The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  Clutching their files the subjects move into the library area. Here there is a series of tests to perform – shapes to match, series to complete, patterns to identify. Then they move to one of the cubicles to change into medical gowns. From there they move to a desk where a needleprick – a sharp intake of breath, sometimes a small cry – reveals blood groups, and a sphygmomanometer measures blood pressure.

  Stahl watches.

  In the measurement areas the staff work in pairs, a recorder and an examiner, the one positioning the subject at the stadiometer – legs fractionally apart, heels, buttocks and shoulder blades in contact with the back board, heads held in a grip, chins horizontal with the ground – while the other waits, pen in hand. The examiner kneels down, pushing and pulling, adjusting and cajoling. It all has to be just right, standardised, exact. Measurements are taken: total height, hip diameter, chest diameter. Then sitting: leg measurements, arm measurements. Then the dentist’s chair: head dimensions, the callipers holding the different crania in their cool jaws. The smooth girls, the grizzled men, the matrons and the husbands. Skin colour is assessed, the inside forearm compared with a von Luschan chromatic chart. Eye colour is recorded, rows of glaucous model eyes staring back at the examiner to be matched with those real ones, wide and anxious, in the subject’s own face. ‘It’s all right,’ the examiners reassure their subjects, ‘there’s nothing to worry about. No pain, no discomfort.’

  Stahl watches.

  Precision, the cool gaze of scientific objectivity. The measurement is as perfect as the dimensions of the Glass Room itself.

  ‘Now we will just take some photographs, and then everything is done. Please take off your gown and hand it to the assistant. This is a scientific examination. We are all scientists here. And the records are entirely confidential.’

  Stahl watches.

  Gown handed aside, the subject stands naked under the lights and before the judgement of the camera. Sometimes they are as white and pure as alabaster, sometimes mottled or brushed with hair, sometimes creased and sagging like old cloth, sometimes firm and youthful, some bellies bloated, some mere cushions, ribs visible in some, breasts sagging like bladders or sharp and prominent like fruit, penises hanging, strangely ageless, like the probosces of blind, hirsute animals. The whole gamut of human variation.

  Stahl watches, enthralled by the systematic measurement of what defines human and subhuman, of what makes Herrenvolk and Untermenschen.

  Rainer

  Switzerland was an island in the midst of disaster. All around swirled the floodwaters of war, fetid and dangerous, carrying with them the wreckage of lives and places. They heard on the wireless and read in the newspapers of armies marching, of men dying, of refugees fleeing, of Paris itself disappearing under the flood.

  Have you heard about Kaprálová?, Hana wrote. Nowadays the letters always came with official stamps – the eagle with the Hakenkreuz in its talons – and a sticky label holding the flap down and announcing Geöffnet, opened. Liesel imagined bored men and women glancing over the banalities, missing the little bits of personal code, peering dully into other people’s private lives, seeing everything and understanding nothing.

  You know she dropped Martinů and married this fellow on the rebound? Perhaps you don’t. Jiři Mucha, Alfons Mucha’s son, would you believe! Well, she fell ill and was in hospital just as the Germans were approaching Paris. Can you imagine the panic? Apparently – I got this from Kundera who heard it from old Kaprál himself – her husband managed to get her out of the city just in time. They fled south, to Montpellier, I think. But there was nothing to be done: the poor girl died in hospital two days after the fall of Paris. God knows what it was. An ectopic pregnancy? Anyway, the lovely creature is dead, and Kaprál and his wife distraught.

  Liesel looked up from the letter. Kaprálová dead! Another part of the past dead. The young dying as often as the old. Out of the window the sun was bright on the lake, but she saw the wreckage of lives all around her, and herself cast up on this island of safety. How long would it last, she wondered?

  We ourselves are as poor as church mice nowadays, Hana continued. She wrote that bit in Czech – chudý jako kostelní myš. That’s what she did, mixed her German and Czech, perhaps to make it difficult for the censors. All O’s money is frozen – some new move against his people – and we are living hand to mouth. Darling, you cannot imagine how dreadful it is becoming …

  ‘His people’ was code, Liesel had worked that out months ago. It meant the Jews.

