The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  ‘Well, it’s too good to last, isn’t it?’ says Hana.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Everything.’

  ‘What do you mean, everything?’

  ‘The good times. All this. The world we live in.’

  She is right, of course. They crowd into the space of the Glass Room like passengers on the observation deck of a luxury liner. Some of them maybe peering out through the windows onto the pitching surface of the city but, in their muddle of Czech and German, almost all are ignorant of the cold outside and the gathering storm clouds, the first sign of the tempest that is coming. They will argue and debate about trivial things, and until it is too late they will largely ignore the storm on the horizon. Of all the people at the party, of all the people applauding the pianists, drinking the champagne, eating the smoked salmon and the chicken legs, it is only Hana Hanáková who feels that breath of cold air as she looks out on the peaceful city and the setting sun.

  Happy Families

  Is the Landauer House habitable? one of the journalists present at the party asks in an article in the next edition of Die Form, the architectural review of the Deutscher Werkbund. A debate ensues in the columns of the journal. Some correspondents claim that the whole building is a lapse of political taste, an exercise in bourgeois excess, and that the duty of modern architecture is to house the working class in decent, well-built dwellings like the Weissenhofsiedlung development in Stuttgart or the Karl-Marx-Hof in Vienna or the Baa development in Zlin, not to create palaces for plutocrats. Others decry the mean-mindedness of such a critique and extol the purity of line, the austerity of design, the perfection of taste, the sensation they felt (those of them lucky enough to have been invited) of actually being inside a work of art. Still others debate the principle of combining dining area with sitting area, study and library. One correspondent even worries about the intrusion of food smells into the sitting area. ‘What if the lady of the house wishes to rearrange the furniture?’ another asks. ‘Will she be able to upset the perfect symmetry of the interior, the careful balance, the proportions? How can one live from day to day in such a place?’

  ‘Have you seen this?’ Liesel asks Viktor, showing him a copy of the journal.

  He glances through it with a disparaging expression and tosses it aside. ‘Absurd,’ he says.

  ‘But they deserve a response.’

  ‘Why on earth? Let them argue. It’s like children fighting over something they’ve seen in a shop window. None of them can have it, so what good does fighting do?’

  So it is she who, sitting diligently at the desk in the library behind the onyx wall, writes a letter to the editor of Die Form. She upbraids their correspondent for speaking without personal knowledge and for introducing political theory into the question of what is simply a home. She and her husband are not victims of Rainer von Abt’s taste but collaborators with him in this inspiring project. In the living area, the curtains, employed to divide off different sections as desired, work wonderfully well in creating spaces with as much privacy as one might wish and she can assure readers of the journal that no cooking smells have intruded on the sitting area from the dining area! Living inside a work of art is an experience of sublime delight – the tranquillity of the large living room and the intimacy of the smaller rooms on the upper floor combined together give her family the most remarkable experience of modern living.

  She hands the finished letter to Viktor for his approval. He puts down his copy of Lidové Noviny and reads it through, smiling up at her with something other than mere agreement. ‘Come,’ he says, holding out his hand, ‘prove it.’

  ‘Prove what?’

  ‘Prove what you say, about creating spaces with as much privacy as one might wish.’

  She looks shocked. ‘Not here. Someone might come.’

  ‘Then your thesis is disproved.’ He still holds her hand, drawing her towards the sofa where he is sitting. His other hand is on her leg, running up the back of her thigh beneath her dress.

  ‘Viktor!’

  And so, with the curtains resolutely drawn to ensure that an intruder improbably clambering down through the dense growth of trees on the slope immediately outside the Winter Garden should not be able to spy on them and the door from upstairs resolutely locked in case the nanny (who was always in her bed by this time) should happen, just happen to come in, and the door to the kitchens also locked in case Laníková, the chauffeur’s sister who does the cooking, should make her presence felt; thus barricaded and shuttered into a space that seems to deny the very possibility of barricading and shuttering, Liesel consents to have her skirt lifted round her waist and her knickers – silk French knickers with disgracefully wide legs (a present from Hana, of course) – pulled down to her ankles.

