by Simon Mawer
‘I thought everything would be … all right. Her papers, this journey, the whole thing.’
‘And us? Would we be all right?’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘You know what I mean.’
One of the children stirred. It was Ottilie, on the bunk above. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.
‘It’s late. We’ve got a long day tomorrow. Go back to sleep.’
‘What are you and Papi talking about? Is it Katalin? Is it that?’
‘Yes, it’s that. Now go back to sleep.’
The train trundled on through the Spanish night, and the sour internecine argument continued, a rapid flow of accusation and recrimination with dark currents underneath. ‘Why did you do this to me, Viktor? Do you hate me so much?’
‘I don’t hate you, Liesel. Don’t be silly.’
‘You must hate me to have done this to me.’
‘I loved her. It’s different. Love for one doesn’t mean hate for another.’
‘Did you ever love me?’
‘Of course.’
‘And now?’
The train rattled on, slipping easily through cuttings and across bridges, passing through darkened stations, sliding through the dark night and carrying with it its cargo of secrets and lies, and silences.
‘Would you weep for me?’ she asked.
3
Dissolution
The news comes through from the Reichsprotektor’s office: the Biometric Centre is to be closed down and all personnel are to be returned to their former occupations. It seems – a phone call to the head office in Berlin confirms this – that the Reichsprotektor does not consider the research work to be justified. If the centre can find no scientific means of distinguishing between Nordic, Slav and Semitic then the work must be flawed. That a difference exists is patent. Anyone of common sense can detect it. That is the trouble with scientists: they can’t quantify and measure common sense.
So the personnel pack their suitcases and draw rail passes for Berlin and Jena and Leipzig and get transport to the station. The measuring instruments and furniture are packed away, the files stacked in boxes for transfer to Berlin, the furniture sent to offices in Město, in Prague, and in Warsaw. Technicians come and unscrew the Hollerith machines from the floor of the garage and load them onto trucks for despatch to an undertaking that will make more fruitful use of them, the new camp complex being established in Silesia near the town of Oświęcim.
She dreams. Her dreams are subtle and elusive, of flesh and hair and glass and chrome, strange chimerical dreams that are peopled by buildings and built of people. When she awakes those images flee from her as rapidly as the shadows of night are extinguished by a hot, tropic day. Outside her room the cicadas begin early in the morning in short rhythmic pulses, like an engine starting. By midday the sound is constant, a steady mechanical scream in the vegetation along the dried-up stream bed beside the garden.
Darling Hana, she writes. The heat here is of a different order of things from that which we know at home. Dead heat, like someone trying to suffocate you …
But the letters go nowhere. They accumulate in a drawer in her desk. The continent of Europe is sealed off by war, isolated from the outside world, a place of plague. ‘What do you think happened?’ she asks Viktor. But he can only shrug in reply.
She dreams. She dreams of cold. She dreams of glass and light, the Glass Room washed with reflection, and the cool view across the city of rooftops, the cold view through the trees, the crack of snow beneath your boots. She dreams of a place that is without form or substance, that exists only in the manner of dreams, shifting and insubstantial, diffuse, diverse:
space
glass, walls of glass
a quintet of chairs, placed with geometrical precision
a sweep of shining floor – ivory linoleum
white and black
the gleam of chrome
These things move, evolve, transform in the way they do in dreams, changing shape and form and yet, to the dreamer, remaining what they always were: der Glasraum, der Glastraum, the single letter-change metamorphosing from one into the other: the Glass Room become the Glass Dream.
My dear Liesel, her mother writes. Somehow – the stamp and postmarks give it away – it has been taken to Switzerland and posted there. I can only pray that this reaches you. I can’t even say who has taken it for me, in case it goes astray. So, your father and I have moved to Vienna, to be among our people …
‘Our people!’ Liesel exclaims. ‘What does she mean by that?’