  I think I may have to look for work, can you imagine?! God knows what I’ll do – walk the streets, probably!

  She smiled at Hana’s exaggerations, folded the letter back into its envelope, put it away in a drawer and hurried downstairs. The reply would have to wait. It was almost midday and they had a guest for lunch. ‘Are the children ready?’ she called to Katalin. ‘I want them to look presentable.’

  Then she hurried around, putting things right in the sitting room, going in to the kitchen to make sure that the cook was prepared. They saw so few people these days, and this was a very special person, a link with the past, a link back to the house. He would bring with him that air of bullish self-confidence that would put everything else in perspective for a few hours.

  ‘There’s the car! We must all go and greet him. Hurry, let’s hurry.’

  They came out to welcome him as the taxi drew up on the gravel, Martin, Ottilie and Marika standing in an obedient line in their Sunday best with Katalin behind them and Viktor beside Liesel. And their guest played the part to perfection, almost as though he was inspecting a guard of honour, bowing solemnly to Marika and her mother, shaking Martin’s hand and proffering a cheek for Ottilie’s kiss. ‘I remember when you were just a little baby,’ he told the girl; and Liesel remembered too. She remembered baring her breast for the baby to suck, and Rainer watching, his cheeks flushed, perhaps with embarrassment, perhaps with desire, maybe both. Liesel felt something like that now, a flush of something that was not quite embarrassment.

  ‘I see you’ve betrayed the cause, Landauer,’ he said, looking up at the front of the villa, at the ogive windows and the crenellations, at the tower with its pointed turret. ‘If ornament is crime then this house is a capital offence.’

  Viktor smiled. ‘We are beggars now, von Abt. Beggars can’t be choosers.’

  ‘They can always choose the bridge they sleep under.’

  ‘Let me show you the garden,’ Liesel suggested. ‘You may loathe the house but you will love the garden. Viktor, are you coming?’

  But Viktor was going to see about the wine. He had a particularly fine Montrachet, something that Rainer would surely appreciate. Not quite beggars yet. So Liesel and Rainer walked down the lawn to the lakeside together, Liesel with her arm through his, the children running on ahead. She hadn’t expected to be so delighted with his visit. He reminded her of the excitement of those early days, the days of optimism when they were planning and building the house, when there was hope and confidence and the storm clouds were so far away on the horizon that it was possible to ignore them altogether. ‘How do you enjoy the life of a refugee?’ she asked. ‘Are you like me, in danger of dying of exile?’

  But he insisted that he was not a refugee. He had a project in Zurich, some bank that wanted a new headquarters. And then the German government wanted him to go back and design entire towns. ‘That fellow Speer has been begging me. He’s not a complete fool like some of them.’

  The idea was shocking. ‘But you won’t accept?’

  That loud and roguish laugh. ‘Certainly not. They can do their own dirty work. When I’m finished here I’m off to America.’

  ‘America!’

  ‘They’ve offered me a post at one of their absurd universities that no one has ever heard of. The Michigan Institute for Science and Technology. It is known to one and all as MIST. How do you like that? Out of the European mess and into the American muck.’*

  She laughed at the joke
and hugged his arm to her. Rainer gave her hope, a sense of possibility. He talked of steel and glass, of light and volume, of buildings soaring up so high that clouds obscured their summits. America! Apparently this institute of the future wanted him to redesign their whole campus. It seemed incredible: in Europe they were destroying but in America they were building.

  ‘You know the house is no longer ours?’ she told him. ‘They took it from us, stole it. Because Viktor is a Jew.’

