The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  ‘Very fine,’ von Abt agreed. ‘Magnificent.’

  She pulled on waterproof overshoes and followed the two men. In the meadow there were apple trees and a single silver birch. Windfalls rotted amongst the grass. Try as she might, she could not picture anything built in this place. There was nothing but this empty hillside and this view of the city. Breathtaking, literally, the wind snatching her breath away.

  ‘I used to come up here with my brother,’ she said. ‘When we were just children. The birch tree was our god. We’d sit with the sun on our faces and look at the tree and the whole city beyond seemed almost our plaything, a toy town.’ Had they heard her? The wind battered her head and snatched her words away. ‘Benno used to tell me that there were prisoners in the Špilas castle, chained to the wall so that they had to stand on tiptoe. If they relaxed the chains would cut their hands off. I never knew whether to believe him.’ The wind blew a smattering of drizzle in her face. She removed her glasses to wipe them. Von Abt was a blurred figure in the rain, examining every detail of the site from the ground at his feet to the slope of the meadow. ‘Here?’ he asked, pointing. ‘Right here?’

  ‘Wherever you like,’ Viktor replied. ‘Wherever you think best. I’d say here at the top, wouldn’t you? The whole field is ours of course. Down there,’ he pointed down the hill, ‘is Liesel’s family home. The land is all in the family.’

  Von Abt had produced a camera from the pocket of his coat, a Leica just like Viktor’s. He snapped the lens out and raised the device to his eye, holding himself steady while he shot a series of photographs of the road, the meadow, the slope. ‘You have a plan of the place?’

  ‘I’ve had my surveyors draw one up.’

  The architect nodded. He walked down through the wet grass as far as the silver birch and looked back up the hillside.

  ‘Will there be any problem with the slope?’ Viktor asked.

  ‘We’ll have to excavate. Dig deep and create sure foundations. Gravity is your enemy, but then gravity is always the enemy of the building. If it weren’t for gravity we’d build castles in the air.’ He looked up to where Liesel stood at the top of the slope, then raised the camera, framing her as she stood there in the long grass with the hem of her coat stained with damp. She felt self-conscious beneath the Cyclops gaze of the little camera, as though it was seeing more than the surface of her, the tall, slightly awkward body, the smooth and expensive clothes, the pale makeup and scarlet arabesque of her mouth, the shining discs of her spectacles. Perhaps, in some mysterious way, it was seeing the occult fact of her pregnancy.

  ‘I like your silver birch,’ he called up to her. ‘I love your silver birch. It will be the axis of your garden, the feature round which the whole design will circle. House and garden as one. Will your brother approve?’

  He had heard. The fact made her feel absurdly happy, as though Benno himself had just smiled at her. ‘I am sure he would have approved. But I’m afraid he’s dead. He died in the war.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He made his way back up to her side.

  ‘Do you know what they did?’ she told him as he joined her. ‘When he was seventeen and about to go off to join the army, do you know what they did?’

  ‘Who did what?’

  ‘My parents. I was only twelve. I caught spála. That’s what we call it. Scarlet fever. And when the rash started they banished me to the chata down there in the garden.’

  ‘Chata? What’s a chata?’

  ‘A sort of country cottage that people build. I think it must come from the German, don’t you? Hütte? This one’s really just a summerhouse but that’s what we call it, the chata. It’s down there amongst the trees.’ She pointed. ‘Papi had a bathroom put in – double quick, you can imagine – and I had to live there with the nurse. And why did they do this? All to ensure that Benno didn’t catch the disease and maybe develop rheumatic fever and therefore not be able to join the army.’ She looked at von Abt. Suddenly the blurring of her sight wasn’t caused by rain on her spectacles: suddenly there were tears in her eyes. ‘Isn’t that stupid? They didn’t want Benno to catch scarlet fever in case it would prevent him from joining the army. They should have put us together in the hope that he’d catch it, and then maybe he’d be alive today.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  She smiled, as though to console him. ‘You weren’t to know.’

