The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  ‘I told you, he’s a Yid. That’s his problem.’

  ‘You were happy enough to take his money.’

  ‘He’s got enough of it, hasn’t he? Look at this place.’

  She stands in front of him, between him and the windows, her bulk blocking the light. ‘Your tea’s going to be ready soon. You’d best go and wash.’

  He looks at her with a sly smile. ‘You know I saw her once? In her bedroom.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘It was almost dark. I was doing something on the terrace, unblocking a drain or something. And I saw her in her room. No clothes on.’

  She laughs. ‘You dirty old thing.’

  ‘I couldn’t help it, could I? The curtains weren’t properly drawn and I just looked round and there she was, naked as the day she was born. Looking at herself in the mirror. Small tits.’ He grins. ‘But a nice bush.’

  ‘You’re making it up.’

  ‘No I’m not. She touched herself, you know that? She touched herself there. Swear to God.’

  ‘Since when did you take any notice of God?’

  ‘Got me stirred up, it did. Like a bloody bargepole—’

  She turns to go. ‘I haven’t got time to stand around listening to your dirty talk. I’ve got to get tea ready.’

  ‘Let’s eat at their dining table,’ he calls after her. ‘No reason why we shouldn’t use the place if we want to.’

  ‘There’s more,’ he tells her twenty minutes later, when they’re sitting at the round table eating.

  ‘What do you mean, more?’

  ‘About them. There’s more about them.’ He lifts food to his mouth and talks through the chewing. When he was a kid she used to stop him doing that but now he’s his own master and he’ll do what he pleases. ‘You know that refugee woman? Kalman. You know her?’

  ‘Frau Katalin, you mean?’

  ‘Call her what you like, she was being fucked by him. I’ll bet you didn’t know that, did you?’

  ‘You just talk dirty. It’s disgusting really, what you say.’

  He laughs through his mouthful of pork and potato dumpling. ‘It might be disgusting but it’s true. I caught them at it. One morning when there was no one around. The kids were at school and Frau Liesel had gone somewhere and I went looking for him. Wanted the rest of the day off, I did. Anyway, I go up to the top floor—’

  ‘You’re not meant to do that.’

  ‘Well I did it, didn’t I? And I caught them at it in her room. I listened outside the door and they were going at it hammer and tongs, I tell you. Like he was strangling a pig with his bare hands.’

  ‘You’re lying.’

  He laughs again. ‘What do you think, that they’re all like you? These people love it, I tell you. They play the respectable but really they love fucking each other. It’s what they do.’

  Exile

  The villa resembled a small castle, complete with turret and crenellations and a front door that looked as though it would keep out a siege army. A monstrosity in the Wagnerian style, Viktor called it. They settled in amongst the heavy drapes and the heavier furniture and felt like raiders camping in the abandoned ruins of the enemy.

  ‘It’s only for the time being,’ Liesel told herself. ‘Soon it will all be over and we’ll be able to return.’

  At first she tried to imagine it like that, as a holiday, one of those summer vacations when they rented a villa on a lake and spent the days in an idle simulacrum of domestic normality: visiting local sights, taking a sailboat, feeding the ducks, walking in the hills. But holidays are circumscribed by the inevitability of their ending. You know you are going home to pick up those threads of a life that has merely been suspended. This was different. Life had not been suspended, it had been ended and a new one had to be constructed out of a poverty of component parts: this house, this garden, this view of the lake and the mountains, these three adults and three children. Six characters in search of a home.

  She wrote sitting at the desk in her bedroom with the view of the lake before her. She wrote in the strange abstraction of exile, talking to people who no longer existed except in memory: her mother, a favourite aunt, an old school friend of Benno’s who wrote to her saying how sorry he was that they had found it necessary to leave and how things were not so bad and at least all that was finest about German culture was being preserved. And Hana.

  My Darling Hana,

  How are you and Oskar? And how are all our friends? And how is the dear house managing without us? You must go round and see it from time to time. I told Laník that you would, so don’t accept any nonsense from him. I feel quite strange thinking of you being there without us, but you are so much part of me that in a sense it would be me, wouldn’t it? Me by proxy. I miss you, Hanička. Of course I miss you. But I truly believe it won’t be long. This awfulness cannot continue.

