The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  ‘We are working on both problems, Herr Obergruppenführer.’

  ‘Then I suggest you hurry up. The work is vital.’

  Elfriede moves to the final measurements, the crucial ones of the cranium. As she adjusts the callipers, Heydrich grabs hold of her wrist with all the speed and precision of a fencer. The woman stands quite still, like a white rabbit caught in a snare. ‘When you have finished I will take my file with me,’ he tells her. ‘As a souvenir.’

  ‘Of course, Herr Obergruppenführer.’

  ‘And you will keep no record of my measurements.’

  ‘Of course not, Herr Obergruppenführer.’

  Wide-eyed with fear she completes her task. The Reichsprotektor stands up, smoothing down his jacket and adjusting his tie. ‘Fascinating,’ he says to Stahl. ‘But it is a shame that you have not found a Jew character that is beyond argument. You should work on it. It seems to me a matter of priority. And the same with the Slavs. Some of the Slavs are no less degenerate than Jews.’

  ‘Of course, Herr Obergruppenführer.’

  And so the visit continues, brisk and businesslike, people scut-tering around, Heydrich looking this way and that, probing, smiling, frowning. His smile is worse than his frown. It is the smile on the face of a corpse.

  The staff members are going round putting things in order. ‘How did it go?’ they ask one another anxiously as they work. Stahl stands by the windows looking out on the afternoon view, the sun descending towards the horizon, preparing to pierce the onyx wall with that lance of fire. They’ll all be gone when it happens. Only he will witness the marvel.

  He thinks of things that happen in the Glass Room: the precisions of science, the wild variance of lust, the catharsis of confession and the fear of failure.

  ‘Did I do everything right?’ Elfriede asks. Her smooth brow is creased with anxiety.

  ‘Of course you did.’

  ‘And did he like our work?’

  ‘Who can tell?’ She reminds him of Hedda, that is the problem. Hana Hanáková is so different as to seem an altogether separate species, but Elfriede Lange is from similar stock as Hedda. ‘Tell the others they can go. I will close up.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ She has that look of concern, as though she is responsible for his well-being. The same expression that Hedda wore.

  ‘Of course I’m sure. It’s an order. Do as I tell you.’

  And when they have all gone he stands in front of the windows and looks out on the city and wonders about Hana Hanáková. Looking out of the windows his gaze encompasses the whole city. She is somewhere there, waiting. He thinks about her, what she knows and what she thinks. She seems a danger to him, a threat to his very existence. He wants the oblivion that she offers, but at the same time he would be happy never to see her again. Perhaps this is like addiction to a drug. He has known people like this with morphine, craving it and loathing it at one and the same time.

  This is not love, it is the very antithesis of love: it is hatred made manifest.

  Léman

  Dearest Hana, Liesel wrote, I received your number eighteen just before we left the house in Zurich. So there’s only number fifteen that seems to have gone missing. Who can wonder these days? Please note the new address, for the moment at least. Where we will be a week from now, I cannot imagine. I have given them instructions to forward anything that comes in the meantime but I will let you know as soon as I am able.

  So after the stasis of Zurich they were finally on the move westward, the children fretful at leaving new friends behind, the adults hopeful. This time there was to be no permanence: a hotel not a house, a grand hotel in the Biedermeier style, Le Grand Hôtel Vevey, with striped awnings that flapped in the breeze and an expansive terrace where Swiss families congregated for lunch and congratulated themselves on being neither German nor French, neither conquerors nor conquered. Again Liesel had a lake view from her window, but it was a different lake now, a bigger, darker lake with another country on the far side. The mountains of the French shore were black with forest; above them you could see the snow on the high peaks hanging over the haze like clouds. The shore might be only a few miles as the crow flies, but of course they wouldn’t be going by boat when the time came. It would be a train, from Geneva all the way across France to Bilbao. That was where the transatlantic liners left from. Further and further away from what she knew.

