The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

  ‘That’s right. Slíva! Dobrá slivovice. Slíva!’

  Recognisable through the fog of incomprehension are shared words. ‘Dóbrá,’ she cries, good, and advances on Laník to throw her arms around him and deliver a kiss on each cheek, and then a third as though to confirm the reality of the two. She smells strongly of horses and sweat and ordure. It is not an entirely unpleasant smell. It reminds Laník of his country childhood. Her skin is strangely smooth, like old silk. ‘Tovarish!’ she cries, ‘Tovarish!’ And then, disturbingly, she kisses him full on the mouth.

  The Russians move in. They are battle-weary and battle-scarred, a dozen young men and three women, all with the look of Asia about their features. Where have they come from, how many thousands of miles have they crossed to reach here, this place at the epicentre of Europe? They mount a guard on the horses and hump their equipment down into the Glass Room. There are two machine guns, a mortar, three or four grenade launchers and several rifles. These they strip down and clean. Oil smears the linoleum flooring. Laník’s sister – she has plucked up sufficient courage to come up from the basement – remonstrates with them and they roar with laughter at her protests.

  ‘Your wife?’ their commander asks Laník.

  ‘My sister.’ There’s no misunderstanding there. The words are the same in both languages: zhena, wife; sistra, sister. The officer nods thoughtfully. What is she thinking? She is square and tough, her face lined and her skin burnished by months in the sun and the wind. You can imagine her standing outside a yurt on a desolate Mongolian plain, or riding a horse bare-back into battle. It’s difficult to guess her age. Is she in her forties? Is she that old? ‘Starshyna,’ she says when Laník points to her rank badges. It’s another word he understands. Staršina, sergeant-major. She gives off the smell of stables and ordure, the smell of thousands of miles living with the animals, living in barns, living in trenches, living like a gypsy. ‘Rostov, Odessa, Jassy, Kishinev, Bucharest,’ she tells Laník. ‘Budapest, Bratislava. On, on, on.’ She waves her hand at the memory of all those different places. ‘Always men and women die but always more come. Patriotic duty,’ she says. Laník agrees. He has no choice, really, for she is holding his hand and staring into his eyes and nodding as though she has already made up her mind about patriotic duty.

  ‘She fancies you,’ his sister tells him when he gets away for a moment. ‘I’d watch it.’

  ‘We’ve got to get them out of here,’ he says.

  ‘I don’t see how.’

  ‘At least keep them out of the basement. If they see what we’ve got down there they’ll have it all. What are you going to give them for supper?’

  ‘Dumplings, stew, what do you think?’

  ‘Don’t put too much meat with it. It’ll make them suspicious.’

  ‘We haven’t got too much meat.’

  ‘Keep the slivovice coming anyway. It’ll take their minds off anything else.’

  In the Glass Room the Russians have finished their work and are sitting about smoking and laughing. The two young women are lumping Ludmilas with faces like potatoes and hands like hams. And then there’s the sergeant-major with her ripe apple of a face and her leering eyes. She has been in the bathroom upstairs and had some kind of wash. Her hair – as black as axle grease – has been combed. There is even a hint of something red smeared across her lips. When the food is ready she indicates that Laník should sit down beside her. The great circular dining table is lit with candles. It is a feast of the absurd, Laník and his merry men reflected in the blackness of the one remaining window of the Glass Room. There are toasts as they eat, to Comrade Stalin, to the commander-in-chief Comrade Malinovsky, to Comrade Churchill and to the brand new Comrade Truman, to the recently deceased Comrade Roosevelt. After the meal they clear their equipment to the side of the Glass Room while one of the soldiers gets out an accordion and begins to play. Some of them stand up to dance but if the expectation was that they would execute some wild Cossack dance with stamping and leaping the reality is quite different: ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby’, the accordionist plays and two couples, two men and the two girls, the two clumsy Ludmilas, begin to shuffle round the Glass Room for all the world like couples in a bar in London or Paris. When the couples swap over, so that the men are each dancing with one of the girls, there are hoots of lascivious laughter and glances in the direction of their sergeant. ‘Dance,’ they shout, ‘dance!’ and the word is the same in both languages so that Laník knows his fate even before she shrugs and pulls him to his feet to more laughter.

