The Glass Room

by Simon Mawer

Tomáš has told Eve all about Zdenka, everything except her name. He has told her about the dancing and about their making love there on the floor of the Glass Room, and about the trip to Paris and what has happened since. Is that a betrayal of Zdenka? But it seems to Tomáš that confession to Eve, for whom he has feelings of companionship that are quite unlike the intense feelings of a lover, is not betrayal in any real sense. His relationship with Eve has all the intimacy of that between a doctor and a patient, where anything may be said and all will be held secret.

  ‘How will you know if you do meet her?’ There are, after all, a number of young women who work in the department, five, to be exact, along with three men.

  ‘Oh, I’ll know your little dancer all right.’

  Tomáš suddenly has a desire to see the two of them together, to see his Ondine and his Berta talking to one another, the one all-knowing, the other ignorant. ‘Maybe I’ll be there. Maybe I’ll show you round. If it’s about the physiotherapy department you ought to have one of the doctors on hand.’

  ‘That’s up to you. But it’s not about the department as such – it’s about the building.’

  ‘The building?’

  ‘It’s a most important house in architectural terms. Didn’t you know that? The Landauer House. There are people who want to restore it, turn it into some kind of museum. The State Committee for Architectural Heritage or something. Haven’t you heard? Well, we’re going to do a piece on it.’

  ‘I’ve heard something about it, but who cares what it was in the past? Now it’s a gymnasium for the physiotherapy department. That’s what it’s for. It’s valuable as a gymnasium but it’s impossible as a house and worthless as a museum. Museums are just like churches, they’re memorials to something that’s finished – the past or religion. Either is pure fantasy.’

  ‘You ought to join the Party with views like that.’

  ‘You know I couldn’t join the Party. The Party believes in history.’

  It seems absurd that they should argue about something so abstruse, so arcane and obscure as Party doctrine, but they do, Eve claiming that the Party believes in exactly Tomáš’s kind of history, a fantasy history, a history of imagination and forgetting, and Tomáš exclaiming that she is wrong, that the Party really thinks that it is right, that history is, for the true believer, a kind of scientific laboratory in which the laws of dialectical materialism are worked out. The difference between this argument with Eve and his argument with Zdenka is that this one ends in laughter, and the two of them taking off their clothes and getting into Eve’s narrow bed; whereas the argument with Zdenka remains at the very core of their separation.

  Zdenka

  For Zdenka the Glass Room is a place of dreams, a cool box where you can project your fantasies and sit and watch them. When she was a child her mother used to laugh at her, call her a dreamer, tell her she always had her head in the clouds and the trouble with having your head in the clouds was that you can’t see where to put your feet. Later, when Zdenka became a promising dancer at the ballet school in Olomouc, her mother would say that a dancer with her head in the clouds was all right as long as she didn’t fall off the stage. One day Zdenka did precisely that – she fell off the stage and broke her ankle. The break was complex and it took some months to heal, more months still to return to something like normal. But never again could she go on points. Dancing was still possible, of course, the modern dance of her heroine Isadora Duncan or Martha Graham, but her ambition, her dream of going to Prague and perhaps from there to the Soviet Union, to dance with the Bolshoi or the Kirov, was at an end. So Zdenka shrugged her shoulders (narrow, fragile, sculptured like an anatomy model) and changed the direction of her life. She abandoned the dream of dancing and took a course in physiotherapy and dreamed of helping crippled children to regain their mobility.

  Dreams are like memories. Zdenka remembers Paris. She remembers walking down the Champs-Élysées and turning into the avenue Montaigne. Tomáš knew who Montaigne was – the first truly modern writer, he told Zdenka; a sceptic and a humanist – but had never heard of Isadora Duncan. Zdenka knew that Isadora Duncan was memorialised in bas-relief on the façade of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, but had no idea that a writer called Montaigne ever existed. So she recalls that moment for standing opposite the theatre and seeing the image of her heroine up on the façade, whereas Tomáš recalls the moment for the lecture that he delivered on Montaigne’s scepticism, his doubting of history and advocacy of imagination.

