The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  ‘Werner Stahl,’ he says. There is a solemn shaking of hands across the table.

  ‘So what exactly are you doing with the Landauer House?’

  ‘Would you like to see?’

  ‘Is that an invitation?’

  ‘Certainly. Perhaps you could take part in our survey of the human species?’

  She considers the suggestion. ‘Only if you’ll treat me to dinner afterwards,’ she decides.

  ‘Won’t your husband object to that?’

  ‘My husband,’ she explains, ‘lets me do exactly as I please. Tell me what I would have to do to be part of your survey.’

  ‘There would be some tests, some photographs, some measurements. It is all very straightforward.’

  She looks at him, right at him with those constant and striking eyes. ‘But human beings are not straightforward, Herr Stahl. They are very complex.’

  Swimming

  Dearest, lovely Liesel, she read, I hope this reaches you quickly. How long the post seems to take these days. To think you are only a day’s train journey away and yet your last letter took three weeks! I suppose they have to read our prattle, but why should it take so long?

  They had carried wicker chairs down the lawn to the lakeside, and a large umbrella with panels of red, white and blue, like a national flag. This was how time passed – not the fleet and nimble time of home but the leaden time of exile, measured not by hours but by the changes in the surface of the lake, from the quiet reflections early in the morning with the far shore flung upside down into the depths, through the daytime when the breeze stirred it to a brilliant, metallic blue, to the violet of evening and the black of night. Sometimes rain turned the surface to beaten silver but now there was some kind of sunshine and the surface was a ruffled azure. Their third summer lived in this limbo that was neither paradise nor hell.

  So, I have made the acquaintance of the new occupant of your house. You may be interested in this! The place is being used for official purposes and the man in charge is a ‘dish’, if you know what I mean. Fešák, as we used to say. Young and good-looking and strange: rather reserved and shy, and, of course, dumb. He calls himself a scientist and I suppose he is in some way – an anthropologist or something.

  Dumb, němy, was the word that gave Němec, German. Liesel could imagine Hana’s delight at the little joke enshrined in her code word. She looked up from the letter. The three children were already in the water, with Katalin. Viktor was reading the paper. Other newspapers lay on the grass around him. The breeze lifted the corner of one page, alternately obscuring and revealing a map of eastern Europe pierced by black arrows. The headline shouted Invasion. The name BARBAROSSA marched across the page like some bearded monster on the rampage.

  He was sitting, would you believe it, in our window seat at the Café Zeman! and so I went over and sat down and introduced myself (there wasn’t a single free place in the whole café – really!) and found him quite charming and we got to talking and of course he mentioned the house and I said that I knew it. So he invited me to have a look round the place and maybe take part in the investigation that they are doing there – it’s an anthropological survey or something (have I spelled that right?), nothing to do with the current situation really, and I thought, well why not? I’ll be able to report back to you on the goings on there.

  How are you, and how is the Cuckoo? Write soon and tell me everything. Give Viktor a kiss from me (the devil!) and especial hugs to the children from their Aunt Hana, and an extra one to my goddaughter. And one to you, of course. Many to you my sweet. Let me know how things are going. You seem so very far away.

  ‘Come in with us!’ Ottilie called.

  Liesel looked up. ‘When it’s a bit warmer. Ask your father.’

  ‘Tatínek is useless. He can’t even swim.’

  Viktor lowered his paper and looked at his daughter. ‘Frau Katalin is an excellent swimmer. Why do you need my help?’ Then he tossed the newspaper aside and got up from his chair. ‘I’m going to listen to the news. Find out what’s happening.’

  Liesel put on her spectacles. She had to squint against the light to look at Katalin standing there in the water with the children playing round her. The young woman’s hair was slicked back and dripping so that you could see the perfect oval of her head. What did she think as she watched Viktor walk away up the lawn? The fact was he almost never looked at her, barely ever acknowledged her presence. When he did he always called her Frau Kalman and always addressed her as Sie, never du.

  ‘It’s bad, isn’t it?’ Katalin called, seeing Liesel watching her.

