by Simon Mawer
Ten minutes later a small convoy of cars heads away from the house down Blackfield Road. Viktor and Liesel are in the front car with the children. Katalin follows in the second car with Marika and the luggage. Oskar and Hana follow behind. They set off on the right-hand side of the road – new regulations have come into force, a new highway code, a new way of driving. The convoy goes down the hill past the children’s hospital to the main road, then turns right and heads down towards the Ringstrasse. There is no other traffic around, and few pedestrians. It is like a Sunday morning, but it isn’t a Sunday morning. It’s a Friday, Friday the seventeenth.
‘What’s happened, Laník?’ Viktor asks through the hatch in the panel between the driver and the passengers. ‘Where is everyone?’
Laník glances round. ‘Dunno, sir. Who can tell these days?’
They turn onto the Ringstrasse, bump over the tramlines. There’s a tram stopped at a light and a thin crowd on the pavement. Another tram passes in the opposite direction, heading towards the north of the city, but there isn’t the usual traffic and there aren’t the usual crowds. As they reach the Grand Hotel they find military vehicles parked across the wide road, blocking access to the railway station. Soldiers flag the cars down. A few civilians have gathered on the pavement to watch.
Laník winds down his window as one of the soldiers advances. The man looks puzzled, as though he feels he should recognise these people and these vehicles. He’s dressed in that uniform that they’ve heard about but never seen until the last two days: dove grey with a hint of green about it. On his chest hangs a silver breastplate. Feldgendarmerie, it proclaims. ‘At least he’s a German,’ Viktor says. ‘That must be better than one of the local fanatics.’
The children stare at him with that open curiosity that children have, as though nothing will affect the even tenor of their lives. Liesel grasps Victor’s hand for reassurance.
The soldier peers into the car and demands their papers.
‘We’re heading for the airport, Sergeant,’ Viktor explains. ‘We have a plane to catch.’
The man shrugs. ‘Well you can’t pass here. The road’s blocked.’
‘Why? We’ll miss our flight.’
‘Orders, sir. An important convoy. You’ll just have to wait.’
There’s a feeling of panic. The plane won’t wait, the world won’t wait. They’ll be stuck here for ever, held back by a squad of soldiers. Viktor opens his briefcase and hands the documents over. ‘There is also the children’s governess and her daughter travelling in the car behind,’ he explains. ‘Her documents are there too.’
The soldier examines the papers with a mixture of indifference and incomprehension. Behind him there’s a stir in the crowd. People are pointing and craning to see down the Bahnstrasse towards the ornate station building. A father has lifted his child onto his shoulders. There is a crowd there at the entrance to the station, soldiers drawn up, a banner flying and vehicles waiting.
‘Why are these people here, Sergeant? What are they here to see?’
‘I can’t tell you that, sir. Orders.’ He hands the papers back.
‘But these people know.’
‘Maybe, maybe not.’
There’s a distant roar of engines. Abruptly the soldier leaves the window of the car and snaps to attention. One of his colleagues salutes, arm extended in that absurd, histrionic gesture. Viktor climbs out of the car to look. Liesel calls him back but he ignores her. Behind them Oskar and Hana are out of their car. The people on the pavement are straining to see, some with excitement, others looking on with indifference. And suddenly the object of all the interest is there, in an open-topped six-wheel car, driving out of the station forecourt, standing there in the front seat of the vehicle, a figure of inconsequential ordinariness who has nevertheless become iconic across the continent, the sallow face with its paintbrush moustache and the eyes that stare out of newsreels and newspapers, gazing into a history that seems already destined and defined. And then the small parade of vehicles has roared away, across the station road and down Masaryk Street towards the city centre. People in the crowd around them are weeping, but whether they are tears of joy or tears of misery it is impossible to tell.
‘Did you see?’ Hana asks. She has come to the window on Liesel’s side. ‘Did you see who it was?’
‘Who was it?’ Martin asks. ‘I didn’t see the man. Who was the man?’
‘Shut up Martin,’ Ottilie says.