  ‘Yevgeniya,’ her voice says loudly in his ear as she grabs him round the waist. They shuffle across the floor to a storm of applause. ‘You call me Yevgeniya.’

  ‘Yevgeniya,’ he repeats dutifully.

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Laník.’

  She practises the name, her breath hot and alcoholic against his cheek. ‘Lyanik,’ she says, ‘Lyanik.’ The dancing goes on and the slivovice goes down, and as the music relaxes so does Sergeant-Major Yevgeniya’s grip on Laník get tighter.

  ‘You are rich man, Lyanik?’ she whispers. ‘This big house yours? You are kulak?’

  ‘No, I’m poor,’ he insists. ‘The caretaker, that’s all. Proletář.’

  ‘Ah! Proletarij.’ She hugs him tighter. ‘Proletarij is good. You are child of revolution.’ After a while she releases him for a moment and claps her hands. ‘It’s late,’ she calls, like a mother with her children. ‘There’s work to do tomorrow.’ Laník tries to move away but she is too quick for him. Her hand darts out and grabs his wrist. The men are laying straw pallets out on the floor of the Glass Room and Sergeant-Major Yevgeniya has become incongruously girlish, pulling Laník nearer and smiling coyly. His heart sinks. ‘You come?’ she asks.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘With me? You show us the rooms.’

  Some of the men are watching, grinning. The two Ludmilas wait with their kitbags over their shoulders and their faces without expression. Reluctantly Laník leads them up the stairs to the top floor where all is quiet and placid, where the candle that Yevgeniya carries throws unsteady shadows across the wall, where the ghosts of the Landauer family walk. ‘Here,’ he says, throwing open the door to one of the rooms. ‘You can sleep here.’

  The two Ludmilas hump their kitbags in and close the door. Laník is standing there in the corridor, alone with Sergeant-Major Yevgeniya. ‘In here,’ he suggests, pushing open a second door. It is Frau Landauer’s room, was Frau Landauer’s room, a space where there once was her dressing table and wardrobe, her clothes, her make-up and jewellery, the very stuff of her life; where now there is only the bare walls and a bedframe without a mattress.

  Yevgeniya pushes him in and closes the door. She looks him up and down, her small eyes shining from deep within their folds of flesh. ‘Lyanik,’ she says, ‘I kill many men, but I won’t kill you.’

  He laughs. It isn’t so funny but he laughs all the same. Downstairs in the Glass Room the Russian soldiers settle down for the night. Further down, in the basement, Laník’s sister locks her door and climbs into her bed. On the top floor, in Liesel Landauer’s old room, Laník is enveloped in the smell of horses and the scent of ordure, gripped by armpits and groin, enveloped by lips and legs. He feels that he might suffocate, that he might explode, that he will die. For the moment it is apparent that the war is finally over, but it is not certain what has taken its place.

  4

  Tomáš

  Tomáš stands at the windows, smoking and looking at the view. Behind him the children go through their exercises. A dozen mats are laid out for this purpose along the floor in front of the onyx wall and Zdenka is putting the children through their paces, although ‘paces’ is rather strong a term for what they do – leg-lifting, leg-bending and stretching, turning this way and that with all the difficulty and awkwardness of geriatrics. When the session is over the children’s parents will come and collect them, and Tomáš and Zdenka will be able to talk together for a w
hile.

  They will talk about the past or about the future. Tomáš does not wish to talk about the past, or the future, or anything temporal. For Tomáš there is no such thing as time. He is a doctor (a paediatrician at the children’s hospital down the road) but a small, hard core of his mind is that of a philosopher rather than a physician. The philosopher has decided that past and future are both illusions, that there is only a continuous present, and the present is this view through the window over the city, this cigarette, this vague and milky reflection of Zdenka walking backwards and forwards behind him urging her charges on: ‘Come on, Miloš! You know you can do it. That’s right Zdenka,’ (another Zdenka, the name is not uncommon) ‘show us what you can do. How happy your mother will be when she sees what progress you have made.’

  The children are broken approximations of what it means to be a child, polio victims, creatures with twigs and sticks for limbs, and pale hospital faces. In the hospital down the road there are others even worse, one of them in an iron lung, contemplating a future in which the machinery will breathe for her, and people will feed her and the world will be something that she sees inverted, in a mirror. Alenka is her name. The irony is not lost on Tomáš. Alenka is Alice, and her life will be lived through the medium of a looking glass.