  There are always delays with the bureaucrats and it’s uncertain exactly when we will travel. We go by train, via Lyon, in five days’ time. I can actually see France from my room. The place feels so French after Zurich – you know, old men wearing berets and drinking red wine at breakfast and that kind of thing! Viktor says it is better to be here. He wants, he says, to shake off the past, all that Germanic nonsense.

  So our strange life together continues, a kind of dance in which the steps are instinctive more than learned – one of those Moravian folk dances we used to laugh at! In some way Kata and I can share things that we cannot even talk about. Should I feel anger towards her? Well I don’t. Affection, in fact. Perhaps we are both victims of a kind. The children are flourishing, of course, although they miss their friends. Poor Martin is bossed around by the girls. Anyway, they send their Auntie Hana big kisses and Ottilie tells you to be good. She doesn’t quite know what she means by that, but I do! I laughed when I pictured you entrapping your brave scientist, and then felt shocked, and then jealous. How is O? You mentioned him only in passing – I hope he is well.

  Your loving,

  Liesel

  She folded the letter in the envelope and sealed it, then took it downstairs to the concierge’s desk. Just as she was walking away towards the terrace and the sunshine a voice called her back. ‘Madame Landauer!’

  It was the concierge himself, resplendent in uniform – a Ruritanian lance-corporal Viktor had described him – coming round the desk, bearing a letter on a silver salver. ‘This has just been delivered, Madame.’

  It was stamped and taped and bore the familiar word Geöffnet across the flap, and the well-known handwriting on the front. ‘It’s from the person to whom I have just written,’ she said. ‘Perhaps I can have the letter back so that I can reply?’

  But there was no possibility of such an irregular action. The post box was the property of the Swiss post, to be opened only by an approved operative. And letters therein were property of the addressee not the sender. He seemed upset that she should not know such things. ‘Such is the law of the land, Madame.’

  ‘Of course.’ She took the letter with her onto the terrace. It was a bright, breezy morning. Ottilie sat with her sketch book. The wind lifted the corner of the page she was drawing on and she spoke to it harshly, as though it was a deliberately recalcitrant child. Martin was immersed in a book and Katalin was sewing, embroidering initials onto the corner of a linen handkerchief. MK. Her daughter sat and watched the creation of this small tribute to herself.

  Liesel took the chair that had been left for her. ‘A letter from Auntie Hana,’ she told them as she sat.

  ‘Read it to us,’ Ottilie said. ‘Read it to us please. I miss Auntie Hana so much.’

  She tore the envelope open, took out the letter and unfolded it. ‘“Darling Liesel”,’ she read out loud. And stopped. I really don’t know how to tell you this, but I’ll try …

  Storm

  He is called to the gate. There’s a woman asking for him, insisting on seeing him, won’t take no for an answer. Apparently she knows him, which is why they didn’t just send her packing.

  It is her, of course. She is wearing an old grey coat and plain walking shoes that make her look like a refugee, standing in the driving rain and looking like one of the thousands of displaced people who throng the city. Perhaps that is intentional, some kind of disguise. He hurries her across the forecourt, hunched against the wind, away from the curious gaze of the soldiers. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

  ‘I want to talk.’

  ‘Not here, for God’s sa
ke.’

  ‘Where then? How else do I see you when I want?’

  He hasn’t seen her for over a week. She hasn’t been in the café where they first met, she hasn’t been answering the phone number that she gave him, she hasn’t been at the Grand Hotel when he went there for a drink. And now here she is, coming suddenly and unexpectedly out of the storm. He shows her into the building and down the stairs into the Biometric Centre. Mercifully, the place is deserted. She kicks off her shoes and crosses the room to the windows. There’s something unsteady about the way she moves, as though a piece of the machinery inside had broken. Beyond the glass it is a ragged autumnal evening, the clouds battering fast across the sky over the castle, gusts of rain thrown like pebbles against the windows, the occasional shaft of sunlight breaking out of the cloud. ‘Where the hell have you been?’ he demands. ‘I’ve been trying to get in touch with you but you weren’t answering the phone at the number you gave me.’

  ‘I’ve been busy.’

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘That’s my business.’