  ‘You haven’t got a mackintosh,’ she whispers in Viktor’s ear. Mackintosh, raincoat, Regenmantel, is their code word for condom.

  ‘Does it matter? It’s only a day or two, isn’t it?’

  They giggle together and then, suddenly stirred by the moment and perhaps by the laughter, cling tightly to each other for a while, Liesel thinking how much she loves this solemn and successful man who is yet bold enough to construct such a house for her, and loving enough to want her like this, uncomfortably and daringly on the sofa, and paternal enough to adore their daughter as the second most precious thing in his world, the first being, because he tells her this, whispering it in her ear, herself.

  Afterwards they settle down to a quiet evening listening to the radio and reading, and as she sits there Liesel fancies that she can feel Viktor’s seed inside her, flooding through her womb, searching for that elusive egg, and perhaps finding it.

  Birth

  At the Landauerovka test circuit the Landauer Popular, that curved beetle of a motor car, chutters round and round the track. Trade delegations from Austria, from Poland, from Germany look on approvingly. The new advertising poster shows the same families as in the summer one, except that now they are heading for snow-capped mountains, their smiles equally cheery as in summer because the Popular car boasts an air-cooled engine originally designed by Oberusal for aircraft. Air Cooling Eliminates Winter Worries, the new slogan boasts. ‘This is the future,’ Viktor explains to prospective customers in his quiet, intense manner. ‘The liberation of the working man and his family.’ He travels to Berlin, to Paris, to Vienna. Everywhere he takes with him the new creed and proclaims it with all the enthusiasm of a prophet. ‘This is where the world of commerce is leading us,’ he explains. ‘Into a world of peace and trade, where the only battles fought are battles for market share.’

  Meanwhile, in the cool and luminous house on Blackfield Road, Liesel grows into her new pregnancy. She has taken to wearing white – white blouses, long white dresses – and walking around the house in bare feet. Mistress of her new domain she floats through the ethereal house just as the house itself, supported by steel and artifice, floats above the city.

  ‘You don’t know how lucky you are, darling,’ Hana tells her, ‘living in this wonderful place when I am condemned to live in a museum. But Oskar won’t move. He says he likes four solid walls around him.’ She looks at Liesel with that equivocal glance, part envy, part desire. ‘And pregnant for a second time! I’ve been trying for a baby for ages—’

  ‘You’ve been trying to get pregnant?’

  ‘However much I try nothing seems to happen. I have even’ – Hana whispers it as if someone else might hear, although they are alone together in the white and liberating spaces of the Glass Room – ‘tried to get pregnant by Němec.’

  ‘Hana!’

  She makes a face, that down-turn of the mouth that frightens men and fascinates them. ‘But nothing doing. I’m as sterile as a babka.’

  Liesel relates the conversation to Viktor with a note of amazement in her voice. ‘Can you imagine trying to get pregnant by one man in order to please another? How fantastic she is!’

  But to Viktor it is Liesel who now appears fantastic, a sh
ining refulgent creature whose swollen belly seems to elevate her from the floor of the Glass Room, as though, when she crosses it on her long, naked feet, in fact she is floating a few inches above the shining linoleum. In his mind her pregnancy, born in the physical and erotic, elevates her above mere flesh. How strange, this metamorphosis from flesh to spirit, mediated by the frame of the Glass Room that is intended to be so literal and exact and yet has become sublime. By contrast the compartment of the Vienna train is closed and dark and battered by noise as it rattles through the bleak borderlands. He buries himself in his paper and tries to think of other, neutral things – markets and investments and recession – while the train crosses over the brown slick of the Danube and edges cautiously past tenements and marshalling yards before sliding into the Nordbahnhof. The station is a racket of sound, a great drum of a place. People push past him indifferently as he walks towards the barriers and the post office with its fetid little telephone cabins. The graffito cut into the wood is familiar now: My little crocodile, I love you. Her voice whispers in his ear, as though confiding a great secret. ‘I got your note.’