  If there is no future, Tomáš thinks, then Alenka’s life ought to be more bearable.

  He smokes and looks. He has opened one of the window panes and can blow the smoke out into the garden, which is necessary because otherwise Zdenka would not allow him to smoke. ‘You shouldn’t smoke in here,’ she said when he first lit a cigarette. ‘It is against the regulations.’

  Regulations. The city, the country, probably the whole world (having travelled little, Tomáš is unsure about the matter) is pinned down by regulations. His own view is that regulations are designed to control the future and if we all live in an eternal present then regulations are, by definition, powerless. When he tells Zdenka this she sighs impatiently like a mother with an unruly child, and tells him that he’ll get himself into trouble one day. It seems absurd that Zdenka should be a mother to him. She is only five foot three inches tall and with a build as slight as a child’s. A dancer’s body. And yet Tomáš imagines her giving birth to him. Sometimes when he touches her intimately, that is what he imagines: Zdenka as both mother (his own mother died during the war) and lover, matka and milenka.

  Tomáš smokes and looks. He would like to live in ignorance of both the past and the future, forever at the pinnacle of time, the eternal present, this moment in what he calls the Glass Room, with this cigarette and this view over the city.

  ‘Now, one more time,’ Zdenka calls to her charges behind him. ‘Are you ready?’

  He first met Zdenka in this very place, the gymnasium that he always calls the Glass Room. It was two years ago, when he had reason to visit the physiotherapy department to follow the progress of one of his patients and discovered this new member of staff on duty. This was, she told him, her first job since abandoning her childhood ambition, which was to be a ballet dancer. From classical dance to recuperative physiotherapy did not seem too much of a leap (that was her joke) and so here she was trying to help children to walk when what she had wanted to do was fly.

  He laughed at her joke. There was something tantalising about this small, energetic young woman. How was it that she had so much energy when he himself felt almost debilitated by his work? She seemed to have an optimism that he did not share, a belief in the future that was quite contrary to his. They discussed his patient and then they talked of other things – her ambitions, his lack of them; her hopes, his despair. She had come from a town in the north towards the Polish border, a place called Hranice, which itself means ‘border’. ‘It’s the border between the north and south of the continent,’ she told him proudly when he asked. ‘On one side all the streams run north to the Baltic, on the other side all the streams run south to the Danube and the Black Sea. So I was born at the very watershed of the continent.’ From that moment on, Tomáš has always associated Zdenka with water. My rusalka, my nymph, he thought of her. Within a few minutes of meeting her he had invited her for a drink. Perhaps he wanted more of her hopes and ambitions. Within a few days they were seeing each other regularly. Within a week they were making love.

  Ondine

  One of the children in the hospital, one of Tomáš’s patients, suffers from a condition that no one has ever seen before. This child is incapable of breathing when she is asleep. When she is awake all is well and she can move her ribs, move her diaphragm, ventilate her lungs, but as soon as she falls asleep she stops breathing. The only solution is to have her sleep on a ventilator. If there isn’t the ventilator she will die of asphyxiation. This is a mystery to the medical profession. It is known as the curse of Ondine.

  Ondine was a water nymph, and therefore an immortal, who fell in love with the handsome, but mortal, Palemon. Although he was already betrothed to the noblewoman Berta, Palemon was prepared to sacrifice his marriage for the love of Ondine. There was, however, a catch. There is always a catch, in stories as in life. For when a nymph has a child by a mortal she has to sacrifice her immortality. Naturally Ondine was afraid of this, afraid of becoming pregnant and thereby losing her eternal youth and beauty. But Palemon reassured her. ‘My every waking breath shall be my pledge of love and faithfulness to you,’ he vowed. So the two lovers married and in due course Ondine had a child. At first Palemon was delighted. Now he had a son and heir, and also the most beautiful of wives. But with the birth of the child, Ondine began to change. She was a mother now as well as a lover, and the eternal youth of a nymph had vanished. She had become a mortal like any other woman, subject to age and decay.