Hana is tense with excitement, as though she has come out here to wave and cheer. ‘How has he done it? They say he was in Prague yesterday. Here today. How does he do it?’
‘It’s not magic, is it?’
‘What’s magic?’ Martin asks. ‘Why won’t people tell me? Tell me, Maminko, tell me.’
The soldiers are relaxing. The onlookers drifting away. ‘May we continue, Sergeant?’ Viktor is asking. His voice is quiet, as though he is confiding something to the soldier. ‘We turn left just there, before the station. Otherwise we’ll miss our plane.’
The man hesitates. ‘You turn down there right away? Is that understood?’
‘Of course it’s understood, Sergeant.’
‘Get in,’ Liesel says to Hana, opening the door. ‘We can’t wait.’ So Hana climbs in beside her and takes her hand for comfort and their little convoy moves forward, manoeuvring past the army vehicles and turning left into the tunnel that passes below the railway line, away from the city centre and towards Černovice and the aerodrome.
‘How did you know he was a sergeant?’ Liesel asks.
Viktor looks tense, as though the ordeal is still to come. ‘He wasn’t a sergeant, he was a corporal. But I always promote a soldier if I can. It makes them feel good.’
Hana laughs and the children laugh with her, Martin because he always follows Ottilie. Liesel joins in and the laughter is immoderate, a lifeline they grab to pull them out of their anxiety. The only traffic on the road seems to be military. The whole country is under siege.
‘Have you heard?’ Hana says, to try to keep the mood light-hearted. ‘Apparently they put up curfew notices in Olomouc yesterday – you know, just like the ones here – in German and Czech. Only they got it wrong. The ones they put up in Olomouc were in German and Romanian.’
The laughter starts again, and then dies away. It isn’t so funny after all.
‘Why Romanian?’ Ottilie asks. ‘Are there German soldiers in Romania as well?’
‘No there aren’t,’ Liesel assures her. ‘But if Auntie Hana’s story is true it looks as though there soon may be.’
The airfield lies beneath a plain and windy March sky. Grey vehicles sporting iron crosses are parked round the perimeter and soldiers are patrolling with their weapons at the port. They let the cars through reluctantly, only when Viktor shows them the tickets and explains the problem and they have talked about it amongst themselves.
On the airfield are aircraft of the Luftwaffe, grey machines that look like coffins. Inside the concrete airport building a crush of people threatens the airline desks. Policemen, ordinary Czech policemen, are trying to keep order. Voices are raised in argument. Soldiers stand guard, German soldiers here as everywhere else. Viktor wades into the crowd waving their tickets aloft. A voice over the public address system announces that the Air France flight from Paris has been cancelled. The announcement is in German and Czech, but the German comes first.
Through the windows of the airport building they can see their aircraft on the concrete apron, wings spread, its nose up, its tail like a Swiss flag flung out by the wind. Daylight gleams on the corrugated metal fuselage. The other aircraft on the perimeter are dull grey and bear the Hakenkreuz on their tails, and there is a strange antinomy between the two symbols, the straight Swiss cross and the crooked German one.
‘Will our aeroplane take off?’ Liesel asks a passing official, but he just shrugs. Nobody seems to know anything. She clings to Hana for comfort, dear Hana who seems so strong now, not the fragile fractured cre
ature of the other day. ‘Hanička, maybe it won’t go. Maybe we’ll have to stay.’ And a part of her, an unexpressed, suppressed fragment, hopes that it will be so, that the airport authorities will deny their pilot permission to take off, that they will have to return to the cars and reload the luggage and set off back to Město and the quiet comfort of the Glass Room.
Viktor comes over, with his face stern but satisfied. She knows the look. He doesn’t like to celebrate his triumphs. Outside, a trolley loaded with suitcases is being pushed across the concrete towards the aircraft. ‘I’ll tell Laník that he can go,’ Viktor says. ‘We’d better get a move on before they change their minds.’ And there is the announcement over the Tannoy, that the Swissair flight to Zurich will be departing in fifteen minutes.