  Zdenka dreams of Paris. Her dreams are more than mere sightseeing. They are also dreams of an ideal world in which she and Tomáš might live in intimacy and harmony for the remainder of their lives.

  ‘I had a wonderful time in Paris,’ she tells the woman from the Committee for Architectural Heritage, who has come once again to look round the building. The last time the woman came she was unable to see the gymnasium because there was a callisthenics class going on and without a proper authorisation from the hospital authorities entry was not possible. But this time there is no class and the woman has brought with her all the authorisation that one could wish for.

  ‘It’s a wonderful city,’ the woman agrees, ‘especially when you are young. And in love. Were you in love?’

  ‘I was,’ Zdenka admits, ‘but it didn’t last.’

  ‘Often that is the way with Paris.’

  The representative from the Committee for Architectural Heritage is a fine-looking woman in her fifties. That is Zdenka’s estimate. But not the kind of fifty that her mother is – a fat and shapeless fifty with slack grey hair, tired features and confusion in her eyes. This woman is slim and elegant, alive. Her face is that of a person who understands things, a face etched in experience. Zdenka feels she will understand about Tomáš.

  ‘There was this most marvellous coincidence,’ she explains to the woman as they go down the curving stairs into the Glass Room. ‘My boyfriend was on the same conference as me. Can you imagine that? We had five marvellous days together.’

  The woman smiles. It is a smile both sympathetic and knowing. ‘But it didn’t last.’

  Zdenka returns the smile. It is, she knows, a smile without humour. People are practised in this expression; it is almost a national characteristic. ‘No, it didn’t last. He’s a doctor here at the hospital, in fact. That’s why we went to Paris, to the conference. But now we’ve sort of drifted apart. Do you think that was a result of being together in Paris?’

  Why does she ask the woman this? Why does she let these small pieces of intimate knowledge slip out? Once said, words cannot be unsaid. The woman cannot unknow these facts now – that Zdenka has broken with her boyfriend, that he is a doctor at the hospital, that they were in Paris together. If the woman cares to she is now able to identify Tomáš. If the woman tells other people, they will be able to identify him. In this world of reported truth and half-truth, of lie and rumour, Zdenka’s love for Tomáš may be entered on some file, assessed by some functionary, used for or against. ‘Do you know Paris well?’ she asks, hoping that one banal question will distract from the revelation.

  ‘I went there often before the war. But not since. It’s not so easy these days, is it? You were very lucky.’

  Zdenka pushes open the glass door and leads the way through into the gymnasium. The curtains have been pulled back and they walk across a lighted stage with the whole city as their audience. Behind her the visitor gives a small sigh, maybe a sign of longing, maybe a mere exhalation of regret. ‘I’d forgotten how marvellous the place is,’ she says. ‘But what happened to the windows? It used to be all plate glass.’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I only know it as it is. It’s ideal for what we do here.’ While the woman looks around Zdenka explains about the children. ‘Space and light. Their lives are too often dark and closed, shut away indoors because they can’t go out to play, that kind of thing. Coming here is a kind of liberation for them. And for me. You know I dance here sometimes?’

  The woman walks ove
r to the onyx wall and touches it as though caressing the face of a loved one. ‘I didn’t know you were a dancer.’

  ‘I trained for years until I had an accident. I couldn’t go en pointe any longer and that ruined it for me. But I can still do other kinds of dance. I run classes here for children as well. Two evenings a week.’

  ‘Maybe you’ll dance for me?’

  Zdenka blushes. For some reason she blushes beneath the woman’s gaze, as though she has just been asked to do something indecent. The woman smiles. This smile is intense, not a casual thing bestowed unthinkingly, but a kind of communication, as though she is saying that Zdenka has made her smile, that Zdenka is worthy of her smile, and that it is a smile to be shared. ‘This place used to be a place of music,’ she says. ‘Did you know that? Maybe you pick up echoes of it when you dance. Do you think that is possible, that a place can store the echoes of its past? The piano used to be here, just here.’ The woman points. ‘The Landauers used to hold recitals.’

