The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  ‘Quite what?’

  For once Hana seems at a loss for words. ‘Overwhelmed … I never dreamed …’

  Liesel feels both vulnerable and proud. ‘Never dreamed what?’

  ‘That it could be so beautiful. May I touch? Does it seem rather strange to ask?’ The improvised pendulum hangs from her finger. ‘May I?’

  ‘Why would you want to do a thing like that?’

  ‘I don’t know. I just … do.’ And she kneels down on the floor beside the chaise longue, and strokes her hands across Liesel’s belly like a blind person trying to discover the shape and texture of something that she cannot see. Then something happens that seems so remarkable that they never talk of it afterwards: Hana leans forward and presses her lips against the warm swelling. The contact evokes in Liesel a vague and unnerving sense of sexual desire, focused not on Hana but on her own body, which is so foreign and so strange, so heavy with the future. She rests her hand on Hana’s head in something like benediction, or maybe to comfort her, that she is in this blessed gravid state and Hana is not. And then Hana’s hand slips inside the elastic of her drawers and cups the warm mound of her pubis.

  There is a moment of shock, a few seconds of a strange tableau in which the participants are uncertain of the role each is playing, before Liesel shifts her hips. ‘Hana,’ she says quietly, ‘please.’

  The hand slips away. Avoiding Liesel’s eyes, Hana gets to her feet. She searches for distraction. ‘The pendulum. We’ve forgotten the pendulum.’ She holds it out as though to demonstrate the hard metallic fact of it, something that can be felt and seen, against whatever it is that the two of them have just experienced, which was a slippery, ineffable emotion that was different for each but nonetheless powerful. Schlüpfrig. The ring spins round, catching the light in splashes of gold. Hana holds it still and for a moment the band of gold hovers motionless above Liesel’s everted navel. Then, hesitantly, it begins to turn. An air current? A shiver from Hana’s fingers?

  ‘Look!’

  ‘Shh!’

  ‘It’s turning. A circle. It’s turning a circle!’

  ‘It’s a girl.’ The turning is obvious now, incontrovertible, a description of a perfect female circle over the smooth and refulgent dome of Liesel’s belly.

  ‘A girl! Oh Hana, we’ll call her after you.’ And she sits up and hugs her friend as though everything is complete, their love consummated, the gestation over, the child delivered, the matter already decided.

  Gestation

  ‘Look at what has just come from von Abt,’ Viktor announces one morning, finding Liesel in her room writing letters. Her belly is heavily swollen now. Sometimes the swelling makes her feel big and clumsy; at other times she feels almost translucent, as though the creature inside her can be seen through the wall of her abdomen, a fish swimming there in the ocean of its own amnion, an amphibian climbing out onto a tidal bank, a reptile raising its ugly head, a mammal couched in fur, an animal re-enacting its evolutionary development there in the primeval world of her womb.

  ‘See what he is proposing?’ He unfolds the architect’s plan on the floor beside her desk, a diazo print showing ghostly lines in dark blue on a pale blue background. Haus Landauer is written across the top left-hand corner. There are two perspective drawings, two floor plans, a front elevation and a street elevation: ruled lines as sharp as razor cuts, a mathematical precision that is beyond the natural. There are no straight lines in nature. Not even light travels in straight lines any longer, so it is said. That man Einstein.

  ‘See what he is suggesting? The house will be sort of hung from the first storey, here. Do you see? Downwards into the garden. The bedrooms and bathrooms on the entrance floor and then the living room below. Huge windows. Plate glass. I mean, the fellow hasn’t really bothered with walls. Just glass.’ His tone is one of amazement and excitement, as though he has just been the witness of a natural phenomenon that you see only once in a lifetime.

