by Simon Mawer
You’ll think me awful saying all this, but perhaps you’ll also say, ‘she’s my old Hana! At least some things haven’t changed!’ Anyway, we went to dinner afterwards and my doctor was very stern and rather offhand, as though he didn’t know how to deal with the situation. He is rather strange. He told me he had a little wifey but that the family didn’t approve because they were cousins. But weren’t Jaromil and Federica cousins? I don’t remember any problem with them. Afterwards … well, you may imagine. One day I’ll tell you all.
As for the Cuckoo – when we get to join you, you can let her fly away with him and I will comfort you! Darling, don’t show any of this letter to Viktor. He’d never speak to me again. And I do hope to be able to see you soon, all of you. But you in particular Liesi, always you.
Hana
She folded the letter away and slipped it into the drawer of her desk. It was already over a month old and yet it had only just arrived. By now Hana’s affaire with the soldier had already advanced far beyond this vague hint. Or perhaps it had come to nothing. How was she to know? That was the irony of exile – the disparity of time. What was happening now still lay in the future. She looked out of the window, at the sunshine on the lake. It was difficult to imagine the house on Blackfield Road. Three years, almost. The detachment of exile, recorded scenes blurring at the edges so that they lost their context, memories becoming imagination. She remembered how Viktor showed her the trick of taking photographs with soft focus. ‘This is how they do it for the film stars,’ he had said – and put a faint smear of Vaseline on the lens. That was how fact became memory, by blurring the edges.
She took paper and pen to write a reply. Outside on the lawn the children were playing, Ottilie and Marika teasing Martin as they so often did. She would sometimes lose her patience and shout at them, and shout too at Katalin for not keeping them better behaved. After all, wasn’t it her job to look after the children? And then there would be tears – Katalin coming to protest, standing in her room and saying that she didn’t want to be here, that she had not chosen to be here, that Herr Viktor – always ‘Herr’ Viktor – had determined that she should be here with them, stuck in this place that was little more than a prison for her. Things like that. And then the making up. Kisses and hugs, and whispered apologies.
The tedium of exile is unbearable, she wrote.
We play cards, and chess, and there is a game that Ottilie has discovered called Lexicon, where you have letter cards and make words with them as in a crossword, so we play that. In English, because that is what the children must learn now, if we are to make a new life in America. And there is swimming and Martin has become quite a little sailor with Viktor. It must sound like a holiday, but really it is not. Oh, I long for Město and our friends and family. Viktor is often away, working on various projects but determined now that we leave this place for America. He says it will not be long.
One thing reminded me of you. Everything makes me think of you, but one event in particular brought you to mind. We went into town to the pictures. A great excitement, some new film from America. And then, after a few minutes of a rather dreary story that was meant to be set in the Kasbah (have I spelt that right?) of Algiers, in she walked. Eva Kiesler! Yes, that is true. She has changed her name but it is she plainly enough and looking as beautiful as ever she did. And I thought of my wicked Hana who behaved badly with her just to spite me. And I wish now that we could have that time all over again and I would never give you reason to go with anyone else. Oh Hanička, if you were only here I would run into your arms and never let you go. There I’ve said it.
She sat back and read the words through, and wondered whether to send the letter.
Concert
The theatre is full, a packed crowd milling around the foyer beneath crystal chandeliers. Despite the early hour many of the men are in tailcoats and white ties, the women in long dresses. Hana Hanáková finds him where he stands watching on the edge of the crowd, modest in his grey suit and stiff collar. She takes his arm to hurry him through the crush, nodding and smiling towards acquaintances, waving to friends, calling out something in Czech to someone who hails her. ‘Thank God I didn’t miss you,’ she says. ‘I don’t want to be seen talking to you in German. Just at the moment it is a most unfashionable language.’
They climb the stairs out of the crowd. The upper foyer is plush and red, like the inside of a blood vessel. An usher bows obsequiously and greets her by name. He leads them along a curving corridor past numbered doors, opening one to reveal dark shadows, six chairs upholstered in red velvet, and a balcony overlooking the auditorium. ‘Our box,’ Hana explains as she closes the door, then adds, in case the statement might have been ambiguous: ‘My husband’s and mine. Don’t worry, he’s away. We won’t be disturbed.’
Standing in the shadows Stahl looks down. Plaster caryatids frame the view of the stage where the orchestra is assembling in that casual manner that they have, musicians wandering in to take their places, fiddling with their instruments and their music stands, blowing or bowing a few notes, anticipating the arrival of the conductor who, like a schoolmaster entering a classroom, will bring them all to order.
She takes a cigarette case from her bag. ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’
He doesn’t, of course. Smoking is against the teachings of the Party, but he is a tolerant man. He takes one of the chairs and sits apart from her, perhaps to distance himself from her and her smoke, perhaps to see her better. She is wearing black, a calf-length cocktail dress hung about with jet beads. Her legs too are sheathed in black, as slick and lucid as oil. He watches her profile as she smokes and stares out across the auditorium. In the close space, despite the drift of smoke from her mouth, he can smell her scent.
What is she thinking?
And what would Hedda have thought?
