by Simon Mawer
The photograph shows a thoughtful man and a smiling woman with a baby in her arms. Between the two adults is a little girl. They are standing in a place that Zdenka recognises instantly, the terrace of the upper floor of this very building, just above their heads. Beside them is the curved bench and behind them the sandpit. The man is wearing a formal suit and the woman’s dress is rather old-fashioned, something from a previous generation, the skirt cut narrow, the shoulders padded. The whole photo has an indistinct quality to it, like an incomplete memory. There is something about the cast of the sunlight, as though it comes from the present to illuminate this small moment of the past.
‘These are the Landauers. Viktor and Liesel, with Martin and Ottilie. Ottilie was my goddaughter, although poor Viktor didn’t approve of Liesel’s choice. I think I agreed with him. Fancy making someone like me a godmother!’
The man appears to be looking at a point somewhere to the left of the camera, but the woman is watching the photographer intently. That’s the impression the photograph gives: she is not looking at the camera lens, but directly at the photographer. ‘We were so happy,’ Hana says. ‘So very, very happy.’
By contrast the photographs taken in the house just a few days ago are bright and glossy, professionally considered, but they don’t have the import of the older one, the weight of time. Hana takes them from their envelope and the two women glance through them. There is a view of the building from the garden, and some shots of the interior, the gym just as it is now with its exercise mats laid out in a row in front of the onyx wall like a row of graves in a cemetery. There are fisheye views of the entrance hall, some with their own figures swimming in the bowl of the lens. And there is a group photograph taken in the Glass Room, just there by one of the chromium-clad pillars, Hana and Zdenka on one side and Tomáš and Eve on the other, the stout chairman of the District Committee detached from the group like an uninvited guest.
Tomáš and Eve are holding hands.
It isn’t an obvious thing. They are standing close to one another, Eve with her notebook held up to her chest in her left hand and the other hand down by her side. Tomáš is on her right, with his right hand up on the chromium pillar as though for support and the other hand, his left hand, down by his side, out of sight of the couple on the other side of the narrow pillar, out of sight of everything except the all-seeing eye of the camera. He is grasping Eve’s right hand. More than that, their fingers are intertwined. No casual gesture that but a thing that requires practice, knowledge, intimacy.
Zdenka is shocked. Hadn’t she expected something like this? But it is seeing the proof that is so upsetting. This is neither memory nor imagination: it is just the plain evidence of the camera, unwavering in its observation. Here is proof of Tomáš’s betrayal.
‘I didn’t know how to tell you,’ Hana says, putting her arm around Zdenka’s narrow shoulders. ‘I didn’t want to hurt you. But I didn’t want him to continue to deceive you.’
Zdenka allows herself to be comforted for a while. Then she excuses herself and goes to the bathroom to wash and change. The face that looks back at her in the mirror is no longer that of a sophisticated adult who has been to the West, to Paris, to an international medical conference: it is the bruised, pale, washed-out face of a young girl. ‘What will Hana think of you?’ she asks her reflection.
When she returns to the gym she feels the need to apologise. ‘For burdening you with my unhappiness,’ she explains.
Hana smiles, and takes her hand and holds it tight. ‘But I don’t mind that. I’d rather you burdened me with your happiness, but if it has to be your unhappiness then that’s all right by me. And maybe, who knows, I can do something about it?’ She lets Zdenka’s hand go. There is something deliberate about that movement, a sense of determined separation. Zdenka watches her cross the room to the onyx wall. She stands beside it, leaning against it as though for support. ‘Can I tell you something? I’m not sure that this is the moment, but then I’m not sure when the moment may be. Maybe there is no best moment for something like this.’
‘Something like what?’ What can Hana intend by this sudden change of mood? They have been close together, united by the dance, and then by Zdenka’s misery and Hana’s comfort, and now quite unexpectedly they are apart and Hana is speaking in this rather formal tone, as though about to explain something difficult. Perhaps it is something to do with the gymnasium itself, that now has to be thought of as the Landauer House. Perhaps she is going to explain what Tomáš claimed, that the Committee for Architectural Heritage or whatever it is called wants to throw the physiotherapy department out of the house and turn the building into a museum.
