he smiled at Liesel – ‘a maximum of three. What area? Say three hundred square metres. Just sketch something out.’

  ‘I will bring you photographs of some of my work. That will suffice.’

  ‘I would like to see some ideas.’

  ‘You will see ideas. I work with nothing but ideas.’

  Viktor laughed. Liesel had somehow expected that he would be angry, but instead he laughed. ‘Show me your ideas, then. Convince me that you are the man for our house.’

  Two days later they met again, by appointment, at Café Florian in the Piazza. St Mark’s stood like a fantasy of Arabian tents at the end of the great space and the orchestra, camped outside the café like a band of nomads, played selections from Verdi’s operas. Rainer von Abt approached their table with all the panache of an opera singer making his entrance. ‘Ecco!’ he announced, and placed a portfolio on their table. ‘I have laboured day and night, to the disadvantage of my current work. But the demands of true love are more powerful than mere artistic patronage.’

  The tapes were untied and the portfolio was opened and Viktor and Liesel put their heads together to look. There were photographs, large glossy prints with studio stamps on the back: an apartment block with white, featureless walls; a square, banded villa set in an anonymous garden; an office block of some kind, all plate glass and white plaster.

  ‘This is all your work?’

  ‘Of course it is.’ He leaned forward and pulled out another photograph, one showing a long, low apartment block receding down the perspective lines of a street. ‘Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart. Have you seen the place? Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Behrens, Schneck. Do you know these people?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Viktor. ‘Le Corbusier, of course. And Behrens.’

  Von Abt made a small sound that may have been amusement. ‘And von Abt,’ he said, putting the photographs aside. ‘Those are some of the things I have done. Now, the things that I have imagined.’ He spread out some drawings. These were all architect’s sketches, rectilinear, sharp of line, devoid of any kind of embellishment. He pointed with a thick, artisan’s finger. ‘That one I am working on for people in Berlin. An industrialist and his third wife. They wanted columns and capitals and statues and I told them that if they were looking for ornament, they could look elsewhere. Perhaps you know the essay by Loos, “Ornament and Crime”?’

  Viktor smiled. ‘Certainly I do.’

  ‘Well then, that is our manifesto. The Communists have theirs and we of the Modern Movement have ours. You ask me to design you a house? I will design you a house. But form without ornament is all I can give you.’ He looked round at the long colonnades of the Piazza, at a couple of children immersed in a fluttering cloud of pigeons and being photographed by a commercial photographer with a massive mahogany box camera. Beyond them were the ornate domes of the Basilica with its mosaics and prancing horses. He gestured towards the scene, as though somehow it had been laid on for his own purposes. ‘Here, in the most ornamental city in the whole world, I am offering you the very opposite.’

  And at his gesture things began to happen. At least that was the impression Liesel had: the café orchestra set off on a lugubrious traipse round the ‘Lament of the Hebrew Slaves’; the photographer bent his head beneath his black cape; and the children, focused through the lens of his machine, shrieked with laughter as though being captured in the box, being inverted and diminished, gave them a physical sensation like being tickled or being frightened. Viktor sipped champagne and considered von Abt’s drawings.

  ‘It all seems rather cold.’

  ‘Cold?’ For once von Abt appeared lost for words. ‘Cold! All my work, all my art is based on this.’ He took a pencil from an inner pocket and leaned forward to draw a line as sharp as a razor cut on the nearest sheet of paper. ‘This is the first work of art: the woman who lies down.’ He looked from Viktor to Liesel, holding her gaze for moment longer than seemed polite. Then he went back to the sheet of paper and drew another line, a vertical cutting at right angles through the horizontal. ‘And this. This is the man who penetrates her. The result is the rectangular cross that underpins all my art. What could be warmer than that?’

  Liesel took a cigarette and lit it, hoping it would distract her from von Abt’s look, hoping she would not blush beneath his gaze. ‘Yes, Herr von Abt seems a most uncold person. Don’t you agree, Viktor?’

  Conception

  When the Landauer couple returned home they moved into a furnished villa in the Masaryk quarter of the city. Overlooking the river Svratka and the wooded hills beyond, this was a turreted, crenellated monster of a villa, the very antithesis of their plans for their own house. ‘How can I live and breathe in such surroundings?’ Viktor had exclaimed when they had first looked round the place. Yet it was in this rented fortress, among the ormolu lamps and velvet drapes, beneath orn
ate plastered ceilings and chandeliers of Murano glass, that they pursued their ideal of a modern house that would be adapted to the future rather than the past, to the openness of modern living rather than the secretive and stultified life of the previous century.