Below them the orchestra has finally assembled and the audience has taken its seats. The instruments are warming up, a shrill, discordant cacophony that precedes order and certitude. Then the conductor emerges from the wings to take his place on the podium, and silence descends. The musicians seem suspended from his raised arms as though by puppet strings. He moves and they move, the liquid runs of the woodwind introducing the first piece on the programme, the swirling waters of Die Moldau, Vltava, the ripples and whirl pools of the young river that grows with the entry of the strings and finally becomes old and pompous as it passes Prague and loses its identity in the Elbe. Surely, Stahl thinks, there is a moral there for this absurd island population of Slavs adrift in the German sea: Germanisation is the only hope for them, the integration of those who are close enough to the German race and the corresponding removal of those who do not qualify.
When the piece comes to an end there is a storm of applause, as though the musicians have done something extraordinary, heroic, a feat of arms. People stamp their feet on the floor so that the whole auditorium resounds like a kettle drum. The clapping goes on and on, everyone washed along on a tide of emotion until finally, like flotsam, they are deposited on the dull tidal flats of catharsis.
Hana stubs her cigarette out in a shower of sparks. ‘How do you like our Czech protest?’
‘It seems harmless enough.’
‘Harmless! It’s pathetic. Our enemy marches in with soldiers and we protest by playing tunes.’
‘Do you think of me as an enemy?’
She doesn’t offer an answer. Below them there is a distraction. A man – Miroslav Němec, so Hana says – has walked out on stage. He stands beside the black coffin of the piano, illuminated by spotlights as though under some kind of interrogation. ‘Dámy a pánové!,’ he cries. Ladies and Gentlemen! There follows a rapid scurry of Czech plosives and fricatives in which Stahl grasps only a name: Pavel Haas.
‘What was that all about?’ he asks when the speech comes to an end.
‘He said that he was ashamed of his name.’
‘Why should that be so?’
‘It means “German”. He is Miroslav Ge
rman. And he said he was sorry that a friend of his could not be here in the audience today, the composer Pavel Haas. He said we should all be thinking of him.’
‘Why isn’t this Haas here?’
She sits back in her chair as Němec settles down to play. Silence has fallen once more. ‘He is a Jew,’ she says.
At the end of the concert they leave hurriedly, before the applause for the final piece has ended. The foyer is deserted. Out in the evening light they look around, blinking, at ranks of policemen ranged in the square. Parked up sidestreets are army lorries filled with troops. They cross the square to Stahl’s car. ‘Where do we go now?’ he asks.
They stand irresolutely on the pavement, each unsure of the other’s motives. Behind them the concert audience begins to stream out into the evening, stirred by thoughts of national redemption and collective shame. She lights a cigarette and draws heavily. ‘You tell me, Herr Hauptsturmführer. I just want to be normal for a while. Even if I am going with a German and getting paid for it, I want to be something other than a whore.’
‘You are not a whore.’
She glances back at the dispersing crowd and the ranks of policemen. ‘Oh yes I am. Everyone here is a whore in some way. The whole damned country is reduced to whoredom.’ She tosses the cigarette down and treads it out. ‘Let’s go to the house. The sun will soon be setting. Let me show you something.’ The Landauer House is quiet and still. Stahl takes out his keys, opens the front door and stands aside to let her go through. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ he says. ‘People will talk. The guards will make a report.’
‘What are you afraid of? A mere woman, and a Czech woman at that?’
‘I’m not afraid of anything.’
‘Oh yes, you are. Everyone is afraid of something.’
They descend into the Glass Room. The place is empty, like a stage after the actors have left, with all the lights off and the curtains drawn and the props standing there ready for the next performance. ‘Now watch,’ she says, and presses a button on the wall. With a faint purr of a hidden electric motor the curtains draw apart along the whole length of the windows. Desks, chairs, the various measuring devices are flooded by evening sunlight.
She points. ‘Look.’
Something remarkable is happening to the onyx wall: slanting through the great windows, the light from the setting sun is gathering in the depths of the stone, seething inside it like a fire, filling it with red and gold. This concurrence of sun and stone seems elemental, like an eclipse or the appearance of a comet, some kind of portent. Or hell. The fires of hell.
‘It wasn’t planned,’ she tells him. ‘No one had any idea about it until it happened for the first time. Like looking into a furnace.’ They stand watching for a while. The whole of the library area is suffused with red; even their faces are tainted with the colour. She walks over to the piano and raises the lid. ‘So what are you going to play for me? Didn’t you say you used to play?’
‘I’m very rusty.’
‘That doesn’t matter. Pretend that you are all alone. Isn’t that what you do, Doctor Mabuse? You come down here to play to yourself and pretend that none of this is happening.’
‘None of what is happening?’
‘The war, the occupation, the deportations. Pretend that we live in a time of peace. A time without fear.’
Reluctantly he sits at the piano and puts his hands together and flexes his fingers. Then he begins to play, quietly and hesitantly, a piece he used to play with Hedda. The notes punctuate the stillness of the place, intense, melodic phrases, meditative passages, solemn echoes – and as he plays, and as the fire in the onyx wall slowly dies, he hears the notes of the missing violin part, as a bereaved twin may sense the presence of his sibling.