  ‘What’s bad?’

  ‘The news.’

  ‘Of course it’s bad.’ The fall of Paris last summer paled into insignificance compared with this latest development – the German armies plunging into the Soviet Union, three million men, so the reports said, thousands of tanks, a front of two thousand miles. It seemed incredible. Armageddon, the end of all things. Only the literal part of the brain could assimilate it, not the imaginative part. The imagination could only encompass the personal – Vitulka Kaprálová dying in a hospital in Montpellier; Hana stuck in Město with Oskar; the house on Blackfield Road abandoned to its fate; and the six of them here, in this incongruous place of peace, where there were boats on the water, where the sun shone during the day and the lights shone at night and people went about their business as they always had with only the newspapers and the wireless to say that the world outside was coming to an end.

  Katalin walked out of the water and came over for her towel. Her wet skin was puckered with cold. ‘Should we be frightened?’ she asked, quietly so as not to be heard by the children.

  ‘I think perhaps we should.’ Liesel looked up at her and put her hand against her thigh. ‘You’ll catch your death. Do you want me to dry you?’

  She smiled, and stood willingly, like a child, like Ottilie, while Liesel rubbed her legs; then knelt on the grass to have her hair dried. It seemed absurd that they had this closeness, as though intimacy with Viktor tied them to each other. ‘My mother used to do this,’ Katalin said. ‘We’d have a bath in the kitchen and then I’d sit in front of her and she’d dry my hair just like this.’ She frowned, as though bewildered by circumstance. ‘I haven’t seen her for years, you know that? Not since I left home for Vienna. I don’t even …’ she paused to consider ‘… know if she’s still alive.’

  The children started shouting, the girls ganging up on Martin. Liesel called out to them, ‘You mustn’t fight. If you fight you’ll have to come in and there’ll be no more swimming.’

  ‘It’s Ottilie,’ Martin insisted, standing defiantly in the water between the two girls. ‘She says I can’t swim but I can.’

  ‘He’s only pretending,’ Marika said. ‘He’s putting his hands on the bottom.’

  ‘Maminko, can we take him further out so he can’t reach? Then we’ll see.’

  ‘No you can’t, Ottilie. Of course you can’t. You must stay in your depth.’ She turned back to Katalin, kneeling there on the grass, with her hair plastered against the smooth oval of her skull and her cheeks white with cold and her blue eyes the colour of ice. For a moment she looked like the young girl who had run away to the big city and cut all ties with her family. Liesel wrapped the towel round her and rubbed her shoulders. ‘Do you want to go back home or something? Is that it?’

  ‘It’s not that.’

  ‘What is it then? Look, you should get out of that costume or you’ll get cold. Let me hold the towel for you.’

  Katalin hesitated. And then, as Liesel took hold of the towel, she pulled her costume down to her knees. ‘There,’ she said, and for a moment she was naked between Liesel’s outstretched arms. Liesel looked at the curve of her hips and the hang of her breasts, the dome of her belly and the delta of dark hair that nested there between plump and childish thighs. Her skin was marbled with blue. ‘You mustn’t catch cold,’ she said, wrapping her in the towel and hugging her tight. For a moment she felt
the cold touch of Katalin’s hair against her cheek, and something else moving beneath the surface of her maternal concern, a sleek shark of desire.

  ‘Martin’s swimming!’ Ottilie cried out. ‘He’s really swimming. Maminko, come and look. We’ve taught him how to swim.’

  ‘Well done,’ she called, letting Katalin go. ‘Five more minutes and then you must come out.’

  Katalin sat back on her heels. ‘Is it true what Herr Viktor says? That we will go to America?’

  ‘Have you discussed this with him?’

  The young woman looked embarrassed. It was part of the tacit agreement between them that nothing was ever mentioned, no reference was ever made, however oblique. ‘He said something.’

  ‘It seems he has decided that Europe’s finished and the only hope is America. You know what he’s like.’ And that was an admission too, that Katalin might possess knowledge of Viktor that was equal to her own. Things were shifting on this summer day of sun and wind, with the sailing boats crossing to and fro and the children splashing in the shallows.