  The Glass Space.

  For the moment it was without form or substance, yet it existed, diffuse, diverse, in their minds and in the mind of Rainer von Abt. It existed in the manner that ideas and ideals, shifting and insubstantial, may exist. Space, light, glass; some spare furniture; windows looking out on a garden; a sweep of shining floor, travertine, perhaps; white and ivory and the gleam of chrome. The elements moved, evolved, transformed, metamorphosed in the way that they do in dreams, changing shape and form and yet, to the dreamer, remaining what they always were: der Glasraum, der Glastraum, a single letter change metamorphosing one into the other, the Glass Space becoming the Glass Dream, a dream that went with the spirit of the brand new country in which they found themselves, a state in which being Czech or German or Jew would not matter, in which democracy would prevail and art and science would combine to bring happiness to all people.

  Towards the end of summer Rainer von Abt came to inspect the site. How, Liesel wondered, would he appear out of the only context she had for him, that fantasy world of Venice in the spring? There he had seemed a character as unreal as the city itself, a creature of imagination and fantasy, capable of conjuring quaint palazzi or overwrought churches or melancholy squares out of the mists of the lagoon as though by some kind of innate magic. How would he seem now, coming off the Vienna train into the literal world of Město?

  ‘Just another smug Viennese, I expect,’ Viktor suggested as they waited on the platform amongst the milling crowds and the idle porters.

  ‘Why should he be smug?’

  ‘All Viennese are smug. It comes from having lorded it over the Empire for so long.’

  She felt indignant on behalf of the man. ‘He’s not that kind of Viennese at all! How cynical you are, Viktor.’

  ‘I’m realistic.’

  Amidst apocalyptic clouds of steam the Vienna train drew in. Doors slammed open and passengers stepped down. She saw von Abt standing at the door of his carriage before he caught sight of them. In a grey homburg hat and black coat he did indeed have the look of a smug businessman. ‘There he is!’ Liesel waved. Von Abt was peering over the people on the platform with an expression that was almost disdainful, as though he despised both the seething crowd below him and the explosive rattle of the Czech language all around. Then he saw her waving and an expression of relief passed across his face. ‘My friends!’ he cried, climbing down from the carriage and flinging out his arms. ‘My friends!’ For a moment he seemed about to hug them, but in the event he merely clasped Viktor’s hand in both of his own and raised Liesel’s to within breathing distance of his lips. How enchanted he was to see them once more. Enchanté, he said. If it were possible, they were looking even happier than they had been in Venice; and Frau Liesel even lovelier.

  She laughed at the absurd compliments. He was not a smug businessman, he was a performer, an artist of verve and flair. She took his arm and led him along the platform, addressing him as du rather than Sie, the familiar rather than the formal. ‘How is Vienna?’ she asked. ‘Do you miss Venice? Wasn’t it wonderful there? Don’t you love the place?’

  Von Abt made a disparaging face. ‘As always Vienna is stimulating and depressing in almost equal measure. Over wrought and undercooked, like its cuisine.’

  ‘And did you have a good journey?’

  ‘Certainly, because of the anticipation of seeing you both again. But passport control at the border was ridiculous. It seems ironical that, though the world is moving forward, it has created a new border control where before none existed.’

  ‘I suppose that’s the price of change. It’s a small loss of freedom compared with other freedoms we have gained.’

  He looked at her with that disturbing smile. ‘And are you free, Frau Liesel?’

  Viktor was striding ahead, past signs saying Ausgang and Vychod. She tried to read the meaning of von Abt’s question. ‘Of course I’m free.’

  They reached the approximate sunshine of the station forecourt. The scene outside the station seemed the epitome of that freedom – the bustle of people coming and going, the taxi cabs stuttering past, the trams clanging and grinding along the Bahnring, the whole energy and enthusiasm of the new republic. There was a small crowd round a newsstand where the newspapers were announcing the latest technological marvel, the first flight of Germany’s new airship, the Graf Zeppelin. Photographs showed the great beast floating like a huge marine animal over the seabed while bottom-dwelling creatures scurried around in its shadow. ‘One day soon,’ von Abt suggested, ‘we’ll be able to fly across the Atlantic as easily as taking a train from here to Paris.’

