by Simon Mawer
After one of these classes, when the children had all gone, he persuaded Zdenka to dance naked for him. ‘I feel shy,’ she protested.
‘But that’s absurd. I see you naked every time we make love.’
‘That’s not the same.’
But still he insisted. And, he explained, the Glass Room, the Glass Tranquillity, demanded such openness and honesty. He opened the curtains so that the evening light shone in on her and the roofs of the city lay there as witness. ‘I want you to dance before the whole city. Before the city and the world.’ Of course this was purely symbolic. Even if they could see the house, no one could possibly have made out the naked figure moving behind the panes of the Glass Room. Nevertheless there was this feeling of total exposure, as though she was dancing naked on a stage before thousands of strangers. This excited Tomáš and intimidated Zdenka. She danced poorly at first, the motion of her pale body out of sympathy with the music, and then the dance took over and she underwent a sea change before Tomáš’s eyes. She became – the metamorphosis seemed real – a water creature, her limbs undulating in the flow of music, the sea grass of her hair tossed around as though by waves. Her breasts were medusas pulsating with the rhythms of the ocean, her limbs were tentacles, her eyes were pearls. When she finished she lay down before him as though cast up on a beach, cold and wet; and the flock of hair between her thighs was like a marine organism, an anemone, hiding in a crevice of the rocks, ready to open its mouth and engulf any creature that strayed near.
After that they made love more passionately than ever before, there and then on the floor of the Glass Room, in front of the sightless city and the sightless world.
‘Do you know this was a private house once,’ Zdenka tells him. Tomáš tries to silence her. He doesn’t want to hear.
‘It was even famous, in fact.’ She is putting away equipment that she has been using with one of the children, an exercise machine for strengthening the leg muscles. ‘There’s a woman who came round yesterday who told me about it. The Landauer family. You’ve heard of the Landauers. They used to make cars. Before the war.’
Tomáš owns a Trabant. The Trabant is the present. Landauers are the past, a mythic epoch of luxury and freedom, but the Trabant, small, noisy and with a poor performance, is the present. The future is beyond imagining.
‘So apparently this family were very, you know, artistic, and they had this house built by some famous German architect. He builds skyscrapers in America now. And this is the house he built for them. That’s what this woman told me.’
Tomáš finds it very disturbing that the Glass Room possesses a past, that it has not always been this sterile gymnasium, this fish tank in which Zdenka dances for him, this room of glass and quiet. Did a family really live here once? Were there children playing games – as opposed to the children who come now with their ruined bodies to do exercises that will never help them play games?
‘She’s interesting, this woman who told me. Part of some committee. Committee for Heritage or something.’
‘I don’t want to know.’
‘You must meet her.’
‘Why should I be interested in finding out about the past? The past is an illusion.’
Berta
Zdenka is not the only woman in Tomáš’s life. There is also a woman called Eve (she uses the English form Eve, rather than the Czech Eva or Iva) who is a journalist on a local newspaper.
It is much easier for Tomáš to see Eve than it is for Tomáš to see Zdenka, because Eve has her own apartment in the centre of the city. It is only one room and only has one bed, but that doesn’t matter to them because they make love quickly and without particular passion, Eve instructing Tomáš on what she wants him to do and Tomáš enjoying it in a rather detached way, as though it were a medical process of some kind, something that brings physical relief from a kind of pain. But all the time he is with Eve he feels guilt about Zdenka, his Ondine.
‘Would you mind if I had another lover?’ he enquired once, when he and Eve had just finished making love and were lying in each other’s arms, sharing a cigarette.
She shrugged. ‘Why do you ask? Do you?’
‘No. I just wondered.’
‘I wouldn’t mind at all. In fact I see Oddball occasionally.’ Oddball, podivín, was her nickname for her editor. It was quite a surprise for Tomáš to hear this. He had met Oddball a few times. He seemed middle-aged and rather unprepossessing.
‘You do?’
‘Once or twice a month, maybe. The poor fellow’s marriage is finished and he’s quite appealing and when he made a pass at me I thought, well why not? He’s very considerate, he’s never going to cause any trouble, and besides, it helps in my work.’
‘How does it help?’
‘He gives me the assignments I want, the stories that interest me. And when I go away on a job he always gets me the best hotel.’
As Tomáš had accompanied Eve on a number of these trips he realised that he was in some way compliant in this clandestine affair with Oddball. The thought amused him, and spurred him to confess: ‘Actually there is another woman.’
Eve took the cigarette from between his lips, drew on it and blew smoke towards the ceiling. ‘I assumed there was.’
‘She works in the hospital. A physiotherapist. And a dancer.’
‘I bet that makes her interesting in bed.’
He laughed. Eve was so much a woman of his type. There was none of the usual jealousy and envy, nothing underhand about her. Now that he knew about Oddball and she knew about Zdenka he felt even closer to her. Yet none of this affected Tomáš’s sense of guilt because the point was not so much whether Eve minded his having another woman, as whether Zdenka would mind. He didn’t dare ask Zdenka the question he had asked Eve because he already knew the answer – she would be destroyed. Like Ondine, she would die.