  Liesel turns to look, spreading her legs so she can lean forward. The plans show Euclidian perfection, as pure as an idea. There is not a curve in the whole proposal. Her own belly is a curve, something aquatic, oceanic, but not this design for a house. Not a curve in sight. She examines the garden elevation, a long, lean rectangle laid sideways across the page and crossed with vertical lines, a rectilinear universe that might have been designed by that new painter whom Rainer talked about, the Dutchman Mondrian. The perspective drawings show all this as a construction of boxes, a child’s game played with wooden blocks. Only a tree, an architect’s conceit sketched in beside the building, gives a brief, ephemeral sense of flow. And as Viktor said, the street entrance seems to be on the top floor with the living room below it. She looks up. ‘“I will build you a house upside down,” that’s what he said.’

  ‘But is it what we want?’

  ‘Why not? And this room, all glass!’ She laughs, shifting her belly, leaning forward again. ‘We will be like plants, hothouse plants.’

  ‘Over-hot in summer, perishing cold in winter, I’d say.’

  She examines the plan of the main floor – it is a space, just a space. There are no internal walls, merely space. ‘What’s this line?’

  ‘He proposes some kind of partition to divide the area. Moveable, I think. And there’s another partition to separate the dining area. See? Where he has put the table and chairs. The semicircle.’

  ‘At least there’s one curve.’ She puts her finger out and touches the slick surface of the print as though by touching it she might understand it better, like a blind person reading Braille. There are small crosses ranked across the plan like graves marked on the map of a cemetery.

  ‘And these?’

  ‘Those are the pillars.’

  ‘Pillars?’

  ‘He wants to build a steel frame. Apparently there will be no load-bearing walls at all, just the whole thing hung on a steel frame. And where the uprights pass through the interior he is proposing to clad them in chrome. Glänzend, he calls it. Shining. Hard steel rendered as translucent as water.’ Viktor pulls a letter from his pocket and reads. ‘“Steel will be as translucent as water. Light will be as solid as walls and walls as transparent as air. I conceive of a house that will be unlike any other, living space that changes functions as the inhabitants wish, a house that merges seamlessly into the garden outside, a place that is at once of nature and quite aside from nature …” That’s what he says. What is the man going on about?’

  ‘I think it looks wonderful.’

  ‘It certainly looks different. More like that department store that the Bat′a people are putting up on Jánská. Do we want to live in a department store? Over here domestic supplies, over there soft furnishings and fabrics, downstairs for cutlery and crockery …’

  She laughs. ‘Viktor, you are losing your nerve. It was you who wanted a house for the future and now you seem to hanker after the solid ideas of the past. Next you will be insisting on a turret with crenellations and ogives. Look.’ She points to the top floor, the street level. ‘This is a terrace, a great space, with the rooms like a cluster of tents. Our family camped out on the steppe. The inside and the outside are one and the same thing.’

  ‘We’re not nomads.’

  ‘You enter here …’ She traces the curve of stairs – another curve! ‘And then descend into this … this space.’ Raum, she says and suddenly she sees the space projected into her inner vision, the purity of line, the thrill of emptiness. ‘Can’t you see it? It’ll be wonderful.’

  ‘I can see it in theory. The fact seems rather remote at the moment. And frightening.’

  ‘But you take risks in your business. You trust to designers. You approve of the building of new factories and offices.’

  ‘But do I want to live in a factory? Or an office?’

  She straightens up. Once it was Viktor who was committed to the idea of the modern, and now it is she. ‘But this is where I want to live.’ She touches her belly. ‘With my daughter and my husband.�
��

  ‘How do you know it’s a daughter?’

  ‘Hana divined the sex. Didn’t I tell you? Astonishing really. With a pendulum.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. That woman’s a menace.’

  ‘Did you know she’s having an affair with Němec? She says he plays her like a piano.’

  ‘How disgusting.’ He looks outraged. She has noticed that ever since her pregnancy began he treats her with a kind of remote sterility, as though she were some kind of virginal mother about to give birth to the Messiah or something. ‘Don’t be so prudish, Viktor.’

  ‘I’m not prudish. You know I’m not prudish. I just don’t want my wife descending to Hana Hanáková’s kind of vulgarity.’