  Would it really be possible? Liesel felt all the possibilities of the future. How remarkable this century, which had started so disastrously, might yet prove to be.

  Viktor ushered them across the road. ‘The Grand Hotel isn’t the Sacher,’ he said apologetically, ‘but it’s convenient. Perhaps we can have lunch there before going on to see the site?’

  So they ate together in the hotel, in the winter garden, among the palms and the cacti. ‘Like old times,’ von Abt observed, as though those Venice days were a generation ago and had lasted for years. And Liesel would have been happy to indulge him, to talk about the canals and the churches, about Titian and Tiepolo; but Viktor was impatient with the conversation and eager to talk about the house.

  ‘Ah, the house.’ Von Abt nodded. ‘Of course, the house. The Landauer House.’

  The Landauer House! Waiters cruised among the palm fronds. The room was filled with the sound of diners, the murmur of their conversation and the ringing of cutlery on porcelain, and Rainer von Abt was looking from one to the other of his hosts with that expression of mixed amusement and thoughtfulness, as though to assess the impact of those words: das Landauer Haus! It was the first time that Liesel had heard the house, the fictitious house, the fantasy house, the house of dream and imagination, referred to in terms so concrete.

  ‘I wish,’ he was telling them, ‘not just to design a house but to create a whole world. I want to work from the foundations to the interior, the windows, the doorways, the furnishings, the fabric of the place as well as the structure. I will design you a life. Not a mere house to live in, but a whole way of life.’ He opened his hands as though the life were there within his grasp. ‘Your abode will be a work of art at which people will wonder.’

  He reached into his briefcase and took out a block of cartridge paper and some pencils. ‘Look.’ His pencil swept lines across the page. ‘You said five bedrooms as well as servants’ quarters? I have thought that the two should be apart, with room for the motor cars between. Something like this …’ A shape appeared on his pad, a silver rectangle that, filled with pillars and a triangular pediment, might have become the façade of a classical temple, but cross-hatched with window frames and doorways became, as they watched, a suburban house of geometrical simplicity emerging as though from the white fog of paper.

  Viktor frowned. ‘A flat roof? Is that suitable for our climate?’

  ‘Modern materials. With modern materials we can fight the elements.’ The pencil moved again and mere lines took on substance, solidity. He stroked some shading across the ground and blurred it into shadow with his thumb. With that gesture, that touch of a god-like hand, the sun shone. The pencil moved again and the small, elfin figure of an infant ran along the terrace in front of the house, the future there before them. ‘Your child,’ he said, looking up. ‘Your first child.’ He noticed Liesel’s blush. ‘Have I guessed something?’

  She looked from von Abt to her husband and back, wondering whether to disclose this confidence that hadn’t yet been conveyed to either of their parents. Viktor nodded faintly. ‘Yes, you have,’ she confirmed. ‘Not many people know yet – just
my doctor really – but we’re going to have a baby. The news is … new. What else can news be? Just a few days old. The baby is due in March.’

  Von Abt looked from one to the other. ‘I must congratulate you both.’

  ‘The achievement is all Liesel’s,’ Viktor said with that dry smile. ‘I played but a brief role.’ There was laughter between the three of them, a moment of shared intimacy such as old friends may have. That was what Liesel felt. Something intense and intimate, as though her pregnancy, the organic fact of it, had created a small, tight circle of special knowledge around these two men. Uncertain exactly how to address him – Herr von Abt? Herr Rainer? – she grabbed the moment. ‘Rainer, I wish to choose the interior of the house – the fabrics, the flooring, the furnishings.’

  He reached out across the table and laid a comforting hand on hers. ‘It will be a collaborative effort. I will build nothing that Frau Liesel will not adore. Nothing!’

  After lunch they drove up Černopolní, Blackfield Hill, to see the plot. Viktor drew the car to a halt in a gravel lay-by that overlooked the whole city. It was a wet and blustery day, a foretaste of autumn, and smoke from a thousand chimneys smudged the air. The roofs stretched away like a choppy sea to the distant shore of the Špilas fortress.

  ‘Here we are,’ Viktor said. ‘This is where you must work. This is your canvas.’

  Beyond a gate a meadow sloped down, gently at first, then steeply towards trees at the bottom. Down there the bulk of a large house could be vaguely seen among trees; beyond that was Parkstrasse and then Lužánky park itself. Raindrops blurred the view through Liesel’s spectacles. ‘Don’t you think the position is fine?’ she said.