So why, Tomáš wonders, does he betray Zdenka? Perhaps, he reasons, because by risking the curse of Ondine he can inject some meaning into his life. It is the curse of not breathing that attracts him. Breathing is so fundamental to human life, as fundamental as the heart. The words involved in the act of breathing sound in his mind: inspiration, respiration, expiration. Birth, life and death. So Tomáš thinks of Zdenka as Ondine, with all the undulating beauty of the name, but above all he courts that dreadful curse, and fears it if Zdenka ever discovers his unfaithfulness with Eve.
Paris
In the Glass Room, Zdenka marshals the children with great skill. Having no child herself she seems to consider all her charges to be in some way her own children. She lives their moments of success, feels their moments of despair, provides the necessary impetus to pick themselves up and continue in the face of adversity.
‘You shouldn’t allow yourself to get so involved,’ Tomáš warns her. ‘In this business you must keep your distance. Otherwise you won’t be any use to them.’
But she cannot keep her distance. Each child’s tragedy is her own. Sometimes, after working with the children, she is in tears. But only ever when they have gone. Never does she allow them to see her upset. Tomáš, on the other hand, is never in tears. ‘My job is to try to mend,’ he says, ‘not to weep.’
One day he came to the gymnasium to find Zdenka in a state of great excitement. She had just been nominated to attend a conference in Paris on polio and its treatment. It was a large international gathering of experts from around the world and to be selected to go was a great honour.
‘But that was what I came to tell you,’ Tomáš said.
‘What do you mean?’
He waved a piece of paper. ‘I have been selected to attend a conference on poliomyelitis in Paris.’
She looked at him in amazement. ‘The same one?’
Her naivety amused him. She was brisk and energetic at her job, fragile and sylph-like in her dancing or in his arms, and credulous in her dealings with the world. She believed in progress. She thought the Party had the best interests of the people at heart. She thought th
at the future would exist and it would be better than the present; and that the past had existed and it was worse. She thought that there was meaning in life. And she thought that there might be two different poliomyelitis conferences at the same time in the same city. ‘I’m sure there’s only one,’ he insisted.
‘Then what a wonderful coincidence that we’ve both been selected.’
That was another mark of her naivety: she assumed that their both being selected was purely fortuitous, but in fact it had all been arranged by Tomáš. His own attendance was almost automatic: he was the leading expert in polio at the hospital and as two doctors would be going it was inevitable that the Head of Paediatrics would want to take him along. Albert Sabin, an American of Polish origin, would be talking about his trials of an oral vaccine against polio. This was a live vaccine, which promised to be more effective in developing immunity in the subject than the Salk vaccine. But a live vaccine also brings the danger of inducing a real infection in some children. It was a matter of balance: of balancing the many protected lives against a few that might be destroyed. That was what particularly interested Tomáš. How do you make such judgements?
‘There’s quite a lot about physiotherapy on the programme as well,’ the professor added thoughtfully when they were discussing the conference. He turned over the pages of typescript that he had received from the organisers.
‘Physiotherapy is very important,’ Tomáš agreed.
‘Perhaps someone from the Physiotherapy Department ought to go?’
That was Tomáš’s opportunity to suggest that a certain Zdenka Vondráková, being responsible for most of the remedial work with the polio patients, might be an appropriate delegate. He smiled as he told the professor this. It was a knowing smile, which made the situation clear without mentioning anything specific.
‘That sounds a good idea,’ the professor agreed. ‘She’s a Party member, isn’t she? That’ll be a help in getting an exit permit for her.’
Tomáš never told Zdenka that he had made her attendance at the conference possible. He preferred to preserve her belief in the wonderful, fortuitous coincidence of existence, the miracle of contingency.
The trip to Paris was Zdenka’s first time out of the country and only the second time that Tomáš had been to the West (the other time was to Vienna when it was still a divided city and he was in the army). They found the city bright and colourful, whereas their home town and their country seemed dull and monochrome. The hotel was magnificent. ‘Each room has its own bathroom. And there’s free soap and toothpaste,’ Zdenka cried, as though bathrooms, soap and toothpaste were the height of capitalist luxury. They also discovered that it was easy for Zdenka to move her things into Tomáš’s room where there was a double bed of gargantuan proportions. And thus they had their five days of almost marital cohabitation, the strange experience of making love in a bed, and of falling asleep in one another’s arms and waking the next morning to find the other still there, creased and warm with sleep. Zdenka was small and fragile and she seemed even smaller and more fragile in that large bed, so light that she seemed to float above Tomáš as he lay on his back, so slender that he feared she might break apart as he lay on top of her. And yet, despite her lightness, he felt almost smothered by her presence, and longed to be back with her in the Glass Tranquillity where they could make love like casual acquaintances, without the awful ties of obligation.