  As they climbed back up to the road something shifted in the atmosphere, some coincidence of wind and light and vapour that brought a rupture in the cloud and let the sun break through. She turned and looked back. The grey clouds were grazed with red. The whole orb of the sun was hanging low to the right of the Špilas hill, its light slanting directly across the city to pick them out there on the hillside in a sudden warm amber glow. Beside her, von Abt raised the camera again and captured the moment of illumination with a small, decisive click of the shutter, a measure of milliseconds. ‘You know what?’ There was something in his expression, a suppressed excitement, the thrill of a secret that, for the moment, he alone possessed. ‘You know what?’

  His enthusiasm reminded her of Benno, all those plans he used to have. Viktor was standing impatiently by the car. ‘What? What should I know?’

  ‘I’ll build your house upside down.’

  ‘Upside down? What do you mean, upside down?’

  ‘Just what I say.’

  ‘You must explain.’

  But he wouldn’t explain, wouldn’t tell her. ‘Just an idea,’ he said as they climbed back into the car. ‘Just an idea.’

  That evening Liesel’s parents held a dinner in honour of the guest. A hopeful from the architectural world of the city had been invited, and the pianist Miroslav Němec. Conversation stumbled occasionally between Czech and German. The architect clearly regarded Rainer von Abt as an interloper and Viktor Landauer as something of a traitor by suggesting that he might employ this Viennese to build his house. Entirely German and quite oblivious to such tensions, Liesel’s mother sat at the end of the table with the Klimt portrait looking over her shoulder. Nowadays the face in the painting bore more resemblance to the daughter than it did to the woman who had sat for it two decades earlier: there was the same oval face, the same pursed and thoughtful mouth, the same dark, considerate eyes, the same aquiline nose. But no one, mother or daughter or anyone else, could ever have worn the dress that the artist had created for his subject, a garment that was a vortex of snow and ice, of diamonds and peacock tail feathers.

  ‘Very decorative,’ von Abt said as he admired the painting.

  ‘I was the toast of Vienna,’ Liesel’s mother told him. ‘Those were the days, Herr von Abt. When the Monarchy was still alive.’

  But Liesel knew the code: ‘decorative’ was not good. Ornament was Crime. ‘Mother, the Monarchy was moribund long before Herr Klimt painted you. It just took a long time dying.’

  ‘It was socialism that killed it,’ her mother retorted. ‘Had the Socialists not killed it, it would still be there. And now we are left living in a state dreamed up by foreigners.’

  There was an awkward pause. At the head of the table, her father smiled enigmatically from behind his moustaches. ‘The war is what killed the Monarchy,’ Liesel insisted. ‘The war killed the Monarchy just as it killed Benno. Stupid old men thinking that they might play around with fighting just as they did throughout the last century. And they found out that they couldn’t, that war kills people, ruins lives and destroys countries. But now perhaps we can build a new one, if they’ll let us. Socialism builds things.’

  The silence deepened, became cavernous. Her mother looked appalled. Socialism? The idea seemed outrageous. Not only outrageous but dangerous.

  ‘So how do you find Socialist Vienna, Herr von Abt?’ Liesel’s father asked. ‘My daughter clearly admires it.’

  Even von Abt seemed at a loss for words. He who could always discover a retort or a bon mot, needed to scratch around for something to say. ‘The Socialists have tried to do something. Their bui
lding projects are exceptional … The Karl-Marx-Hof …’

  It was Němec’s wife who unwittingly saved the situation. She knew how she found Vienna. She found Vienna full of shops and cafés, a positive plethora – she used the word Überfülle, her lips enveloping the vowels as they might a strudel – of things that didn’t seem socialist at all. Wasn’t socialism to do with bringing everything down to the lowest? Well Vienna raised things up to the highest. ‘Prague has nothing to compare,’ she complained, ‘and so I am forced to go to Vienna. And then they try and charge me duty at the border.’

  The discomfiting moment, the daughter lecturing the mother, the mention of the dead Benno and the cursed socialism, seemed to have passed. But it left its mark on the evening, like an embarrassing blemish that everyone notices but no one remarks on. Except Rainer von Abt. ‘If you decide to storm the barricades, I will surely follow,’ he murmured to Liesel as they followed her parents to the drawing room to listen to Němec play.

