by Simon Mawer
‘Well then. You know. That’s all.’ He stands with his hand on the doorknob, trying to gather his thoughts. ‘Look, you’re not safe here.’
‘Not safe?’ She looks round the small cabin, at the innocent clutter of her things and Marika’s. ‘What do you mean, not safe?’
‘I mean in this country. You think you’re safe here but you’re wrong. No one’s safe. I’m planning to take the family to Switzerland. There’s going to be an invasion.’
‘Invasion?’
‘Don’t you listen to the news?’ This is something he can deal with, a matter of facts and opinions, of judgement and decision. ‘Henlein has a secret pact with Hitler. Don’t you know who Henlein is? He’s the leader of the Sudeten Germans. He’s got the German army at his back and he’s demanding self-rule for the border regions. If the government does agree then Henlein will invite the Germans in; if it doesn’t the Germans will use the so-called oppression of the Sudeten Germans as a pretext for invasion. I can’t see any way out of it. One way or another the Germans will be here just as surely as they are in Austria.’
‘And you’re going to leave?’
‘Not immediately, but I’m making arrangements. So that we’re prepared.’
‘Will Switzerland be safe?’
‘Who knows? We might have to move on. To the United States perhaps.’
‘And what’ll happen to me and Marika?’
‘I’ll think of something. I won’t leave you here.’
‘We don’t have any papers. Marika has her birth certificate but I don’t have anything.’
‘We must see what we can do. There’s the refugee office. They issue papers for people without anything. We’ll work something out.’
Outside the air is cool and fresh. There is a sensation of relief. How long has it been? He has lost all sense of time in the close confines of the chata, in the presence of Kata. The upstairs window in the big house is closed now. The garden, the hedges and the trees are empty. Not even Marika has appeared. He glances at his watch and sees that it has only been a few minutes. Fifteen, maybe. A part of him, that part that always has a plan, always considers and calculates, tells him that little or no damage has been done. He just dropped by to see how things are going, how the Kalman woman is dealing with life in exile, how she is making ends meet. One has an obligation, just as one has an obligation to one’s work force. But it is a frail voice, barely heard above the storm that is raging in his head. He turns and makes his way up the slope towards the trees that cut off the top of this garden from the bottom of his own property, the trees and bushes that cut him off from Kata. He knows there is a way through the dense undergrowth, the jungle of clutching branches and shielding leaves.
Robots
Fuchsias are in bloom, so the gardening programme on the radio says. ‘We ought to have fuchsias,’ Viktor suggests, against his better judgement. Fuchsias are ornament and ornament is crime. ‘I like fuchsias. The Berchtolds out near Slavkov, they breed fuchsias, don’t they? We should pay them a visit and get some.’
‘The Berchtolds are a bore.’
‘Who tells you that? Hana?’
‘Have you seen the news?’
‘Of course I’ve seen. I always see the news.’
The news tells of German troops massing on the border. The Czechoslovak army has been mobilised, sabres are rattling, hearts are beating, engines are roaring, boots are tramping, all that kind of thing. He remembers it all from last time, the last war where he occupied a bureaucratic position behind the front line – some military headquarters in Graz just inside the border from Italy – and watched the thousands go marching off to death. One of them was Liesel’s brother. They met up – the purest chance, the caprice of war – on the edge of a parade ground where Benno’s unit was mustering.
‘My God!’ they both exclaimed as they caught sight of one another. ‘I don’t believe it!’
That is the kind of thing you say, but of course you do believe it. Coincidence happens. Paths cross, journeys meet, lives intersect, like the various progressions of articulate but entirely automatic animals, ants maybe, weaving around on a table top, moving, searching with no more sense than robots. ‘Robot’ was Capek’s word, the linguistic gift of the Czech language to the whole world. Robot, from robota. Hard labour, drudgery, the slave labour of the serfs. They talked a bit, those robots called Benno and Viktor, they talked about home, about parents and family, about Liesel who was then no more than a young girl – fourteen, fifteen – with, so Benno said, a crush on Viktor. It was that that turned Viktor’s head. He’d never imagined the possibility that Benno’s sister could admire him, love him even. Being loved was a new experience. Then Benno had to go because his unit was waiting for him and Viktor watched him clambering aboard one of the lorries and turning to wave. The engines roared and off they went, robots climbing up the hill away from the army camp. And that was the last anyone from home saw of him.