  ‘And now? Am I your business again? I told you we shouldn’t meet here. Once is enough. People will see you. Questions will be asked. I cannot allow my work to be compromised by your presence here. You must never do this again. If you do—’

  ‘What will you do, Herr Hauptsturmführer?’

  ‘I’ll have the guards arrest you.’

  She laughs. Perhaps she’s drunk. She seems wayward and dangerous, liable to do anything. Outside, the wind hammers at the windows. ‘How was your visitor?’ she asks.

  ‘My visitor?’

  ‘Our Lord and Protector. How did you find him? Is he the monster that they say he is?’

  ‘Who says that?’

  ‘Everyone says it. Even the newspapers imply as much. Arrests, disappearances, deportations. Thousands of Jews have been rounded up in Prague and sent to Poland. Five thousand, they say. You must know something about it. There’s a rumour—’

  ‘There are always rumours.’

  ‘They say the fortress at Terezín is being turned into a ghetto. The Jews are to be concentrated there, that’s the story.’

  He shrugs. ‘Perhaps they are. Who knows? It would be a practical solution.’

  She walks round the room, touching things as though to assure herself of their reality – the examination couches, the measuring callipers, the desks and chair – and speaking thoughtfully, as though trying to work things out for herself. Is she perhaps a Jew? The thought brings a shiver of revulsion to him, that what he has done with her might have been with a Jew. But the measurements deny it. She’s a Slav, a typical, emotional, unstable Slav lurching from one thing to another, her mind as varied as the storm outside.

  ‘They’ve been forbidden everything, haven’t they?’ she says. ‘The Jews, I mean. They can’t use shops during normal hours. They can’t travel on the trams. They can’t go into a café or a hotel, they can’t even enter a public park. They can’t own a pet or a telephone. They can’t hold down a decent job. They have to wear a label as though they have the plague or something. And now they are being rounded up and deported. Surely you know something about it. Surely all this’ – she gestures at the whole room, the apparatus, the devices – ‘means that you know what is going on.’

  He picks up some files, taps them into order and puts them in one of the drawers. He feels anger towards her, anger for her insistent interrogation, for her knowledge of him, for having allowed her to look into the depths of his past. He slams the filing cabinet closed and turns. ‘It’s a plague in our midst affecting everyone. For God’s sake, it has affected my own family. You know that. And now every mile we advance into Russia more and more of these people come under our control. We cannot just stand back and do nothing. We have to find a solution.’

  ‘And the solution is to persecute them?’

  ‘To isolate them, yes. Why are you so concerned?’

  She looks him straight in the eye. ‘Because my husband is a Jew.’

  He looks around the room, the Glass Room, at the beauty and the balance of it, at the rationality. Then back at her. She’s laughing at him. It’s the laughter that’s disturbing. Like the laughter of an idiot.

  ‘Does it disgust you, the thought of sharing me with a Jew? The idea that there’s been a Jew prick inside the cunt you like to suck so much?’

  ‘You’d better go,’ he says. ‘You’d better leave at once.’ But she’s staring at him, her face taut as though braced against the gale that is blowing. ‘There’s something else,’ she says. ‘To do with your damned miscegenation. Something else that you should know about.’

  ‘What? What else is there?’ She’s mad or drunk, or perhaps she’s under the influence of some other drug. He has heard about it, women of her kind taking things. Morphine, playing with morphine, the morphine that is needed in the front line to deal with genuine pain, being used by them to treat their own imagined pain. How he can get rid of her, get her out of this place to somewhere where it doesn’t matter, the hotel where they have always met, that anonymous room with the subdued lighting and the trams clanging outside the windows, not this place of cool and objective measurement? Should he call the guard? But that would only lead to complications, problems, questions. ‘Look, just wait for me to clear these things away and we can go. I won’t be more than a few minutes.’

  But she stands there before him without moving. ‘I’m pregnant,’ she says.

  Behind her, beyond the windows, the trees are throwing caution to the wind. The panes shudder. The whole room seems to be a soundbox for the gale, a chamber that resonates with outside forces. Where has the wind come from? All the way from the Atlantic ocean, right across France and Switzerland and the Alps, ignoring borders and territories, wars and occupations, ignoring everything to do with humans.