Your uncle and aunt, who have stayed behind, send their love, as do the cousins. Except Ferdinand who cannot because he has gone away to war and we have heard little of what has happened to him …
‘To war? Ferdinand? For whom does he fight? Which side is he on, for God’s sake? Which side?’
I have some news of the Hanáková woman and her husband. It seems – the story has done the rounds and I heard it fourth- or fifth-hand – that they have both been arrested. He was a Žid, of course. They say that he has been sent to Theresienstadt where they are gathering the Jews. Of his wife there are only rumours. Some that she has been sent to Germany, others that she went to Austria, to some kind of work camp. More than that I cannot say. I am sorry not to be more precise but these are difficult days. Of the house, I can say that it was used as some scientific laboratory – can you believe it? – but now it lies empty, looked after by Laník and his sister but in the possession of the authorities. Before we left we tried to get access to the building but were not allowed, although your father spoke with Laník who tells him that everything is all right.
I do hope and pray that all is well with you and Viktor and the children …
Viktor spends much time away from the villa, in the city. He visits offices and consulates, he sits at desks demanding that people write letters, send telegrams. They are looking for a Katalin Kalman and her daughter, last seen in Bayonne in the German-occupied coastal zone of France. They may be in Spain, they may still be in France, they may be somewhere, anywhere. He doesn’t know where. But he wants to find them. And cannot. When he returns in the evening he has the hopeless look of the refugee about him. Liesel comforts the children with lies.
She dreams. In the hot night, alone in her bed beneath the heavy hand of a mosquito net, she dreams. She dreams of Katalin and she dreams of Hana. And when the heat wakes her in the morning, the joy and the ecstasy of the night vanish as quickly as the bats that spend the night circling the house in search of prey. In the day there are only flies and lizards and this box of a room with the white walls and a French window onto the veranda and cane chairs and a brightly coloured bedspread in some kind of Aztec design. Geckos cling to the ceiling as avariciously as she clings to her memories. But memories are not constant, being, like dreams, evanescent things that shift and change, metamorphose and vanish. Flies circle the light fitting in the centre of the room – a hideous thing that the owner claims is Murano glass – while the wind rattles the palm trees outside. Fans whirr behind their metal cages like something aeronautical, like the engines of the flying boat that will take them – Viktor assures her – away. And above all this and below all this is the one constant: the sound of the ocean. How strange that the ocean, that played no part in her life before, that was something imagined, foreign, alien, should have come to dominate it now.
Viktor teaches Martin to play chess. Ottilie, golden-limbed from the sun, finds animals in the garden, in the carefree manner of young children forgetting all about her friend Marika. Liesel reads. Somewhere in the villa she has discovered a cache of paperback thrillers in English – Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler – and she works her way through them with the aid of a dictionary. ‘You’ll end up speaking like a gangster,’ Viktor warns her. He comes to her room and asks if he can spend the night with her. She lets him, but they have forgotten the moves, the things that they do and the things that they don’t do. She knows that he
is thinking of Katalin.
Storms flicker on the horizon or slam into the coast to deliver rain in torrents. Everywhere grows dank with water. In the worst downpour the roof gives up and a wet patch appears in one corner of her room so that a bucket has to be placed beneath it to catch the drips. The sonorous rhythmic sound of falling water underpins the night. Then the sun and the heat, the shriek of insects in the vegetation and the sound of music blaring from some radio in a room nearby, the strange syncopations of the Latin world, maracas rattling, guitars strumming, and voices wailing about love and loss.
The Landauer House lies empty. It is impractical for housing, although under wartime conditions housing is at a premium, and there is a move to have it demolished. Reprieve comes in the shape of draughtsmen from Messerschmitt AG. Messer schmitt have moved some of their facilities to the local airfield in order to put them as far away as possible from Allied bombing. They test new types there, in particular a fighter with a new kind of propulsion system, a shark of a machine that breathes itself along instead of thrashing at the air with propellers. Turbo, they call it. All summer the strange, elemental sound of this aircraft is heard in the skies above the city, rumbling like distant thunder, or coming nearer with a noise that seems to rupture the very air that sustains it. While draughtsmen pore over their drawing boards, fiddling with details of the aircraft’s undercarriage and engine cowlings, the windows of the Glass Room shudder with the aircraft’s passage overhead.