  But it was not long before the idea of return came to seem absurd. The children were found places in schools nearby and settled in quickly, and Viktor was making plans. His latest project involved the manufacture of instruments for both cars and aircraft. It would combine traditional Swiss expertise in clocks and watches with his own knowledge of the motor industry. During the daytime he was often in Zurich, occasionally in Geneva, meeting people. There were potential investors to persuade, partners to coerce, contacts to establish.

  Liesel waited patiently for his return from these outings to the city. There wasn’t much else to do except wait, Katalin doing some needlework and Liesel writing letters or practising the piano. Almost the first thing she had done on arrival was to hire a piano – a Bösendorfer grand just like the one in the Glass Room – and find a piano teacher. Piano teachers were two a penny here, Jewish refugees struggling to make a living.

  Right at the start she had invited Katalin to come down from her room and join her in the sitting room. It seemed absurd to pretend that she was a mere employee, a servant of the family. ‘We might as well keep each other company,’ she suggested.

  Katalin had seemed hesitant, but perhaps that was to be expected. She came from a different world, and had to adjust to this new experience. They talked about the places they had left behind, about the dream of return, about all those vague aspirations that are symptoms of ennui and exile. Outside a thin rain was smudging the view of the lake.

  ‘Maybe we’ll be back home before Christmas,’ Liesel suggested. It was always she who suggested the possibility of return. ‘Maybe everything will settle down.’

  ‘But you can’t go back, can you?’ the younger woman said. ‘You can only go forward.’

  Liesel gave a small, humourless laugh. ‘Goodness, we sound like two characters from Chekhov.’

  ‘What’s Chekhov?’

  ‘You don’t know Chekhov?’ She didn’t meant to sound so surprised, but Katalin’s manner sometimes belied her ignorance, that was the trouble. It was easy to forget that she did not possess the same qualities as their other friends. Qualities, Eigenschaften, was a word Liesel liked to use. Viktor was a person of Eigenschaften and so, of course, was Hana. The qualities were implied rather than defined: a level of intellectual understanding, a high degree of culture, a certain liberal attitude, a delight in the modern and a loathing of the bad things of the past. But Katalin is a charming companion for all her limitations, she wrote to Hana, and we get on very well. For they did have things in common and, thrown together by circumstance, were happy enough in each other’s company, going round the market in Zurich together, or taking a steamer trip on the lake with the children, or swimming from the landing stage at the foot of the garden. Katalin turned out to be an excellent swimmer. The first time she ventured into the water she surprised them all by diving off the end of the jetty with a sudden fluid grace that had barely disturbed the water: just a liquid plop! and there she was beneath the surface, swimming strongly and silently towards the shore. The children had clapped as she emerged, as though the dive had been quite unexpected and remarkable; but Liesel s
aw that Katalin had that about her, something sleek, like an otter.

  Summer passed, the first summer in exile, and when the first snowfall came they took the children tobogganing in the hills behind the house. Later, before Christmas, there was the first trip to the ski slopes where Ottilie could show off her skills already learned in the Tatra Mountains. She and Marika were almost inseparable by now, a pair of precocious young females with budding breasts and knowing smiles. Marika had taken to calling Viktor Onkel. He seemed to find that amusing. ‘Show me how to ski, Onkel Viktor,’ she would cry. ‘Please show me how to ski.’ Or, ‘When are you going to take us tobogganing, Onkel?’ Or, ‘I want to do ice skating, Onkel Viktor, please come and watch me ice skating.’

  ‘He has become like a father to her,’ Katalin confided to Liesel. Her face was flushed and her eyes shining, happiness and cold conspiring to make her seem so young. ‘You don’t know how much we owe to him.’