‘You are very good,’ the woman says when he brings his playing to an end.
He shrugs. ‘I’m good enough to know that I’m no more than adequate.’
‘And your wife – how good a musician was she?’
‘Did you recognise the piece?’
‘It was part of the “Kreutzer Sonata,” wasn’t it? Did you use to play it with Hedda?’
‘Yes, I did.’
‘What happened to her? How did your lovely violinist die?’
Softly, as though lowering the lid of a coffin, he closes the keyboard. The Glass Room is still.
‘She killed herself.’
‘Why? Was it something to do with being cousins? Was that it?’
The light may have died in the onyx wall, but through the windows the sun is still hanging on the lip of the world, blood red and ominous. Hana Hanáková stands silhouetted against this light, an anonymous shape like the figure of a confessor behind the grille. If he tells her she will know everything. There is nothing more than this. There are no armies on the march, no guns firing, no bombs exploding, no people dying. There is only this, his own personal disaster.
‘I told you that there was no child, but that was not the truth. We had a daughter. We called her Erika. I don’t imagine you know babies very well …’
‘I knew Liesel Landauer’s babies. I watched them grow up and I love them still.’
‘So imagine a baby like they were. Beautiful, perfect, the loveliest baby you could imagine. Hedda seemed to have found something beyond mere music, a fulfilment she hadn’t ever thought possible. Our perfect baby, born out of a love that some said had crossed forbidden boundaries …’
‘And then?’
‘And then things began to go wrong – various things, small things at first. This piano – I press a combination of keys and it plays a chord. The correspondences are exact.’ He lifts the lid and does that very thing and the chord of C sharp minor, clear and harmonious, sounds through the proportions of the Glass Room. ‘Well, for six months Erika seemed like that: perfect. She grew and developed, smiled and laughed. Knew us, reached out for us as we stood over her cot. And then, like a piano going out of tune, she began to deteriorate. She used to smile at us; and then she couldn’t. She looked at us; and then she didn’t. She used to grasp toys, her rattles, things like that; and then she couldn’t do that either.’
Hana waits, standing there by the windows. There is this compulsion to tell her what he has never told anyone else. He doesn’t know why. He doesn’t understand how the armour of his defences has been breached by this woman whom he has paid for sex. It seems absurd. Yet she holds comfort in her arms and between her legs.
‘The condition is known as infantile amaurotic congenital idiocy. That’s the medical term. Amaurotic means blindness. That was just one of her symptoms.’
‘She went blind?’
‘There were the signs on her retina. Cherry spot, they call it. Gradually she lost control of her head – it just lolled about. She couldn’t hear, she couldn’t respond to anything. She had learned to grasp things and was just beginning to crawl and then all that stopped. She went from being a happy, smiling, funny child to being completely unresponsive. Then came the spasms and convulsions.’ He gestures, as though to conjure up the whole gamut of symptom and syndrome, the various tricks by which a single mutation can wreak havoc in a human body. ‘It was like winding the clock backwards, unlearning all that she had learned to do. We were told that she would eventually lose all bodily functions, and then finally she would die. The average life of such children is four or five years. There is no way out, no possibility of a cure. Not even a miracle.’
‘What causes it?’
He sits there in the Glass Room among the trappings of scientific measurement, in the pure proportions of the place, and talks of irrationality and senselessness. ‘It’s to do with a chemical, a particular kind of fat that the body makes when it shouldn’t. It accumulates in the brain and somehow turns the nerve cells off, that’s what the specialists say. It’s what they call an inborn error of metabolism. Inside me, inside every cell in my body, there is this genetic mutation. Recessive. You need one from each parent before you have the disease.’
; ‘So Hedda had it too.’
‘Of course she did. The same mutation, running in our family, but brought together by our union.’ He pauses. ‘It’s one of the Jew diseases.’
‘A Jew disease? Is there such a thing?’
‘Jews particularly suffer from it, along with many other diseases of that kind. Degeneracy, you see. They are a degenerate people.’
‘And does having it make you a Jew?’
‘It doesn’t make me a Jew, but some Jew introduced the disease into the family four generations ago. A great-great-grandfather. That is what I believe.’
She comes over from the windows and stands beside the piano. ‘And the baby? When was this? I mean, is the baby still—’
‘Do you know how such children die? Finally they lose the ability to swallow. You try to feed them but they just choke everything up. Either they starve to death or they die of pneumonia. There’s nothing anyone can do. Nothing.’
‘And that’s what happened?’
‘No, that’s not what happened.’ He hesitates, looking up at her. Her expression is full of compassion, compassion tinged with horror. He doesn’t mind the horror; it is the compassion that he resents, the pity that he loathes. He looks around the Glass Room, illuminated at that moment only by the backwash of light from the set sun, and he tells her about the Castle.
The Castle stood on high ground on the edge of a village, a quiet and peaceful village in Upper Austria. It was tall and hunched and secretive, with high walls and windows like small, surprised eyes. There were corner towers with pointed tops and a clock tower with an onion dome and a steeply pitched, grey-tiled roof. It was there that they took Erika.