  She had to suppress her laughter. ‘I’m afraid that you’ll leave Viktor behind.’

  The guests settled into a semicircle of chairs, with the Bösendorfer at the focus. They talked in hushed tones, as though in church. Němec sat at the keyboard and played something by his mentor Leoš Janáček, a piano suite of mournful tone whose notes meandered through the room, occasionally dying away to silence, occasionally hammering on the startled audience’s ears. Liesel’s mother listened with a stern concentration that was a rebuke to anyone less attentive than she. In the pause between movements, von Abt leaned over to Liesel and breathed in her ear, ‘Why are Czechs always so mournful?’

  ‘They have,’ she whispered back, ‘a great deal to be mournful about.’

  ‘I’m not surprised, with music like this.’

  There was a terrible moment when laughter threatened to bubble up out of control. Viktor caught her eye and frowned. The pianist swayed back and forth, rumbling out deep and sorrowful arpeggios. Von Abt compressed his lips thoughtfully and gazed at the ornate plasterwork of the ceiling, while the giggles rose in Liesel’s throat until she feared she might choke.

  ‘I thought you behaved disgracefully this evening,’ Viktor said when they were undressing for bed.

  ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Giggling like a schoolgirl with that fellow von Abt.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd, Viktor. We were laughing. We find the same things funny.’

  ‘You were behaving like children.’

  ‘Don’t be such a prig!’

  The little argument flared and died. In the morning it was forgotten, for there were other, more momentous events to occupy the mind: a meeting with the company lawyers where an agreement was signed between Landauer, Viktor and Landauerová, Liesel on the one hand, and Herr Doktor Architekt Abt, Rainer (‘You may leave out the “von”’) on the other, for the design of a family home of two storeys and a basement, with a floor area of approximately five hundred square metres, and the addition of a garage for a saloon car and separate quarters for servants of one hundred and twenty square metres, preliminary plans to be completed in two months and final plans by April of the year 1929. Details of construction to be agreed by common consent and the design of furnishings and fittings to be decided over the ensuing months, all designs to be subject to final approval by Landauer, Viktor and Landauerová, Liesel.

  Pens scratched in the still atmosphere of the legal office. A banker’s draft, drawn on the Živnostenská Banka, was handed across the table. There was a shake of hands, solemn and businesslike with Viktor, warm and two-handed with Liesel, and the commission had been formalised. The Landauer House, a mere figment, would be crystallised into fact.

  ‘He’s a strange fellow,’ Viktor remarked as they saw von Abt off at the railway station. ‘You don’t know where you are with him.’

  Hana

  ‘How is the baby going?’ Hana Hanáková asks.

  ‘It seems fine. The doctor tells me that all is proceeding as normal.’

  Hana is the privileged one, Liesel’s intimate friend. Although the younger of the two, it is she who mediates on Liesel’s behalf between Czech and German, between the world of the arts and business, between the various social circles that interlock and intersect within the bourgeois society of the city. Away from their respective husbands, the two women meet every Wednesday at the café that Fuchs designed for the gardens inside the Schramm-Ring – the Café Zeman – where they sit as always and almost by right in their favourite corner so that they can look out across the tables and see who is there and who might be worth talking about. Hana drinks turecká, Turkish coffee, and eats Sachertorte and lets people look at her. ‘You know my latest?’ she says. She touches crumbs of cake away from her lips. Her mouth, that feature that seems to fascinate men, is down-turned when in repose. This gives her a look of faint disapproval, to be relieved, suddenly and surprisingly, when she smiles. Her smile, when it strikes you, makes you feel that there is joy and pleasure to be had in life after all.

  ‘No, but you’re about to tell.’

  ‘Of course I am.’ She leans conspiratorially across the table, her eyes darting sideways in the hope that people at other tables might be lip-reading. ‘Miroslav Němec.’

  ‘Oh, Hana, not him, surely not him.’

  ‘Why not? His wife is always going off on shopping expeditions to Vienna leaving him with nothing to do but perform.’

  ‘For you, I suppose.’