  Katalin hitched her towel over her breasts and stood up. ‘I never thought that this would happen. I mean, I thought we would wait here for a while and then it would all be over. I never thought we might be going to the other side of the world.’

  ‘Would you rather stay here?’

  She shrugged. ‘I don’t have any choice, do I? I can’t stay here on my own.’

  Far out towards the distant shore there were sailing boats, triangles of white and red passing and repassing. And beyond those the houses along the opposite shoreline, and then the hills, dark with trees. ‘Then that makes it easy.’

  ‘And you? Do you want me to come?’

  Liesel looked away. ‘Of course I do. Now let’s get the children in and the things cleared up. It’s almost lunchtime.’

  Examination

  She arrives at the house exactly on time. Someone from reception brings her to his office and when he looks up from his work there she is standing in the doorway, wearing a grey suit with wide shoulders and a short sharp skirt, looking like the kind of model that you might find in a fashion magazine. Her hat is a neat grey pillbox, set at an angle on her head.

  He’s not used to this. He is used to the milk and honey girls of the farming community where he grew up, or the earnest plainness of the women – many with a hint of Jew about them – that he encountered in the university world. And Hedda, whom he loved and who loved him in return until that love was murdered by circumstance. But never this elegance and urbanity. He rises from his chair and comes round the desk to take her hand and raise it towards his lips.

  ‘Küss die Hand, gnädige Frau,’ he says.

  She looks round, her expression difficult to read. Regret, perhaps. A hint of sadness. ‘This room used to be the guest room. I spent the night here sometimes, can you imagine? There was a painting on the wall just there, an abstract by František Kupka. Do you know Kupka? Bright, pastel colours.’

  He doesn’t know Kupka. He knows little of abstract painting. All he knows is that now where she points above his head there is a tinted photograph of the Führer gazing towards an unseen horizon. ‘So you knew the family well.’

  ‘Very well. Liesel Landauer was my greatest friend.’ She turns away and looks out of the window across the deserted terrace. Her face is broader than he recalls from that meeting in the café, her zygomata wider and more accentuated. ‘The children used to play out there. Dolls, cars, that kind of thing.’

  ‘How many children were there?’

  ‘Two. A boy and a girl.’

  ‘And is Frau Landauer a Jew like her husband?’

  She smiles warily. ‘She is a German, my dear Hauptsturmführer. As beautifully, sleekly Germanic as yourself.’

  ‘Then the children are Mischlinge.’

  ‘They were wonderful. They are wonderful.’

  ‘Miscegenation is not a wonderful thing. It is a terrible curse on our species. Hybrids between the races are unfit.’

  ‘Ottilie and Martin aren’t unfit. They are normal, healthy children.’

  He shrugged her assertion away. ‘We are gathering evidence to prove it. We are striving to find what characteristics define each human race so that the purity of the races may be preserved.’

  ‘And which race do I belong to?’

  ‘You?’ He considers the question seriously. Perhaps it was intended as a joke but that does not concern him. What concerns him is scientific truth. He reaches out and takes her chin to turn her head this way and that so that he can see all the angles and curves. ‘Of course you are fairly characteristic of the western Slav racial sub-group. But I would have to make a more detailed assessment to be certain of details. Eye colour and hair colour are obvious enough. And at a guess I’d say that your zygomatic arch is strongly Slav.’

  ‘I didn’t even know I possessed a zygomatic arch.’

  ‘Of course you do. Everyone does. The orbit to zygomatic arch ratio is a measure that I developed when I was at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Munich. It has considerable correlative potency.’

  ‘Potency, indeed! Doesn’t it repel you that I am Slav?’

  ‘Certainly not. I am a scientist and I must be objective. Objectively Slavs may be people of great talent and great …’ he pauses ‘… beauty.’

  ‘Are you trying to flatter me?’

  ‘I am merely saying what is true. So, let us go downstairs and see the work, shall we? As I suggested, maybe you can become one of our subjects. I must warn you that you will have to undress. For the photographic record.’