‘I hope you are going to marry that girl,’ the professor remarked on the third day of the conference, when they were sitting in one of the lecture rooms waiting for a talk to begin. ‘She seems a lovely young thing.’
Tomáš agreed that she was a lovely young thing – ‘a rusalka,’ he said, while thinking to himself, an ondine – but he didn’t say anything about marriage. Marriage was the future and these five days with Zdenka – Zdenka naked at the basin in their shared bathroom, Zdenka emerging from the shower with her hair like waterweed down her back and across her face, Zdenka still wet from the shower climbing into his arms and letting herself be carried to the bed, where they made love – were the present.
When they got back from Paris Zdenka almost wept. ‘We could have stayed,’ she said. ‘We could have found work easily. They want doctors and physiotherapists. We could have stayed and found work and been together in freedom.’
‘What has happened to your admiration of the Party?’ Tomáš asked.
‘I’m not thinking of the Party, I’m thinking of us.’
But the five days in Paris have become the past, and for Tomáš the past does not exist. There is only now, this pinnacle of time, the eternal present, this moment in what he calls the Glass Room, the Glass Tranquillity, with this cigarette and this view over the city.
He turns from the window. The last of the children has struggled up the stairs with the help of its mother and the place is empty but for him and Zdenka. ‘What is going to happen to us now?’ she asks.
‘Now?’
‘Yes, now.’
How can he talk about now when now is all that there is? You cannot talk about something except by contrast with other things. You cannot paint something unless it is different from its surroundings. The Russian painter Malevich attempted it, and what did he get? A white canvas with a white square on it. ‘Now we are going to make love,’ he says. ‘That’s what we do isn’t it, when we are here? This is the perfect place to make love. It has no points of reference, no memories, no illusions. It just is.’ He looks round the bare space, the chromium pillars, the white walls and cream floor, the curve of wooden panels that closes off the area they use for individual treatment, and the strange wall of patterned stone which is the only irregularity in the place. And as he looks Zdenka begins to weep.
Tomáš is confused by her weeping. He goes to comfort her but she throws him off. ‘You’re so cold,’ she accuses him. ‘In Paris you were warm and loving, but here you’re so cold. And I want the warm and loving you, not this awful cold one.’ And then she stops, and, having turned her head away from him, suddenly looks at him directly. ‘There’s another woman, isn’t there? You keep me in this state of uncertainty because you’ve got another woman.’
Tomáš smiles. ‘Don’t be absurd.’
‘Why is it absurd? In Paris you had only me and you were as loving as a man can be. Here you are distant and cold, so it must mean you don’t have only me. There must be another woman.’
He laughs. ‘That’s woman’s logic.’ He reaches out and takes her hand and draws her to him. For a moment she is soft and supple in his arms. Then she pulls away.
‘No,’ she says. ‘No!’
It is the first time they have ever had an argument. Tomáš doesn’t wish to take part but it seems that he has no choice. The argument is about their future and when Tomáš says that there is no future Zdenka merely gets more angry. ‘Of course there’s a future. There’s a future in which I should become a mother and you a father. There’s a future in which we should get our names on the housing list and make a home. There’s a future in which we grow old together. But none of that seems likely, does it? Not with you the way you are!’
Despite his protests, she continues. She has been thinking this over, ever since they got back from Paris, perhaps even before they went to Paris. Her idea is that they need a break from one another. They should be apart for a while, get things in perspective, wait and see what both of them want. Thus, soon after the delights of Paris, here in the cool light of the Glass Room, they seem to be slipping apart. It is all unbelievable to Tomáš. This is not the way he should lose Ondine, not with a banal discussion about commitments and obligations, not without that terrifying curse.
Over the days things change a little. They talk to each other on the phone, exchange words in a meeting at the hospital, and finally meet up for a drink. The present is losing the malign influence of the past and Paris is slowly becoming nothing more than a memory. They talk about it as though it is a piece of fantasy with little grounding in real life. The
y even recall different things, Tomáš remembering a visit to the Panthéon that Zdenka denies happened, Zdenka a market on the Île de la Cité where there was a stall selling animals, an incident which Tomáš denies. She insists. There were tropical fish, caged birds, mice, even a sleek and self-sufficient rat; but he cannot recall the place. They laugh about their different memories of these events, but for him all this is symptomatic of what he believes, that memory and imagination are the same thing. He has need to imagine the Panthéon, the temple to no gods whatsoever; Zdenka has need to recall brilliantly coloured fish swimming round and round in a tank.
History
‘I’ve got a story to do in your part of the world,’ Eve tells Tomáš one evening.
‘In Židenice?’ He assumes she must be referring to the area where his parents’ house is, but that is such a dreary and uninteresting part of the city that he cannot imagine what the story might be.
‘No, the hospital. Actually the Department of Physio therapy.’ She says it deliberately, aware of the significance of what she is saying. ‘I wonder whether I will meet your dancer.’