  But Liesel did know. There were signs, of course there were signs, small hints, like the first indications of age in a someone’s face, changes that you don’t notice if you are living together until you wake up one day and there they are: the greying hair, the crow’s feet round the eyes, small creases of disapproval at the corners of the mouth. In retrospect she realised that she had noticed them even before they had left Město. It wasn’t the way that Viktor and Katalin looked at each other, it was the way they didn’t look. It wasn’t the notes, it was the silences between the notes. Some music is the very enemy of silence, keeping the sounds coming so that the listener has no time to reflect. But other music, the music she played for herself, was different. In that music – the music of Janáček, for example – the silences matter. They are silences of foreboding, anticipatory echoes of the sounds that are yet to come.

  Viktor bought a sailing boat and taught himself to sail on the lake. Once or twice Liesel went with him but she didn’t enjoy the experience. Absurdly – it seemed absurd in such a small craft – it made her feel sick. So it was Katalin who crewed for him, with one of the children as a passenger. They couldn’t take more than one passenger, there just wasn’t room. And sometimes they just went on their own and Liesel looked after the children. She wasn’t a fool. She saw the laughter in Katalin’s eyes when they came back, and something else as well, a hint of shame.

  Then one night when she couldn’t sleep because of a headache Liesel opened the door to Viktor’s room. She was in search of aspirin and there was none in the bathroom and she knew he kept a bottle at his bedside, so she crept into the bedroom like a shadow, determined not to wake him. But in the event there was no risk of that happening because he was not in his bed.

  She whispered his name, ridiculously she whispered his name. ‘Viktor? Viktor?’ Whom was she hoping not to disturb? Anyway, there was no reply. The bed had been occupied, but not for a while. The sheets were cold. She waited but he did not appear. So she left the room and crept, breathless and fearful like a child, up the stairs to the attic floor. The corridor was silent, illuminated only by a night light at the far end where the children’s rooms were. The first door was Katalin’s. For long minutes Liesel stood with her ear against the door, listening. What she heard was the breath of slumber, the mutter of sleep-talk, the moan of nightmare and then a voice crying out in despair or pain, Katalin’s voice crying Oh, oh, oh in short, staccato bursts, as though her very life were being shaken out of her. And then a quietness that held within its embrace a low mutter of contentment.

  Liesel turned and went back down to her bed. She slept fitfully for the remainder of the night, her sleep disturbed by dreams in which they were back home in the house on Blackfield Road, and she was standing outside on the terrace looking in through the windows into the Glass Room and seeing Viktor making love. The object of his love was Katalin, was Hana, was herself, the three women metamorphosing one into the other, then becoming one, a chimera, and the man becoming Hana, Hana with a penis, Viktor with a vulva, the act of love transformed into something that people watched, crowds of people packed into the space between the onyx wall and the windows, an audience that laughed and applauded as the protagonists performed, giving and receiving sperm that was like rice thrown at a wedding.

  She woke to a pale dawn and the grey lake beyond the garden, and a misery that remained ill-defined until she remembered what she had discovered during the night. She sat in her room listening to the familiar sounds – footsteps on the floor above as Katalin got the children up, the running of a bath in her and Viktor’s bathroom, the door opening downstairs as the maid let herself in, all this domestic familiarity standing as sharp contrast to the silence of the night and the dark shadows of suspicion.

  Over breakfast she watched Viktor and Katalin for signs. There were none. No glance exchanged, no secret contact. Life, domestic life, went on as normal.

  Viktor glanced up at her from his paper. ‘Are you feeling all right, my dear?’

  ‘I’m fine,’ she replied. ‘I just didn’t get much sleep last night.’

  He smiled and nodded and went back to his reading. The Neue Zürcher Zeitung was the usual catalogue of disaster – Jewish refugees being held on the border, questions being asked in the assembly of the League of Nations, people being arrested in Prague, German forces massing on the Polish border this time, nobody doing anything effective. The meal continued, the cook hovering, wanting to ask about lunch, Viktor reading, Katalin talking to the children, explaining to Martin how he should eat a good breakfast, how it would set him up for the day. ‘What’s “setting up” mean?’ the boy asked in the manner of children, who will ask a question even when they know the answer.

  ‘Can I have a word with you, Viktor?’ Liesel asked. She felt like a supplicant, bereft of the natural authority that she should feel in her own household. What would Hana have done in such a situation? How would she have behaved?