  ‘Did you know the family? What happened to them?’

  The woman shrugs. ‘He was a Jew.’

  The word ‘Jew’ clouds Zdenka’s mind. The Jews are like ghosts in the country, forgotten people whose shades haunt the alleyways and streets of certain towns. You think you might see one in the cramped cottages of a one-time Jewish quarter or in the shadows of an abandoned synagogue, but you never do. In Hranice there was an old Jewish cemetery which the children used to venture into, a frightening place of tombstones and ghosts, peopled only by the dead. But there were no living Jews in the town. Then, when she was seventeen, she went to Terezín with the Union of Youth. This was not long after the Communists took power, in the days when she truly believed. Her group had been camping in the hills and they went to visit the Museum of the Resistance in the small fortress outside the town of Terezín itself. Zdenka and a friend had separated from the group and walked down the long straight road that led from the fortress across the river, to the garrison town that had been, so the story went, the ghetto of the Jews. She remembers the moat, the walls, the desolate barrack blocks inside, the weeds growing up in the streets, and the old woman shouting at them from an upstairs window. Was the old woman a Jew, one of the few left behind? Was that possible? What she shouted they didn’t know, but she and her friend ran all the way back to the fortress museum to rejoin the party. They talked about it on the journey back to camp. Why was the town abandoned like that? Why was it only the Resistance that was remembered in the museum of the fortress? Why was the memory of the Jews being left to die?

  ‘Were the Landauers killed?’ she asks.

  ‘They were lucky. Lucky or clever, or whatever you want to call it. They escaped at the time of the Nazi invasion. To Switzerland …’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘I lost touch with them during the war. When I was deported …’

  ‘You were deported?’

  There is a moment of uncertainty in the woman’s expression, as though she is trying to decide what to say. ‘I spent three years in the camps. And when I came back …’ She shrugs. ‘How was I to get in touch again? And then the revolution came. It was a shame. The children must be about your age by now.’

  Zdenka says how old she is. She feels that she needs to tell her, to give some personal information to this woman who has come into the place as a stranger but somehow – this is only her second visit – seems a friend.

  ‘There you are. Martin would be just three years older.’ The woman walks around the onyx wall, reappearing on the other side silhouetted against the light from the windows. ‘I’d like to see you dance,’ she says. ‘In here. In the Glasraum.’

  That’s what she calls it: der Glasraum, in German.

  Encounter

  The meeting with the journalist is arranged for two days later at eleven o’clock. There will be a photographer as well. Tomáš discusses it with Zdenka on the phone. ‘There is more to all this business than meets the eye,’ he advises her. ‘Apparently there is a move to try and take the building away from the hospital. People want the place restored, turned into a museum or something. A representative of the hospital ought to be present.’

  ‘You mean we’d be thrown out?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  After that conversation the woman from the heritage committee does not seem quite so attractive. On the other hand the prospect of seeing Tomáš again gives her a little thrill of excitement. She is waiting, trying to choose the moment when she says to him, come back to me, come back to me on your own terms. Let us meet as we used to, after work has finished, here in the department when everyone else has left for their own houses, their own apartments, their own families and their lives. Our life can be here as you wish, in the Glass Room. Pokoj. Tranquillity. That is all she wants, all she will demand from him. The quiet of the Glass Room, the quietness of their making love here in the cool light of the evening.

  The woman from the heritage committee arrives at the appointment before all the others, slightly ahead of time in fact. Greeting her at the front door, Zdenka addresses her as soudružko, comrade. Comrade Hanáková. That seems to give the correct sense of formality that she feels towards her now. But the woman just laughs. ‘Oh, come on. I think we can dispense with that kind of thing. You must call me Hana. We’re friends, aren’t we? You are going to dance for me.’

  Zdenka laughs at the idea, but it is not a dismissive laugh. Rather, it is a happy one. Despite the possibility that the building will be taken away from the department of physiotherapy the idea of dancing for this woman with her grave face and amused eyes seems to Zdenka to be a delight. She tries her name out, as though she hasn’t heard it before. Hana. It seems a name of some beauty, as though beauty can reside in just two syllables that are echoes of each other almost like something in a nursery rhyme. Ha-na.