  ‘I worried that you wouldn’t pick it up.’

  ‘I’m reliable like that.’

  ‘So are you free?’

  ‘Of course I’m free.’

  She is waiting at the Goldene Kugel, amid the anonymous bustle of the café, the coming and going of customers, the waiters in their aprons cruising between the tables with trays held upwards on the palms of their hands like circus performers bringing off a deft trick. He sits down at her table and watches her fingering the stem of her wine glass. She never seems nervous, and yet there are those bitten fingernails. ‘How are you doing?’ she asks, and smiles at him as though she means it.

  ‘I’m fine. Business is all right, we’re keeping our heads above water. What about you?’

  She shrugs. ‘All right. You know.’

  But he doesn’t know. She comes out of the anonymous world of the city, out of the mix of German and Slav and Magyar, and there are things he knows about her and things he doesn’t. He knows her taste in chocolates and coffee and wine, her love of popular music and operetta – they have been to the Carl-Theater together and seen something by Lehár – and her views on politics. But he does not know anyone she knows, or where she works, or what she does when she is not with him, or where she lives. She comes whenever he calls her, but from where she comes and to where she returns he has no idea. He guesses only that she has other ‘friends’ like him, but who they are and how often she sees them he does not know. Only once he didn’t send a note in advance and when he rang he found that she couldn’t see him. On that occasion he spent the night alone, consumed by anger and jealousy. But the next time they made an appointment he asked no questions and she told him no stories. She never enquires about his life, so why should he know anything about hers? Their relationship, part venal, part affectionate, exists only in the brief moments when they are together.

  ‘What do you want to do?’ she asks.

  ‘I just want to be with you. Isn’t that absurd?’

  She puts her head on one side. She is wearing one of her hats, a small thing of black felt with a red feather. ‘Why should it be absurd? It’s nice. I like being with you.’

  They book into a different hotel from usual, still one of those that proliferate around railway stations, but where the gilt is a little less faded and the carpets a little less threadbare. They book in, as always, under the name Richter, a name chosen at random on the very first occasion but one which now, with its hints of rightness and rectitude, seems to Viktor to have acquired a certain irony. When they have sex it is with a peculiar intensity, a passion bordering on the very edge of anger. And afterwards she sleeps in his arms, with an innocence that could not be feigned.

  Martin was born, there being some problem with his presentation, by forceps delivery. For days after the birth Liesel lay in hospital with a high fever, at times slipping into delirium, sometimes conscious enough to call for her child or her husband or Hana, but often merely there on the mysterious borderline between sleep and unconsciousness. The nursing staff and doctors spoke in hushed voices as though they were already in the presence of the dead. At her mother’s instigation a Catholic priest was even brought in to pray at the bedside and perhaps administer – the matter was never clear – the last rites. Viktor visited as frequently as was possible but it was Hana who devoted herself to Liesel through the dangerous crisis of her illness, thus showing herself, against Viktor’s expectation, to be far more than a fair-weather friend. ‘I almost feel she’s one of the family,’ he confessed when Liesel was on the mend, still bedridden but able to receive visitors. ‘I don’t know how I would have managed without her.’

  Liesel regarded her husband from the depths of her pillows. Her face was sculpted into angular and rather intimidating contours by the receding illness. The baby nuzzled hopefully at her breast, trying to suck at milk that wasn’t there. ‘I hope she doesn’t seduce you, Viktor.’

  Viktor was horrified. ‘Do you really think she would attempt such a thing? And at such a time? I thought she was your closest friend.’

  She shrugged. ‘She has a very different way of looking at things from us. Haven’t you understood that yet? She’d probably tell me all about it, and call it sharing.’

  ‘And what would you feel about it?’

  ‘Are you interested in her?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  She looked away, out through the window where there were trees and a fragment of anonymous sky. ‘Then why ask?’

  Starved of its feed, the baby began to cry. A nurse took the baby away. Viktor felt a need to explain, to justify his feelings.