  He looked at her over his paper. ‘Really?’

  ‘If you don’t mind. In the study, perhaps.’

  The idea of leaving the breakfast room for a private discussion seemed both surprising and amusing. He folded his paper open at the place he was reading and got up from his chair. ‘If you wish. I have to catch my train in twenty minutes. I have a meeting in Lausanne.’

  ‘Perhaps it won’t take long.’

  Katalin watched as they left the room. The children were arguing about the meaning of ‘setting up’. ‘Setting down’ they knew. ‘Setting up’ was surely the opposite. ‘“Settling up” is when you pay your bills,’ said Ottilie, who knew more than the others.

  ‘Tell me,’ Viktor said as he closed the study door. The study had become his territory ever since they moved into the villa. When Liesel wanted to write letters she went to her room looking out over the lake. Here, on the other side of the house, with a view of the front garden and the road, it was a male refuge, all heavy oak panelling and leather-upholstered armchair and a wide desk with a leather skiver.

  ‘It’s about Katalin.’

  ‘About Katalin?’

  Carefully, she paused. ‘Is she happy?’

  He seemed surprised by the possibility of happiness. ‘Happy? I don’t really know. I think so. You speak to her more than I do. What do you think? Goodness, she has enough to be thankful for. I mean, what would have happened to her if she’d stayed behind?’

  ‘Of course there’s that. But what kind of future does she have here?’

  ‘With us, do you mean?’

  ‘I suppose with us. She doesn’t have anyone else, does she? And no way of supporting herself.’

  He looked puzzled. ‘What are you driving at, Liesel?’

  She shrugged. She didn’t really know the answer to his question. What was she driving at? The expression implied intention, a target, an aim, and in truth she had none. There was just the dull notes of accusation. ‘What do you think of her?’ she asked. ‘Do you find her attractive?’

  ‘Certainly she’s attractive.’ It was impossible to read his expression. Just
a faint smile, as though the question revealed more about her than it did about him. ‘Eliška, I do believe you are jealous.’

  He never called her Eliška, not these days. ‘Do I have reason to be?’

  ‘Of course you don’t.’ He paused, considering. There was nothing in his expression, no guilt, no shame. So much so that a small part of her wondered whether she had imagined the whole thing last night, whether it was all part of her dream. ‘We can be honest with each other, can’t we?’ he asked.

  ‘Can we?’

  ‘I think we can. I think we ought to be.’ He seemed to be thinking about the form of words he might use, like a chess player wondering how his move would affect his opponent, how that move would affect the next, how the single first step would reverberate on throughout the game. But it wasn’t a game, was it? There were no boundaries and no rules. ‘Nothing that is due to you is compromised by Kata being here,’ he said. ‘Whatever is mine is yours, you know that. And if you were to say that Kata must leave, then she would have to go. Is that what you want? Is it?’

  ‘I don’t know what I want.’ She turned away and looked out of the window. She needed a cigarette. She rarely smoked so early in the morning but she felt the need now. Her hands were trembling as she dealt with cigarette packet and lighter. She drew on the cigarette and felt the smoke in her lungs, consoling her. Out there beyond the window, beyond the limits of the garden and the boundaries of this country everything was happening: politicians were ranting, troops were massing on borders, people were being shipped off to camps, the whole world was coming apart. And here there was this intestine, undeclared conflict.

  His voice came from behind her. ‘You can tell me that she must go and there will just be the two of us. If that’s what you want. Look, I’ll miss my train. We’ll talk this over when I come back. Is that all right? Until then I suggest you say nothing to her. Will you do that for me?’

  She nodded at the window. Perhaps she nodded. Anyway, she felt that she nodded, and then he was gone: the door had opened and he had gone. She could hear the children, and Katalin hurrying them up to get ready for school. And soon she saw him walking up the drive with his briefcase in his hand. What would Hana have said? What would Hana have done? She felt that strange longing for the familiar and the unexpected, those demon things that she had known with Hana. Nothing more perfect. A completeness of body and soul.