  As she is hanging Hana’s coat, the journalist and the photographer arrive. The photographer is a tall, casually dressed man who says little but immediately starts getting out his equipment – battered black cameras and lenses and a tripod. They are like bits of weaponry that fit together with clicks and grunts. The journalist is the one who does the talking. She shakes Hana’s hand and Zdenka’s hand and smiles very warmly at Zdenka and insists that they call her Eve. ‘We’re waiting for someone from the paediatric department of the hospital,’ Zdenka says.

  The journalist raises her eyebrows. ‘Why is that?’

  ‘They have overall control of this facility. We are really just an offshoot.’

  The disparate group wait in the hallway of the building, in the strange aqueous light that comes through the milky panes of glass. People push past on their way from one office to another. Eve asks Hana some questions about the place, about when it was built and by whom. Zdenka glances at her watch. The photographer takes photographs of the hall, moving people aside so that he can get a clear shot. His camera stands on arthropod legs and he invites Zdenka to look through the viewfinder (he has to lower the tripod to her height). To her surprise she discovers the world in a fish bowl, the warped figures of Hana and Eve floating round one side, the curve of the milky glass wall, the staircase winding downwards like a vortex, and the front door bending open and a diminutive Tomáš entering, like a fish swimming into view. Two fishes, for there is someone else following Tomáš, a stout, balding man with a coarse, peasant face.

  ‘Am I late? I’m very sorry,’ Tomáš says. But he isn’t sorry, Zdenka can see that. He is pleased that he has kept them all waiting. She watches as he shakes hands with the photographer and Hana, and greets the journalist by name. ‘Hello, Eve. Fancy seeing you here.’

  ‘You know each other?’ Zdenka asks.

  ‘Old friends,’ says Tomáš.

  Zdenka notices that the old friends exchange amused glances. And she can see – sense, not see – something else: a small pulse that passes between the two old friends like the small shock of electricity you get in summer when you touch the handle of a car. A pulse of energy. Z
denka senses it but doesn’t quite understand it. ‘Old friends,’ he repeats, and Zdenka wonders where the emphasis lies – on old or on friends?

  Then the bald man introduces himself. He addresses them all as soudruzi, comrades. He is, he tells them, chairman of the District Committee with responsibility to the Party for the Blackfield area. Hana, it seems, already knows him. ‘Comrade Laník,’ she says as they shake hands. ‘How you have come up in the world.’

  ‘That’s the whole point of the revolution, isn’t it?’ he replies. ‘The proletariat is in power now.’

  The tour of the house takes an hour. It is led not by Zdenka but by Hana with occasional interruptions by the chairman of the District Committee. This is architecture not physiotherapy, art not science. And she appears to know everything about the place, from the details of the architect himself to the birthdays of the children of the owners. The man called Laník knows other things. He knows the date of construction and the materials used. And what happened to it after the family left, during the war. Together these two recount the history, the story, the past that leads to this present of six people walking round the space, looking at perspectives and vistas, at details and delights. The journalist scribbles away in shorthand, turning over pages of a ring-bound notebook. Comrade Laník insists that Eve explain to her readers how he defended the house against counter-attack by the forces of bourgeois Fascism. Tomáš watches and smiles distantly, as though he understands a deeper truth than a mere recounting of the past. And the shutter of the photographer’s camera makes that repeated mechanical sound, that unlocking and locking of the doors of light to send momentary images from the present into the light trap of the past.

  When everything is over there is uncertainty over matters of departure and farewell. And then the following things happen: Laník says he has an important meeting to attend and must bid the comrades farewell; the photographer shoulders his bag of gear and says he has to get the films to the lab; the journalist gives Tomáš a kiss on the cheek and follows the photographer out; and Hana says goodbye and tells Zdenka that she will be in touch. Tomáš and Zdenka are left together in the physiotherapy building, which Zdenka has now come to think of as the Landauer House.