Then that project is over and those temporary interlopers collect up their equipment and load it into a truck and the house lies empty once more.
They pose for a photograph on the veranda in front of the French windows and the purple bougainvillea: two cane chairs for Viktor and Liesel, with Martin sitting cross-legged on the ground between his parents and Ottilie on the right beside Liesel. The camera, a Leica equipped with a clockwork timer, is mounted on a tripod in front of them. The timing mechanism gives the camera a personality all of its own: it buzzes for their attention.
‘Smile,’ Viktor tells them, and they smile self-consciously while Ottilie says, ‘You can’t smile on demand,’ and the camera snaps at them in the manner of an ill-tempered instructor saying ‘I told you so.’
Viktor gets up to reset the machine. ‘One more. And this time we must try to keep still and look natural.’
‘Looking natural’s not natural,’ Ottilie insists. Martin laughs. The camera begins to buzz and Viktor settles back in his chair. ‘Now,’ he says.
What the camera sees, what it preserves for posterity, is Viktor in a lightweight suit and a panama hat against the sun and Liesel wearing a floral frock and a straw hat that fails to shade her eyes. She has espadrilles on her feet. She looks rather thoughtful, as though she is considering her position here. The children wear broad-brimmed straw hats, Mexican style. Ottilie watches the camera and tries not to giggle, but Martin is looking to one side, following the sudden dart of a lizard across the floor of the veranda.
‘There we are,’ Viktor says when the ordeal is over and he is unscrewing the camera from the tripod, ‘the last souvenir of our tropical paradise.’
Outside the villa the car is waiting to take them to the port, to the flying boat that will carry them to the promised land, to the future.
A house without people has no dimensions. It just is. An enclosed space, a box. Wind rattles round the shutters of the building. Rain falls on the terrace and batters against the walls. Snow falls and stays and melts. Water, the death of all structures, the destroyer of mountains, the solvent of the caverns and caves of the Moravský Kras to the north of the city, insinuates itself into the walls. It freezes and expands, melts and contracts, levering apart the material. Paint and concrete flake away. Tiles loosen. Steel is brushed with autumnal rust. Dust settles in the cold spaces and draughts whisper round the wainscot like the hints of what has happened there and, perhaps, may happen again. People walking along Blackfield Road glance indifferently at the long, low form of the building. Some of them wonder what has happened to the owners. Switzerland, people say; others say, Britain; some, the United States. But they don’t really care because there is little opportunity to care about anything these days other than the basic worries of survival. Where is the next meal coming from? How will this coat survive another winter? How can these shoes, already wooden-soled, already sewn and patched, survive another walk? When will the war come to an end?
The great plate-glass windows of the Glass Room shake and shudder in the gales. During one storm, suddenly and with a sharp crack that no one hears, the pane at the furthest end near the conservatory is fractured right across, creating a diagonal line of reflection like a cataract in a cornea.
Laník
Laník and his sister occupy part of the house like epiphytes living on a tree, not integral to the place but depending on it for shelter. Sometimes they wander round the main room, the Glass Room, just to check. Occasionally they go through the upper floor and see that shutters are closed and doors are fast. But they live in their own world on the edge of the building, in the two rooms at the back of the garage and in the kitchens where the sister cooks and they eat together, and in the basement. The basement is a warren, a subterranean complex, like something you might discover in the Punkva Caves north of the city. It is the antithesis of the Glass Room. There all is space and light, but in the basement the ceilings are low and the doors narrow. There are dozens of rooms, one leading off from the other, going back underneath the front terrace almost as far as the street: laundry rooms, storage rooms, the boiler room with the boiler that drives the heating system of the house and the compressor that runs the air cooling. The place hums and grunts in the darkness like the engine room of a ship. As you move around you have to duck your head beneath conduits carrying electricity cables and pipes carrying water. There are water tanks and fuel tanks, and, against the front wall, the electric motors that raise and lower the windows of the Glass Room directly above, and the twin bays into which the glass panes descend. In this underground maze Laník has his stores. ‘We’ve got to think of the future,’ he tells his sister. ‘We’ve got to think what we can do when it’s all over.’