  Winter came with snow, sometimes a blizzard, at other times just faint white moths floating down through the cold air. In the garden at the back of their rented house it gathered in the shadows of the plants and survived there even when the daytime temperature rose above zero. The grass took on a bruised, dead look while the hills on the far side of the river lay like corpses beneath their winding sheets. Nature seemed suspended in this icy season, but still things grew – the child in Liesel’s womb, the house in Rainer von Abt’s mind. The one convolute, involute, curved and complex – there are no straight lines in nature – the other simple and linear.

  In March, when the ground thawed and the whole world turned to mud, the site for the new house was prepared. A mechanical excavator was hired for the task, a machine that gouged and churned the soil until the top of the hillside resembled the scarred and crevassed landscape of the Tagliamento during the war. From the lip of the street the land was cut away, a step down into the lower stratum of soil which was rust-coloured and as hard as rock. The ramp leading down was clad with planks to stabilise it. ‘All this for a private house,’ muttered the site foreman. ‘Anyone’d think we was building a factory.’

  Then they sank the foundations – the piles that would support the frame – and laid the concrete base. Excavators chugged and spluttered in the dank air. Cement mixers churned. The site spread like a lesion on the forehead of the hill. Once the foundations had been completed and the concrete piles driven down into the hard-pan, the frame of the house had to be erected. The steel pillars came from Germany, from the firm of Gossen in Berlin. The joists were I-beams, but the vertical supports were constructed of four angle-beams riveted back to back to make pillars with a cruciform cross-section. The hammering of the riveters and the clangour of steel cut through the tranquillity of Blackfield Road. Never, probably never in the whole world, had a private house been constructed in this manner.

  In April, while the frame grew, the baby was born. They had decided on the modern way, in a clinic run by Doctor Živan Jelínek, a physician who had learned the Twilight Sleep technique under the tutelage of Gustav Gauss in Freiburg. It was Hana who had first mooted the idea. ‘Tell me what’s wrong with a little touch of morphia, darling?’ she had asked. So the pain of delivery was blown away by morphine, and any memory of the whole event excised from her mind by scopolamine, a drug culled from henbane and deadly nightshade that kills, among other things, memory; and into this chemical amnesia Ottilie was born.

  Construction

  Rainer von Abt at the building site: it is a late April day with a thin and miserable rain falling. Mud is still the chief feature of the place, mud like a curse clinging to your legs and trying to drag you down into the pit. Von Abt stands in muddied brogue shoes on a plank walkway. Dressed as he is in a dark grey suit and a black overcoat, and wearing a pale grey homburg hat, it would be easy to mistake him for the owner. By his side, in rubber boots, stands the site foreman, muddied, dishevelled and harassed. At the moment there is no concrete form to the construction they are looking at. It is no more than a sketch in bold strokes, written into von Abt’s mind, transferred onto sheets of paper then revised, reconsidered, discussed for the slightest detail, and now drawn out in the bold horizontals and verticals of reddened steel, a three-dimensional maze raised into the misty air. In the past houses have grown organically, like plants, from the ground upwards. But this house is different: it grows from the frame outwards, like an idea developing into a work of art from the central core of inspiration out into the material fact of realisation. Cement mixers churn and vomit. Men tramp back and forth with hods over their shoulders. Ladders stand as sharp diagonals to the rectilinear skeleton of the frame.

  The site foreman unfolds a diazo print and gestures upwards towards the top floor where a workman balances across a girder as easily as a child walking along the kerb of a pavement. ‘You want decent load-bearing walls,’ he says, ‘give the thing some stability.’

  ‘I want nothing of the kind,’ von Abt replies with remarkable good humour. ‘Stability is the last thing I want. This house must float in light. It must shimmer and shine. It must not be stable!’

  The man sniffs. ‘It looks more like a machine than a house.’

  ‘That’s what it is, a machine for living in.’

  The foreman shakes his head at the idea of such a machine. He wants four walls around him, made of stone. None of this steel-girder frame nonsense. If that is for anything it is for office blocks – they are putting up a building like that on Jánská at this very moment, but it is going to be a department store, for God’s sake, not a private house.