And now Viktor can hear the same sounds, the same preparations for war, as though they are being carried towards him on the breeze from the other side of the hill. But the strange thing about this new season of danger and dissolution is that he has almost ceased to care. Or at least he cares far more about what is going on in the chata, whose tarpapered roof he can just glimpse if he goes upstairs to the terrace. Or what’s happening down there on the lawn, where, in the evening sunshine two days later he watches Liesel and Kata playing with the children.
He stands and smokes and watches. They are both wearing white, Liesel tall and narrow, slightly stooped, and Kata smaller and vivacious, running with the two girls, then turning and crouching down to encourage Martin, who follows with all the determined clumsiness of a five-year-old. As the little boy runs into her embrace she straightens up and hoists him above her head. Viktor can hear the shrieks of laughter.
Can they see him standing at the windows of the Glass Room? It depends on the light, and your point of view. Sometimes from the garden you can look up and see someone standing there beyond the windows as plain as daylight; sometimes only milkily, through the pale reflection of the day; and sometimes not at all, for there is only the view of sky and the clouds in the whole expanse of glass, so that you seem to be looking through the building, as though the house itself were transparent.
The two women are making their way up the lawn and onto the terrace. Only then does Liesel notice her husband. ‘I didn’t see you there, Viktor. You’re back early from work. Katalin and I have been entertaining the children.’
Kata is looking bright and happy. Her face has taken colour, a faint flush in the cheeks, a smooth, buttery tan from the summer sun. ‘Good afternoon, Herr Landauer,’ she says, and he inclines his head in acknowledgement, watching the sky in her eyes. ‘Frau Kalman,’ he replies. But he wants to call her Kata. He wants to cry out loud, Kata!
The children sit at the table, Martin determined to be as grown up as the two girls. Ottilie and Marika patronise him, tell him to sit properly at the table, not to talk with his mouth full. Marika is a beautiful child, more beautiful by far than Ottilie, a radiant genetic reflection of her mother, except for her eyes, which are dark. She glances at Viktor with all the indifference of a child perceiving an adult to be nothing of importance in her world. There is apparently no memory of that man standing in her mother’s room, no record of clinging monkey-like to her mother and watching him and asking, ‘Are you one of Mutti’s friends?’
‘I’ll leave you ladies to it,’ he says, and retreats to the library where he can read the papers and listen to the noise of the children and hear, just once, Kata’s voice raised to stop the girls doing something that annoys Martin. He wants Kata. More than anything in the world, he wants her.
The next day he goes down to the chata again, but this time she’s not there. He finds some paper and a pencil and scribbles a note. There is the question of whether to make it cautious and safe or open and incriminating. I want to see you, he writes, but cannot find the way.
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br /> The weasel words of a coward.
Gossip
‘It’s a matter of perspective,’ Oskar says. They’ve finished dinner and are sitting in front of the onyx wall. They come together these days for mutual comfort. The house has become a refuge for them, the Glass Room, that least fortress-like of constructions, bringing the consolation of reason and calm, while outside the confines of their particular lives, the world is crumbling. There are riots in the border areas, demands from the German-speaking groups for autonomy, the massing of German troops along the Austrian border, cries for rights, shouts for independence, shouts for secession.
‘What do you mean, perspective?’ Viktor asks. He has returned late from a visit to Prague, where there is panic and treachery in the air.
‘Historical perspective.’ The ceiling lights gleam on Oskar’s bald head. He holds out his hands, as though to display perspective, an abstract idea resting between his palms. ‘After the war we – that is the poor benighted inhabitants of this country – thought ourselves to be at the culmination of some historical process. But we were wrong. Actually we find ourselves in the middle of a process with no idea what the end will be.’