Liesel shepherds her children towards the gate. ‘We’re going to fly!’ Martin says. ‘We’re going to fly!’
Viktor walks behind, with Katalin and Marika. Hana and Oskar follow like a couple at a funeral – the same drawn faces, the same searching for things to say and failure to find them. At the doorway a border guard checks documents. Katalin and Marika’s Nansen passports are glanced at, then passed back with a shrug. He asks Hana for hers. She shakes her head. ‘We’re just friends,’ she tells him. ‘We’re just the people left behind.’
At the door they say their farewells, exchange kisses and hugs. Hana clings to Liesel and whispers in her ear, Miluji tě, I love you, and then lets go and stands there bereft. They go out into the cold, uncertain day, Viktor leading the way across the concrete. ‘We’re going to fly!’ Martin announces to the hostess who stands at the foot of the steps. Holding her hat on against the wind, she bends towards him. ‘You’re a very lucky boy,’ she says.
They climb the steps and duck in through the door. The cabin is a narrow, sloping tunnel with seats on either side and a dim twilight coming through the windows. It seems the very antithesis of the Glass Room, with no sense of design but instead a hard, factual functionality. Above the seats there is netting for hand luggage and behind each seat a paper bag for vomit. At the summit of the tunnel is an open door and a glimpse of daylight where the pilots and navigator are at work.
The other ten passengers are already settled into their seats. The Landauers strap themselves in, Viktor and Liesel across the aisle from each other, Ottilie and Martin behind them, Katalin and Marika just ahead. The pilot appears at the door at the top of the slope.
‘We must apologise for the delay, ladies and gentlemen, but as you know these are unusual times.’ He has the jovial manner of a sea captain about to set off on a cruise. He even uses the word: ‘We’ll be cruising at an altitude of three thousand metres. And an estimated flying time of three and a half hours. The weather seems to be improving a bit, but be prepared for a bumpy flight.’ He says bockig for bumpy. Martin and Ottilie giggle, and look over at Marika. ‘Bockig,’ they whisper and make the gesture of a bucking horse.
‘Are there many first-time flyers?’ the captain asks. ‘Well, you mustn’t worry about it. It’s what the birds do. Quite natural. If you do feel sick there’s a bag in the pocket opposite you. There will be a bit of a bang when the engines start, but don’t worry, it’s quite normal.’ He returns to his cockpit, closing the door behind him.
‘Will we be sick?’ Katalin asks. She looks round at Viktor. He is the expert, the only one of their party who has done this before.
‘Some people are, some people aren’t. It’s a bit like a fairground ride at times.’
‘I went on the Riesenrad once,’ Liesel says. ‘With Benno.’
‘A bit more than the big wheel, I think. A roller-coaster, maybe.’
The passengers wait expectantly. But still they jump when the explosion comes and the engines start. The cabin is flooded with noise, like the inside of a drum when the drummer beats a military roll. Katalin looks round and tries to smile. Liesel pulls the curtain aside and peers out of her window at the aluminium wings and the shining disk of the propeller. It seems an insubstantial thing, a ghost of something that cannot possibly pull them up into the sky. Are they really going?
‘We really are going, aren’t we?’ she says, not to Viktor, not to herself but somehow to the low line of hills she can see out there beyond the limits of the airfield.
The engine note rises in pitch and the aircraft begins its move forward, swinging its tail from side to side, bumping over the grass. ‘Bockig!’ Martin shouts above the engine noise. ‘Bockig!’
Liesel tries to shush him to silence but the endeavour is futile. The racket of the engines drowns everything including his child’s voice. She reaches out and holds Viktor’s hand across the aisle and wonders whether this is usual, this monster of noise, the cabin shaking, the aircraft snaking forward, the lurching and bumping.
‘Everything’s fine,’ he mouths when he sees her expression. ‘This is what it’s like.’