  ‘On me, my dear. I can tell you, there is nothing, absolutely nothing, like a pianist’s fingers.’

  ‘Hana!’

  ‘Have I shocked you? I always thought pregnant women were unshockable. You will be by the time you’ve given birth. All that gaping and pushing, with half a dozen men peering up your pochva.’

  ‘Hana, you really are disgraceful.’

  Hana shrugs. ‘I’m just truthful. Now tell me about you and Viktor. Is he wildly frustrated?’

  ‘Viktor is not frustrated. He is very content.’

  The one looks askance at the other. ‘Darling, you’re not letting him in, are you? You know they say that it can damage the baby.’

  Liesel laughs. ‘I’m certainly not going to tell you what I am letting him do. Some things are sacred.’

  ‘My darling, these days absolutely nothing is sacred. You know that as well as I do.’ For Hana that certainly seems to be true. She has posed naked for the photographer Drtikol, and during a year spent in Paris when she was a mere nineteen she was painted nude by the Russian artist Tamara de Lempicka. The painting, all anodised tubes and curves, with hair like strings of liquorice and a mouth like a vampire’s, has only recently been exhibited in Prague. There is a rumour – Hana has never denied it, never confirmed it – that she did rather more for de Lempicka than merely pose, that they were in fact lovers.

  ‘For me there are many things sacred,’ Liesel insists. ‘My marriage, for example. My baby for another.’

  ‘Oh darling, don’t be absurd. Your marriage to Viktor is a mere contract.’

  ‘My marriage to Viktor is very much more than a mere contract. It is a marriage of minds.’

  Hana laughs. ‘You’re being sentimental, darling. But your baby is something quite different. Maybe that really is the last sacred thing. Really I do rather envy you. However hard I try nothing ever seems to happen with me.’

  ‘You actually want a baby? How wonderful.’

  ‘Sometimes, darling, just sometimes. When I’m feeling lonely.’

  Beneath the table Liesel touches her belly. Only the day before she fancied that she felt a movement, and now there it is again, a tiny fluttering certainty in the depths of her being. ‘It’s there,’ she cries. ‘I can feel him!’

  Hana reaches forward. ‘Let me see.’

  ‘Not on the outside. Inside, I can feel him inside. Like a bubble bursting.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s wind.’

  Their laughter draws the attention of people at nearby tables. ‘I think it’s true,
’ Liesel insists. ‘I think it really is him.’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Or her. Perhaps a her.’

  ‘Have you had anyone divine it?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Oh, but it works. If you have the powers.’

  ‘And unscientific.’

  ‘You and your science. Just because Viktor makes motor cars. You need to make a pendulum with your wedding ring, that’s all. A cotton thread will do. Everyone knows.’ She pauses and looks round as though she might be overheard. ‘I can do it.’

  ‘You can do it?’

  ‘Of course. Dear Viktor may loathe me but I am a woman of many talents.’

  So they finish their coffees and, giggling, take a taxi to Hana’s apartment in the centre of town where the operation is performed, Liesel lying on the chaise longue in the drawing room, in the very place, presumably, where the pianist Němec conducts his private performances. Hana ties Liesel’s wedding ring to a length of cotton thread and holds it above her abdomen. ‘I think you should pull your dress up, darling. It works much better if there’s nothing to absorb the aura of gender.’

  ‘Won’t my own aura of gender interfere with the transmission anyway? How can this possibly work?’

  ‘You’ve become too cynical. You’re catching it from Viktor.’

  ‘Viktor is not cynical. He is just realistic.’ But still Liesel complies with the suggestion, shifting her hips to hitch her skirt and petticoat up and expose the gleaming dome of her belly. The umbilicus is everted, and there is a median line that has appeared over the weeks, running from her navel to her pubis almost like a line of symmetry. Hana looks down on her with an expression of amazement. ‘Darling, you are gorgeous.’

  ‘Don’t I look like a clumsy whale?’

  Her friend’s eyes shine. She stands there, sharp and elegant and sterile, looking down on the helplessly exposed Liesel. ‘Of course not. You look like a sleek fish. Tamara could have painted you. Goodness, I’m quite …’