  ‘Hana is like a sister to me, that’s all,’ he said.

  Liesel smiled. ‘Don’t think fraternal love is any protection, my darling. Hana would have no compunction about sleeping with her brother.’

  Attenuated by the fever, tall and gaunt like a prisoner of war returning after liberation, Liesel came back home. She had a nurse to tend her during her convalescence. Viktor’s dressing room now became his bedroom so that Liesel could continue her recovery in peace and the nurse could attend her as needed. By day she walked, a cool white ghost, in the open spaces of the Glass Room; by night she lay alone, motionless beneath a sheet. People treated her as though she had come back from the dead, a Lazarus who had no real right to be walking on the earth. With the baby in a bassinet by her side she sat in front of the great glass windows and looked out on the view of the city with the distracted expression of someone who doesn’t quite recognise where she is. Her voice had changed during her illness. It had become soft and melodic, almost ethereal. ‘I almost left you, didn’t I, Viktor?’ she said. ‘What would you have done without me?’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘I think you would have soon found another woman. I only hope that you would have chosen wisely.’

  ‘Why on earth are you talking like this?’

  ‘Coming close to death changes one, do you know that? That’s what Benno told me in his letters and that’s what I’ve learned now. You consider things that were unthinkable before. I think you would have gone with Hana.’

  ‘Don’t be absurd.’

  ‘Oh, you’d have got on well together as long as she stayed with Oskar. You share the same tastes – modern art, music, literature, all that. And Hana would have kept you from falling victim to any pretty woman with a sympathetic smile. She would have been ideal.’

  ‘You are my ideal,’ he said.

  That made her laugh. It was difficult to read her laughter these days. There was irony there, and a certain bitterness. ‘Of course I am, darling. Of course I am.’

  *

  In the spring Liesel and Viktor made a return visit to Venice. It was their first holiday alone since Ottilie’s birth and they stayed in the same hotel as they had on their honeymoon, in the very same suite they had had before, attempting – the motiv
e was never expressed openly – to recapture the past. But beneath the calm surface of their affection there was this new remoteness. Perhaps it had to do with the difficulties of the birth and the subsequent illness. Perhaps it was something in his own behaviour, a distance of mind even when there was no distance at all of body. These things are subtle. Whatever the cause, the effect was clear: Liesel, who had once, in that very room in the Venice hotel, arched her back at the surprising moment of orgasm and cried out in an ecstasy as intense as pain, now seemed to have the even tenor of her being barely disturbed by the act of sex. Perhaps this was what one expected as a relationship matured: love translated into affection, and lust into a kind of placid contentment.

  A Day in the Life

  A day in the life of the Landauer House. The parents wake early, at six o’clock, the windows of their rooms black with night or flooded with light depending on the season. Make it spring. Dawn is breaking. When the curtains are pulled back and the shutters raised (an electric motor whirrs quietly) they each look out across the terrace and the shadows of the children’s sandpit. One of them – usually it is Viktor – comes through into the other’s room. They talk a while. He bends to kiss her. Once this brief morning kiss would translate into something else, a quickening of the flesh, a quick and affectionate conjunction. But that has become a rare event these days. Soon there is the sound of movement from elsewhere on the same floor: Liba, the nurse, has woken the children and hurried them, grumbling, to their own bathroom.

  Liesel and Viktor’s bathroom is cool and spare, like a sunny day in late autumn. Their voices echo against the high tiling as they wash. Liesel takes her bath in the evening, while Viktor has a morning shower. By the time they have finished, the dumbwaiter has rumbled up from the kitchens to present them with a tray bearing coffee. Viktor sips the coffee as he dresses and talks about the coming day, the meetings, the tour of the factory that is scheduled for the afternoon, the telephone conversation he must book with someone in France to discuss the possibility of a joint project – something to do with aircraft, a passion he has. A lightweight, cheap cabin monoplane, ideal for businessmen. The planned partnership with Dornier fell through a few months ago and now he is talking with the Société des Avions Marcel Bloch.