  ‘Le Corbusier,’ von Abt says.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘What I said is not original. I cannot take the credit. Le Corbusier got there first. La machine à habiter.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘French.’

  ‘Who needs French? It’s bad enough having to deal with German and Czech. You know we had a fight the other day? On the site, right here. Something about politics, a Czech speaker and a German speaker and the stupid thing was, the Czech was called Mlynář and the German was called Müller.’

  ‘Mlynarsch?’

  The foreman laughs at von Abt’s attempt at the pronunciation. ‘It means “miller”. The bastards each had the same name. I slung both of them out on their ears, I did. Well, you can’t have that sort of thing getting in the way of work, can you? Not when things are looking as bad as they are at the moment.’

  There is a call from up above, from the top of the staircase of planks that has been built down from street level. The two men look up. There, against the sky, is the silhouette of a woman.

  ‘Frau Liesel?’ von Abt calls. ‘Is it Frau Liesel Landauer?’ He struggles across the planks and clambers up the uneven staircase to her level. The encounter is a cautious one. When they had first met she was a girl becoming a woman; now she is a woman become a mother. The fulcrum of her life has shifted.

  ‘I must congratulate you on your great achievement,’ von Abt says, bowing over her hand.

  ‘You must come and see her,’ she tells him.

  ‘I’d love to.’

  ‘She’s beautiful, beautiful. Perfect …’ Perfect what? What feature shall she choose? ‘Fingers, hands. You cannot imagine how perfect. Fingerprints, miniature nails, all perfect.’ She holds out her own as though they might help explain. ‘She sleeps and eats and sometimes looks at you but you don’t know what she is seeing quite. She frowns, as though you aren’t coming up to her standards, but you don’t know what those standards are so you always feel inadequate.’ Liesel laughs. She has been warned that some mothers feel depressed after giving birth, but she feels only exultation. ‘But I’m here to see the house. How is it going? How long will it be? I want to bring Ottilie here.’

  They stand on the edge, looking down on the frame. Somewhere down there, defined within the cage of steel, is her house – the rooms, the space, the furniture, the floors, all conceptually there as a sculpture is somehow there in the mind of the sculptor before he completes it. Men climb ladders and tiptoe across the beams as though searching for this mysterious grail. The site engineer, a small man with glasses and energetic arms, is discussing something with the foreman. ‘They all want
walls,’ Rainer explains, ‘and I insist that Frau Liesel does not want walls. She wants space and light for her new child. That’s what I tell them.’

  He smiles at her and she feels iridescently happy, as though lights have been turned on, multicoloured lights that shimmer and wobble and reflect off moving mirrors. This man has a vision that he is realising for her alone, for her and Viktor and their baby. It seems fantastic. ‘Will you come and see her?’ she asks. It suddenly seems important that she should show him Ottilie. ‘Can I drag you away from your work for a few minutes?’

  ‘Of course you can.’

  Her car is waiting, with the chauffeur, Laník, behind the wheel. They drive round to the other house, the turreted and bastioned one in the Masaryk quarter, the one with small windows and weighty walls, the towers and the turrets. The nurse goes and fetches Ottilie while Liesel entertains von Abt in the sitting room. A maid brings coffee and cakes. They talk enthusiastically of furnishings and interiors, of the space in which to create her family, which is not like the space of this room with its heavy drapes, its furniture like coffins and pews, its chandeliers and heavy flock wallpaper. ‘A new way of life,’ von Abt is saying as the nurse comes in with a bundle of shawls that is Ottilie. ‘That’s what you will have. Away with all this fustian.’

  Liesel takes her child. ‘She has been sleeping. In a moment she will awaken and will want to feed. That’s it. Sleep and feeding.’ She laughs at the absurdity of such a life and holds the baby for von Abt to see. He reaches out and strokes a cheek with the tip of one finger, then looks up at Liesel and touches her hand where it holds Ottilie’s shawl aside. ‘It is marvellous to see you so happy.’

  ‘I am very happy,’ she agrees, as though there has been some suggestion that she might not be.

  ‘Viktor is a lucky man.’

  ‘We are both of us very lucky.’