  ‘That means nothing. When the war is over …’

  ‘But will it ever be over? That’s what I want to know. Will it ever be over? It was terrible when we left, you know that? Our beloved house. Viktor’s and mine, but yours as well. It was like having a limb amputated. We were so happy there. You know I compose it in my mind? It’s like recreating it in a dream. I walk round the terrace and pick up the children’s toys. I go inside and walk into the rooms, Ottilie’s, Martin’s, and their bathroom with the ducks – you’d be appalled to see them, Rainer, a line of rubber duck silhouettes following their mother across the tiles and into the bath. Then I go down into the Glass Room – twelve steps to the curve, and then round and down nine more, and the space opens out around me just as it really was. I’m there, right there, where we were so happy.’

  ‘And you’re not happy now?’

  She wanted to tell him. She wanted to explain about Viktor and Katalin and the awful penalty of isolation and indifference. Surely Rainer would understand. ‘I don’t feel I belong here. Viktor says he belongs anywhere. He claims to be a citizen of the world, but I miss home and friends much more. And everything is so uncertain. He always talks of going to the United States, but it’s not that simple for people like us, without work, without relatives there. They have quotas. He says that one way of doing it is via Cuba, but who wants to go to Cuba?’

  ‘Why don’t you come with me?’ he suggested. ‘Leave Viktor and run away with me to America.’

  For an ephemeral moment his tone seemed serious, and the very idea possible, this man snatching her away from enigma into certainty. Then she laughed – ‘Don’t be absurd’ – and he laughed with her and they strolled along the lakeside and onto the landing stage, laughing at the idea of her running off to America as though it was the greatest joke imaginable. She hadn’t laughed like that in years.

  Lunch was eaten on the terrace at the back of the house in the pale sunshine, the three of them together at one end of the table, Katalin with the children at the other. The conversation was about the past because that is what exiles talk about, what was and what would never be again: the house in Město, the light and the balance and the beauty; and the people who had inhabited it, creatures of light and beauty as well. ‘Sometimes I feel that the place never existed,’ Liesel said. ‘That it’s no more than a figment of my imagination. Can we really have been so happy there?’

  ‘That is why I built it,’ Rainer said. ‘To make you happy.’

  ‘But now whom are you making happy? Banks in Zurich and universities in America? Why not stay here? We’ll knock this pile down and you can build another house of glass and make us happy again.’

  Rainer laughed and caught her hand across the table. ‘Viktor,’ he said, ‘you don’t know how lucky you are with your wife.’

  Viktor’s expression was of detached amusement, like an adult with over-enthusiastic children. ‘What makes you think it’s luck? It’s all planned.’

  And Liesel thought, watching Katalin at the foot of the table talking to the children and only occasionally joining in the adults’ conversation that, yes, it was a plan, all of it was a plan. While the world itself was thrown around in the storm, Viktor had managed to plan the little world of his family down to the smallest detail. When Rainer came to leave after lunch she found herself absurdly close to tears. Somehow he represented the truly uncertain, the capricious and the dangerous. It was only in the unknown that hope lay. ‘Maybe we’ll meet up in the United States,’ she said as his taxi drew up.

  ‘And then I will design you another house,’ he assured her.

  She had to bend to kiss him goodbye. She’d forgotten that, that she was taller than he. Somehow being with him, you forgot a simple physical fact like that.

  * German Mist is ‘muck’ or ‘manure’.

  Encounter

  He sits at a window table in the café, watching. The place seethes with talk and laughter, an inchoate sound that reminds him of the noise from some animal colony. Men and women, hooded crows and parakeets, as though a species boundary is being crossed – crows and parakeets mixing together against the laws of nature. He remembers hours, days spent in a hide on the Baltic coast near Peenemünde watching terns nesting – the chattering, the raucous calling, the manoeuvring for mates and territory. Later, in the ornithological section of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, he chloroformed his samples and handed them to the taxidermist for skinning and preserving. The skins lay in drawers, their feathers bright and sharp as though they were still alive; but each with a small inflorescence of cotton wool poking out of its eye sockets. As with these women in the café the faint smell of mothballs clung to their plumage.

  ‘May I join you, Herr Oberst? All the other places appear to be taken.’