  ‘You are what?’

  She nods. ‘You heard what I said. I’ve had the test done. The rabbit test. I got the result yesterday, and it’s positive. I’m pregnant.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’

  ‘Because the child is yours.’

  ‘Mine? What about your Jew husband? Why should it be mine?’

  ‘It’s not his, believe me. I told you, he’s much older than me. We have a different relationship.’

  ‘And the other men you’ve been with?’

  ‘There are no other men, dear Hauptsturmführer. There is only you and it’s your child.’

  ‘And you want me to give you money to get rid of it? Is that the idea?’

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t have much compunction about that, should you? Killing babies is in your nature.’

  That is when he hits her. The blow, a heavy slap across the side of her face, is sudden and shocking, surprising him as much as her. She gives a gasp of outrage and pain and backs away from him, but he reaches out and grabs her by the wrist, pulling her towards him. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Let me go!’ she cries, struggling in his grip.

  ‘What do you mean, killing babies is in my nature?’

  ‘Werner, let me go!’ She calls him by his first name. Always it has been Stahl or his rank, or something mocking like Doctor Mabuse; but now it’s Werner. ‘Werner, you’re hurting! Werner!’

  But he holds her tight, drawing her closer, wondering if he can smell alcohol on her breath, wondering if she is lying or if all this is true. She turns her head away. There’s a weal across her cheek and a swelling in her upper lip and a trace of blood from where one of her teeth has cut the inside of her mouth. ‘You’re drunk. I can smell it on your breath. You’re drunk and you’re lying.’

  ‘That’s not true. I swear. The child is yours.’ She tries to drag her arm down but he doesn’t let go so she drops to the floor like a child trying to pull away. She’s sitting on the floor at his feet, her legs splayed. He can see the tops of her stockings and the whiteness of her thighs, that marbled flesh whose texture and scent he knows.

  ‘You’re trying t
o blackmail me.’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘Yes you are. You’re trying to blackmail me with your half-breed child.’

  ‘I’m not, I swear I’m not. I wanted to discuss it with you. I wanted to see what we could do about it. Now let me go.’ She puts her hand to her mouth and brings it away with a smear of blood and saliva. ‘You’ve hurt me.’

  ‘It’s nothing.’ He releases her wrist but still stands over her, wondering about the foetus that may or may not be swimming in the salty amniotic ocean of her uterus. The thought excites him, that is what is so strange. That he has impregnated her. His tainted seed, those millions of swimming cells, half of them carrying the gene that killed Erika, meeting this woman’s own Slavic egg. Maybe his seed is only good for someone like her, an Untermensch. A slut.

  He reaches down to pull her to her feet but she backs away like a hit bitch, cowering in front of him. He follows her as she moves across the floor towards the windows. Something is rising inside him like gorge, a compulsion born of disgust and delight. She’s powerless there on the floor, trapped against the glass. No longer is she the sharp and sarcastic woman who knows how to sell herself and, worse, knows what he wants. Suddenly she’s a victim, unsteady and unclean. He reaches down and grabs her knees. She thrashes her legs, trying to twist out of his grip but he holds on, laughing at the sight of her caught like a mammal in a gin trap.

  ‘Let me go,’ she cries. The demand carries no weight. He twists her legs and turns her over, surprised at how light she is, how easily he can move her this way and that. Her face is pressed against the window and her hands are spread out on the glass and he takes her by the scruff of the neck to hold her steady. With his other hand he lifts her skirt and pulls her knickers down, and suddenly she is naked, humbled, the pale globes of her buttocks there in front of him.

  ‘Werner,’ she cries, ‘what are you going to do?’

  It’s an interesting question. What is he going to do? What does this creature, to whom he has opened up the secrets of his own life, merit? What does this Mensch, who claims to be carrying his own child, deserve? He kneels down and unbuttons his trousers, then spreads her buttocks apart so that she is open to his gaze, the dark valley, the tight mouth of her anus, the dark fold of her shame. What does she deserve?