At the far end of the airfield the aircraft turns and settles for a moment, the cabin shaking. Then the shaking becomes a shuddering and the engines roar against the brakes, and abruptly the passengers are thrown back into their seats as the machine moves forward, faster and faster, the wheels rumbling beneath them, the grass rushing by, the airport buildings and the fuel trucks and the grim grey military aircraft all rushing by, and a small crowd of spectators at the windows of the terminal building, among whom, Liesel presumes, are Hana and Oskar. And then there is something magic, a sudden lightness, a last kiss of the earth, and they are free, detached, floating up into the Raum above them, the ground dropping away, the aircraft rocking and the engines shouting in a call of triumph. Liesel looks down on buildings and streets and the sinuous line of the river, the Svitava, there like a snake winding through the undergrowth. Then more houses, and a factory, surely the Landauer factory, and dense clusters of houses, like decorative stones embedded in concrete, slipping beneath the wings and falling away behind. ‘Oh, Viktor, it’s wonderful!’ she cries, overwhelmed for a moment by the pure sensation. ‘Oh, do look! Do look at that!’
And then there is a line of buildings and a street that somehow she recognises even from this unaccustomed angle: the bulk of the hospital and then a slope of grass and trees, and there, outstanding on the lip of the hill, the long low shape of the house itself, her house, hers and Viktor’s, the pure dimensions of von Abt’s vision drawn with a ruler across the land, the blank wall of glass, the Glass Room, der Glasraum. And suddenly she weeps, that she might never see the house again, that all that has happened is past and that the future is uncertain and full of fear.
Laník
Laník stands in the centre of the Glass Room examining the place, the chairs that have not yet been packed and sent to storage, the glistening flooring, the wooden partition of the dining area and the honey-coloured partition of the onyx wall, the chrome pillars and the milk-white lights and the plate glass. He feels an immense relief. They have gone. He is his own master. Not that he covets the house in any way. In fact, he dislikes it. ‘Can’t see what they see in the place,’ he has said often enough to his sister. ‘More like a fish tank than a house. And if it’s a house it certainly isn’t a home.’ But whether or not he likes the place, he prefers it to be within his own sphere of influence.
He walks round the room fingering the fittings, running his hand – they all do that, he has noticed – over the surface of the onyx wall. ‘I think you had better board that up,’ Herr Viktor said to him as they were preparing to leave. It was almost the last command given to him before they went to the airport. ‘Plasterboard either side, turn it into an ordinary partition wall. See to it, will you?’
For the moment the matter can wait. The place is his. The sensation is not of unalloyed contentment: he feels like someone in the audience who has suddenly been invited up on stage but then discovers that the set has been abandoned, the actors have all departed and there are only the props left behind. Still, there’s something of the magic of the performance hanging round the place. Faint echoes. Memories o
f listening from behind the door to the kitchen and occasionally sneaking out for a peep, and hearing things, even – occasionally – seeing things that he can mull over in his mind.
He pours himself a whisky (the glasses have been packed away and shipped, but the drink is still there in the library area) and walks over to the front of the onyx wall to sit in one of the chairs. A Liesel chair, he happens to know. It’s not the kind of chair he likes – much better to have something with proper padded arms, something you can nod off to sleep in, listening to the wireless – but it’s funny to sit in a chair she sat in, her round arse against the same leather. That gives a small stir of pleasure. Paní Landauer. Paní Liesel. As he lights up a cigarette and contemplates the view through the windows, he says the name out loud, savouring it. ‘Liesel.’
There’s a footfall behind him. He turns to see his sister coming out from the kitchens, wiping her hands on her apron. ‘I thought I heard someone in here. What you doing?’
‘Just sitting. I thought I owed it to myself.’
‘It’s not your place to sit, is it?’
‘Isn’t it? Do you reckon it’s theirs still?’
‘Well, it is, isn’t it?’
‘You think they’ll be back? They’ll settle in Switzerland or wherever, won’t they? People like them never really have a fixed home, do they?’
‘What do you mean, “people like them”?’
He sniffs and turns back to the view. ‘Yids.’
‘She wasn’t a Yid.’ It has become the past tense now. ‘I’ll miss her, you know that? Miss her, I will.’
‘Not him?’
‘You know I didn’t like him. Cold fish. You said so yourself.’