  Stahl looks up. A woman, perhaps in her thirties, certainly older than he. Her eyes are blue, and bright with something like amusement. Mockery, perhaps. Her hair is just the pale side of chestnut. She is dressed in black, with a small blackbird’s nest of a hat perched on her head. Half rising to his feet, he offers the chair. ‘Bitte.’

  She sits and orders something called a turecká and a small slice of Sachertorte. Despite the fact that her German is perfect, she is clearly a Slav. As she speaks to the waiter he examines her, focusing on her mouth, looking for curves and corners, wondering if clues lie there. And her ears, where they are visible beneath her careful hair: the convolute sculpting, the cartilage joining smoothly into the line of the neck. No lobes.

  ‘So tell me, Herr Oberst,’ she asks, turning her eyes on him. ‘To what do we owe the honour of your presence here in our city?’

  He smiles, embarrassed by her attention. ‘I’m afraid I cannot claim to be an Oberst, gnädige Frau. I am a mere Hauptsturmführer.’

  ‘Mere Hauptsturmführer? Hauptsturmführer sounds dreadfully important. But then all Germans are dreadfully important, aren’t they? Anyway, I always promote soldiers. It makes them feel good.’ She peels off her gloves, folds them into her bag and takes out a silver cigarette case. He declines her offer of a cigarette but reaches across the table with his lighter.

  ‘Is your husband not with you?’ he asks, noticing her wedding ring.

  She blows smoke away towards the window, as though with it her husband. ‘I always leave him behind. This café is where I meet my friends, and I’d hardly include my husband amongst my friends, would I? My friends spend money; my husband makes it. The opportunity for a conflict of interests is evident.’

  Her order comes. She sips and eats carefully, endeavouring not to touch either coffee or cake with her glistening, scarlet lips. ‘And what about you? Is there a Frau Hauptsturmführer somewhere in the background?’

  He hesitates, wondering whether to lie. ‘There was. But now she is dead.’

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry.’ But she doesn’t seem sorry. She seems merely thoughtful, as though she is trying to assess the truthfulness of that answer. ‘You haven’t told me what you are doing here. Or perhaps you can’t tell me. Perhaps it is terribly secret.’

  ‘No secret at all. I’m here in the name of science. Beneath my uniform beats the heart of a scientist.’

  ‘How remarkable. I always thought that scientists were heartless. What kind of scientist are you?’

  ‘Zoologist, anthropologist, geneticist. I am director of the research centre at the Landauer House.’

  Which is when the brittle banter, part sexual, part social, the one shifting over into the other, stops. She holds a forkful of Sachertorte suspended in mid air, h
er lips open. ‘The Landauer House?’

  ‘You know it?’

  ‘Very well.’ The chocolate cake goes into her mouth. She lifts her napkin and touches crumbs from her lips. ‘Liesel Landauer was a great friend of mine.’

  ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She went away. Surely you know that, otherwise why should you be in her house?’

  ‘And you have no contact with her?’

  She looks at him thoughtfully. ‘Am I being interrogated, Herr Hauptsturmführer?’

  ‘I am asking a question about your former friend.’

  ‘Why should you wish to know?’

  ‘Because I am intrigued by the house and the minds behind it. The Landauers must have been unusual to build such a place.’

  She shrugs. ‘They were people of imagination and culture. They wanted a new life, a modern way of living. That is all. And they had it for just ten years before they were forced to abandon it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I am sure you know why, Herr Hauptsturmführer. Viktor Landauer is a Jew. No, that’s not quite right. Like his nominally Christian wife, he is in fact an atheist; but he has what you would term Jewish blood.’

  ‘I dislike the term “blood”. There is no racial identity in blood. In the genes, perhaps. Jewish genes.’

  ‘The words don’t matter. The concept does. That is why they left.’

  There is a small hiatus in the conversation, a pause while the two of them assess what has been said and what has not been said. ‘Perhaps we ought to introduce ourselves,’ she suggests carefully. ‘I know this is hardly the normal thing to do in polite society, but then we don’t live in normal times, do we? Or maybe even polite society any longer. My name is Hana Hanáková.’