  One day Ondine discovered Palemon lying naked in the arms of his former fiancée. Thus betrayed, she fled back to the river to die of grief, but not before she had summoned her last bit of immortal magic: she woke Palemon and cried, ‘You vowed that your every waking breath would be a pledge of faithfulness. So be it. For as long as you are awake, you shall breathe; but should you ever fall asleep, your breathing shall cease.’

  That is the curse of Ondine.

  Tomáš knew this story because of the affliction that his patient suffered from; Zdenka knew it from the piano piece by Maurice Ravel. ‘Show me how you dance,’ Tomáš asked her early in their relationship, but at first she refused. That part of her life was behind her, she told him. Teaching dance was all she allowed herself (twice a week in the evenings she conducted classes there in the gymnasium). However he insisted and one day after she had finished work and the others in the clinic had gone home, she produced the gramophone that she used in her classes. The music she chose was the piece called ‘Ondine’, from Ravel’s suite for piano entitled Gaspard de la Nuit. ‘It’s what I danced for my final presentation at ballet school,’ she explained.

  She placed the gramophone beside the onyx wall and plugged it in, then went to change. When she came back she was transformed. What had been a small, energetic nurse in white coat and trousers had metamorphosed into something mythic and magic – a barefoot, barelegged, gracile creature with white limbs and flowing seaweed hair. She was wearing a shift of translucent green silk and he could see the shadow of her body through the material almost as though he could see her soul inside her.

  She curtseyed before him. The music began, a liquid trilling of notes, like water flowing over stones. If Tomáš had never quite believed in her being a nymph, at that moment he was convinced. Zdenka moved, flowed like weed in the stream, like reflections of sunlight on the surface of a pool. And the room in which she moved, the Glass Room with its transparent walls, its chromium pillars, its onyx wall, its pools of light, seemed a kind of tank in which the nymph was trapped. She darted this way and that as though trying to find a way out, but always she came back to the centre of the room, to the onyx wall and to the chair where Tomáš sat. He was entranced. He was also sexually aroused. And it was the moment when he fell in lo
ve with her.

  Tomáš applauded when the music had trickled away to silence and she had completed her dance. The clapping of a single pair of hands inevitably sounds ironic, but there was no irony in Tomáš’s mind. What he had seen was one of the most wonderful visions of his life, a blend of abstract beauty and pure, feminine loveliness, something mythic and yet at the same time physical and real. Zdenka bowed before him, holding out her hands as though to display what little she possessed.

  ‘Come,’ he said. She stepped forward on bare, narrow feet and folded herself onto his lap like a cat. He could feel her body through the thin material of her dress – the corrugations of her ribs, the undulation of her spine, the small nodes of her breasts. ‘Can we make love?’ he whispered in her ear.

  ‘Of course not! How can we make love here? This is where I work.’

  ‘Then where can we go?’

  She didn’t know. She wanted to make love to him as well, but they had nowhere to go. The housing shortage meant that he still lived in his parents’ house, while Zdenka had a room in the nurses’ hostel at the bottom of the hill. Men were not allowed in the women’s section. So they had nowhere that they could safely go and make the love that was even now spilling out of them. That was why, despite the fact that anyone might come in and catch them, the caretaker maybe, or one of Zdenka’s colleagues coming back to check on something, they made love there and then on the floor of the Glass Room.

  Tranquillity

  Tomáš always referred to the gymnasium as the Glass Room. There is a language problem here. The word he used for room, pokoj, can also mean peace, tranquillity, quiet. So when he said ‘the glass room’ he was also saying ‘the glass tranquillity’. Thus does one language fail to make itself felt in another. He loved the Glass Tranquillity. The place appeared quite without reference to period or style – just a space of light and stillness where, when his work was over, he could be with Zdenka. Sometimes when she held her dance classes after work he would come and watch. The classes earned Zdenka extra money. The arrangement was quite irregular but some of the dancers were children of party officials so everyone turned a blind eye to the use of a state-owned building for a private enterprise. Tomáš would come down and find a seat in a corner of the room and watch the young girls going through their exercises and their routines. He enjoyed watching their efforts, sometimes ungainly, sometimes genuinely beautiful. It was a relief from always dealing with children who had been crippled by disease. He loved the sound of their chattering when they relaxed. They chattered like swallows, he thought.