‘What process?’ Hana asks. ‘Darling, you are being opaque.’
‘The dissolution of the Empire, of course. We thought – we were naive enough to think – that it was all over. The Emperor has gone, Woodrow Wilson has spoken, the principle of self-determination has been established, and that’s it. Bye bye the dual monarchy and all that went along with it; welcome Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria and goodness knows how many other little statelets. But we were wrong. We weren’t at the end of a process, we were merely in the middle. That’s what I’m saying. It’s like a happy couple strolling through the countryside. They think they’re in a pretty little piece of woodland and after a while they’ll break out onto a sunny pasture. But actually they have entered a dense forest and it stretches hundreds of miles ahead. And they have no idea of the end.’ He lifts his brandy glass to his mouth. ‘If there is an end.’
Liesel gets up and walks over to the windows. ‘An end to history? Of course not.’ She presses the button and waits while the central pane slides gracefully down into the basement and opens the room to the cool air of the evening. ‘Let’s talk about something else. It’s always politics. Politics, politics, politics. Let’s talk about people.’
‘We are talking about people,’ Oskar insists. ‘Politics is people.’
‘How’s your refugee lady?’ Hana asks, ignoring her husband.
‘Katalin?’
‘It’s Katalin now, is it? Should I be jealous?’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. She’s a common little thing but really quite bright. And tough. When you think what she’s been through. She has done some wonderful work for me. You know she used to work for Habig? Making hats. And then dressmaking with Grünbaum or someone. One of those houses. I mean, quite a talent. And then all this happens and she’s just thrown on the mercy of others …’
Thus set on a new course, the conversation shifts, first to the contingent trials of Katalin and then, to Viktor’s relief, to the self-imposed trials of another pretty little thing, Vitulka Kaprálová. ‘Have you heard?’ Hana asks. They haven’t, of course. They wait on Hana for gossip, for distraction, for delicious morsels of scandal. ‘Well, you know about her affair with Martinů, don’t you?’
‘Only because you told us.’
‘Don’t be silly, darling. Everyone knows it. So she’s there in Paris in the arms of the doting Martinů, leaving his wife all alone in their country house, and then something happens – we know not what, perhaps the wife cut up rough – and she’s off on an extended holiday with a new boyfriend.’
‘A new one?’
‘Some unknown engineering student she met. His name is Kopec, apparently. From Prague. Anyway, off she goes, to Italy and the south of France, abandoning poor old Martinů to his wife.’
‘How do you know all this?’ Liesel asks.
‘A little Parisian bird tells me. Then, apparently, she gets back from her holiday and falls straight back into Martinů’s arms again. And now – well you’ve got to hand it to her – now the little koketa sets off, with Martinů in her baggage, to London, to that music congress. You heard about that from Kaprál himself, didn’t you? Everyone was there. Hindemith, Britten, Bartók, the American Aaron Copland, all of them. And our little minx actually opened the congress with the ‘Military Sinfonietta’, the piece she conducted in Prague last winter. Can you believe it? Taking the music world by storm and Bohuslav Martinů by the balls.’
‘Hana!’
‘Well I don’t know how else to put it. The poor man’s completely infatuated. They say the stuff he’s writing now is full of coded references to her.’
The gossip goes on, the suggestions and the intimations, the life of a young country stumbling to its death. People and politics dissected and discussed in the cool spaces of the Glass Room, while outside the storm gathers.
‘By the way, there’s a problem with Liba,’ Liesel says, later when Oskar and Hana have gone and she and Viktor are upstairs. They are in her bedroom, the quiet box of her bedroom, the plain white box which contains the most intimate secrets of their marriage, the delights and disappointments, the silent revelations that they share but never talk of.
‘You’re avoiding the issue,’ Viktor says. ‘The issue is what is happening to this country. It will affect us all, Liesel. We must talk seriously about leaving while there is still a chance.’