  ‘Undress?’ The mockery is there, in her smile and in her manner, as though somehow she is above all this. ‘Is undressing the cost of a dinner? You are taking me to dinner, aren’t you? Wasn’t that the agreement?’

  ‘Dinner wouldn’t be a cost, it would be a pleasure. And the photography is for scientific purposes only. If we were to publish any of the pictures the eyes would of course be blacked out so that you would not be recognisable.’

  ‘And what about private use?’

  ‘How do you mean, private use? The researchers—’

  ‘I mean you, Herr Hauptsturmführer.’

  She is difficult to read. Usually he can assess people immediately. Usually they surrender to the demands of medicine, motivated perhaps by something close to anxiety, like patients who have been told they have a fatal disease and who submit to treatment unthinkingly, placing themselves in the hands of the medical profession without thought. But this woman is different, distrustful and sardonic. And intelligent. ‘I am a researcher like the others. Let me assure you of my absolute discretion.’

  ‘I’m not sure that discretion is what I am looking for,’ she replies.

  They make their way downstairs into the measuring room. At the entrance she stands still for a moment, evidently amazed by the transformation that has taken place. People bustle around her. Three women are waiting at the stadiometer. Another couple are performing tests at a table. There is that atmosphere of focus and discovery, the sensation that the borders of knowledge are being moved back.

  ‘I don’t know what Liesel Landauer would make of it all,’ the Hanáková woman remarks. ‘The only thing she would recognise is the piano.’

  ‘Does it seem out of place?’

  ‘It is the only thing that is in place. Is it just for show or does someone play?’

  ‘I was at the Munich conservatory before I felt the call of science. I still try to keep my hand in.’

  She looks at him in surprise. ‘You must play for me some time, Herr Hauptsturmführer.’

  One of the workers, the milk-white girl called Elfriede Lange, hands her a form to complete and, when that is done, directs her to one of the changing cubicles, from which she emerges wearing a green gown and looking somehow smaller and defenceless, stripped of artifice. ‘I feel like a lamb going to the slaughter,’ she remarks as Elfriede prepares to take her blood.

  ‘It’s just a prick,’ S
tahl assures her. ‘There will be a mild discomfort, nothing more.’

  ‘But I’m not used to discomfort of any kind.’ Yet when the needle jabs she doesn’t flinch, doesn’t move, doesn’t register anything at all, just watches Stahl as blood grows like a bead of ruby on the tip of her finger. Elfriede manoeuvres her hand over the row of sample tubes, then adds test solutions and holds each tube of clouded red against the light, watching for coagulation. ‘AB,’ she announces. ‘MP negative.’

  ‘What does this show, Herr Hauptsturmführer? Whether I am Mensch or not?’

  Der Mensch – human being; das Mensch – slut. Which does she intend? They usher her on to the stadiometer to have her height measured, then onto the scales for her weight, then into the dentist’s chair to have her legs and arms measured. Stahl takes on this task himself, bending the callipers towards her, touching her heel and knee; knee and iliac crest. Close to her he gets a faint drift of her scent. If only, he thinks, it were possible to measure smells. Surely there would be a means of classification: a Jew smell, a Slav smell, a Teutonic smell. This woman’s smell, only partly disguised by some Parisian perfume, makes him imagine the steppe in summer, the miles and miles of wheat fields, the scent of hay, the scent of crushed grass. Coumarin. Vanilla. And something darker underneath.

  ‘Am I in good shape?’

  ‘Fine shape,’ he says. ‘A most beautiful shape. Now the cranial measure ments.’ Her eyes follow him as he moves above her, touching her temple to place the jaws of the callipers exactly. Her smile reveals even, perfect teeth. There is a faint warmth from her breath. He turns the callipers to measure from the frontal to the occipital, then crown to chin. Then the length of her nose and its width across the base. Then the orbit, with the jaws of the callipers coming close to the egg white of her eye and the staring blue jewel of her iris. ‘Just keep quite still.’

  She blinks. ‘How did you get into this kind of research?’ she asks him.