‘What do you mean by that? It’ll be just like it was, won’t it? They’ll come back and we’ll be here and it’ll all be like it was.’
‘Don’t be a daft cow. I’ve told you, they’re never coming back. For the moment this place is ours and we’ve got to make the most of it. Nothing is ever going to be the same again.’
His sister is heavy and dull, a peasant woman transposed to the city with all her peasant certainties. It was those peasant certainties that, despite the insistence of uncles and aunts, led her to bring up her younger brother when their parents died within two years of each other. ‘I’ll manage him,’ she told them, and that is what she did. She still feels that maternal devotion, but now it is mixed with something else: pride. He’s a clever one, is her brother. He’ll go places. ‘So what do you propose to do?’
He taps the side of his nose. ‘Propose to do? I’m already doing it, aren’t I? Building up a little nest egg, that’s what. Laying in stock for the future. Accumulating a bit of capital.’
‘What do you mean by capital?’
‘I mean stuff, that’s what I mean. Stuff.’
Stuff, věci, conjures up everything that one might want. Food, blankets, paraffin, cigarettes, brandy, beer, chocolate, all the things that matter in life and that have become unobtainable. Stuff is riches. You hoard during a time of plenty and you sell during a time of dearth. That’s the way.
The war seems to stretch backwards into memory and forwards into the unknown future. Maybe it will go on for ever. The inhabitants of Město scratch an existence as best they can, living off potatoes and turnips and beets, things grubbed out of the earth and tasting of the earth. They have been thrown back to the ways and means of their stone-age ancestors, hunched forms that scavenge for food, a whole city of hunter-gatherers. German troops appear
and disappear, moving eastwards, always moving east. What comes back are the defeated and the damaged, human wreckage being cleared out to make space.
At U Dobrého Vojáka, The Good Soldier, the pub at the bottom of the hill past the children’s hospital, Laník hears the news: the Red Army is coming. There’s a small group of men – mainly workers at the armament factory down by the river – who gather there when they come off the morning shift. News and rumour battle for attention. The Red Army is coming. But when? How far away are they? Geographical terms mean little: Carpathia, Ukraine, Belorussia, the Don, the Caucasus, Moldava. How vast the distances and the areas, how huge the numbers – of tanks, of aircraft, of soldiers and civilians, of the dead and the dying. The Russians are coming, the apocalypse is coming, but when? The men congregate round Novotný, who treats every advance of the Soviet army as a personal triumph. He talks of Operation Bagration and can even show a map of the Soviet front line swelling out towards them like a bladder filled with red paint that threatens to burst across the whole of central Europe. The Great Patriotic War he calls it.
Back at the house, Laník muses on this conversation. He may look forward to the coming of the Soviets but he harbours no illusions about them. The onyx wall clearly has value and he doesn’t want it stolen. So, finally, he carries out Viktor Landauer’s parting instructions, to cover the wall up behind a partition of wood and plaster. Quite what he might do with the wall once the war is over isn’t certain. Ashtrays, maybe. Hundreds, maybe thousands of ashtrays.
November. A cold November morning with snow smeared into the corners of the streets and a heavy fog hanging over the buildings, turning the alleys back a century, making every pedestrian a ghost, every vehicle a monster, every building a castle keep. It deadens sound and restricts movement. It carries the cold inside the clothing of every inhabitant, in through the doorways and windows, into the houses with their meagre fires and their spare rations.