He’s in his pyjamas, sitting in an armchair smoking. She is standing in the doorway to the bathroom, her head wrapped in the turban of a towel. She is naked. There is something clumsy about her nakedness, the wide hips, the rough beard of duncoloured hair between her thighs, her breasts like wayward eyes. Once she had been shy of his seeing her like this. Now she doesn’t even realise she is doing it.
‘I’m not avoiding any issue. You see, Liba’s engaged to be married. She told me the other day. It’s all a bit of a rush and I think she’s pregnant although she denies it. Anyway, the point is, not only would she not be able to come with us to look after the children if we did leave, but she’s actually handed in her notice. She was awfully upset about it, said how much she loves the children and all that kind of thing, but Jan – that’s his name – works in Prague. I mean he’s with his regiment at the moment, of course. But he lives in Prague and she feels duty-bound to be with him.’ She towels herself dry, briskly rubs her head and stands there with a frizz of damp hair about her face. ‘And so I thought, what about Frau Kalman?’
Viktor is dumbstruck. What exactly is his wife suggesting?
‘Ottilie and Marika get on remarkably well, and Katalin is a wonderful mother despite all her trials and tribulations. Martin adores her. What do you think?’
What does he think? He thinks the immediate thoughts of a liar: how to react appropriately, how to make the unnatural appear natural, a process that carries with it the seeds of its own destruction, the premeditated act betraying itself as unnatural precisely because it is premeditated. A conundrum.
‘Don’t you like the idea?’
‘I didn’t say anything.’
‘I can tell by your expression. You’re not impressed.’
‘Well, does the woman have any experience?’ He is not used to dissimulation but he discovers a natural talent for it. ‘I mean, we’re talking about a nanny, aren’t we? Does she know what’s involved? What is she? A seamstress? Hardly a qualification. And does she have references?’
‘You make it sound like a job application.’
‘It is precisely that.’ It is precisely something imprecise: it is a whole universe of possibilities. The possibilities confound him. His wife shrugs her way into a silk nightdress. The material – pale ivory – clings to hips and breasts and belly. He senses, as though it is something that operates independently of his mind, something extraneous, the growing insistence of an erection. How c
urious that arousal should come when she dresses rather than when she is naked.
‘There’s also the question of what happens to Katalin and her daughter if we do leave.’
‘Do we have an obligation to her?’
She looks at her husband with an expression close to outrage. ‘Sometimes you appear so heartless, Viktor. Of course we have an obligation. In abstract terms we have obligations to all refugees, and we try to discharge those obligations by supporting the various organisations that we do. But we also have precise and personal obligations to those we know and hold in regard.’
‘You sound like a moral philosopher.’
‘You sound like a cold fish.’
‘So you hold Frau Kalman in regard?’
‘Don’t you? I think perhaps you do.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘She’s an attractive woman. Men like attractive women. I have noticed the way you look at her.’
He laughs. ‘Ergo I should want Frau Kalman to become the children’s nanny? Don’t be ridiculous. Liesel, I don’t know enough about her to judge one way or another. I know that she has been living in the chata for the last few months and I know that your mother doesn’t like her. And you apparently do.’
‘My mother didn’t like you either, at first. So that puts you in the same boat. Anyway, what do you propose doing about her and her daughter? Are you happy to abandon them? All these things that happen to the Jews – that’s why you are talking about going, isn’t it? Are you happy to leave those two and have such horrors happen to them? Could you face yourself? Look, why don’t you go and have a word with her? Talk to her a bit. See what you think.’
He considers this possibility amongst the galaxy of possibilities, a universe of possibilities greater than anything he might have imagined. ‘Have you mentioned this to her?’
‘Not specifically. We’ve talked in general terms of what she might do, where she might go. I suggested Palestine. She says she’s looked into that. Apparently there are Zionists trying to drum up support amongst the refugees – the Germans and Austrians are even encouraging it, did you know that? Apparently they even have an office for Jewish emigration in Vienna. But she says that the British have quotas and it’s not easy to get in …’