‘The fact is that over the last few weeks, meeting you in the house, talking to you, chatting over things like old friends almost – don’t you feel that? don’t you feel some kind of sympathy?’ Hana gives a little laugh, something wry and bitter. ‘Well, the fact is that I have fallen in love with you. I might never have said this at all, but now I feel that I must. Maybe it repels you, to have another woman say this. Especially a woman who is almost twice your age and old enough to be your mother. But there you are.’ She shrugs, as though the little speech is of no consequence, a mere trifle, something Zdenka can take notice of or not as she pleases. ‘I thought I ought to make myself clear in case there are any misunderstandings. I’m in love with you.’ She opens her hands. It is a gesture of helplessness as much as revelation, the gesture of one who says, look, I have nothing more than this. ‘That’s all there is to it.’
The confession comes as a shock. It doesn’t repel Zdenka, but it is certainly a shock. She is not a complete stranger to the attentions of other women. There was Isadora Duncan’s example, she knows that. And at ballet school a teacher who had once been a prima ballerina of the Kirov paid a great deal of attention to her, sometimes caressing her improperly when adjusting the position of her legs at the barre, occasionally snatching a kiss from her when they were alone together. ‘You are so lovely,’ she whispered once in her heavy Russian accent, kissing her very gently on the mouth. But then there was a problem with another of the girls and the teacher disappeared, leaving only rumour in her wake and a thin deposit of guilt in Zdenka’s mind.
‘I’m sorry,’ Hana says. ‘I should have kept quiet.’
‘No. No, please.’ By her reply Zdenka somehow turns the negative into an affirmative. ‘I can’t just respond like that. You’ve surprised me. I can’t just say this or that.’
‘It doesn’t repel you, does it? The idea of affection between two women.’
‘No, it doesn’t. Not repel.’ She looks round the room as though for a way out and sees only Hana smiling at her. ‘I find it … strange. I think you’re very beautiful. I said that before and I meant it. I think if you were younger you would frighten me.’
The older woman laughs. ‘My darling Zdenička, I would never frighten you. It is you who frightens me. Anyway, let’s just leave it, shall we? You know how I feel and I’m pleased for that. Let’s just leave it there and we’ll go and have something to eat, and then I’ll take you back to the hostel and you can think about what I have said. We’re not like men. It is perfectly possible for us to remain friends without being lovers. How often that has happened between women? I will leave it all to you.’
Zdenka spends the next few days in a state of heightened nervousness, going about her work in a haze of confusion and bewilderment. The children are her only distraction. She urges them on in their efforts, cajoles the ones who are reluctant, tries to restrain those who are in danger of overdoing their efforts, encourages the weak and praises the strong. When Tomáš rings she talks to him in neutral tones, so much so that he asks whether everything is all right, whether she is feeling unwell. She is fine, she assures him and tries to bring the conversation to a rapid close, in case his presence on the other end of the line should somehow upset the disturbing choice she has been presented with. She doesn’t understand how to act. This is not the story of On
dine. In Ondine there is merely the nymph’s love of Palemon and his betrayal of her. There is nothing else.
After work she has one of her dancing classes, a procession of little girls in tight, pink leotards who primp and prance and try to do what they cannot truly do yet, which is to appear fluid and feminine. She shows them, demonstrates plié and port de bras, feeling her own body as something that is almost foreign, as though she has discovered herself in someone else’s limbs and torso, someone strange who yet has all the attributes she thinks of as her own. The mothers who collect the girls at the end of the lesson seem to be over-protective and demanding, asking about their daughters’ progress, insisting on their talents and possibilities. ‘Is she ready for Prague?’ one of the mothers, the wife of a Party official, asks. The question implies that one day the girl will be ready: it is merely a matter of spotting the moment. Whereas the fact is that the girl will never be ready, her talent is limited, she stands out only among amateurs. Zdenka does not want to have to argue with the woman, however tactfully and pleasantly; all she wants is to be alone. ‘We will see,’ she says. ‘We will bide our time. The worst thing you can do with a ballerina is to push her beyond her natural development.’
When finally everyone has gone, Zdenka stands for a long while on the stage of the Glass Room looking out through the windows, across the sloping garden, through the trees at the distant view of roofs. It is as though she has an audience out there, rows and rows of watchers, every one of them Zdenka herself. She turns away from the audience and crouches at the gramophone. The needle drops, with a hiss, onto the narrow band of silence at the edge of the disc before making a small, precise click and sliding into the groove. The liquid notes of ‘Ondine’ flood out through the Glass Room. Zdenka stands up and faces the windows and begins to dance, slowly, fluidly, not for any audience but for herself alone.
Comfort
‘May I come round and see you?’ Hana asks on the phone. She has rung the direct line into the gymnasium, to the battered, old-fashioned receiver that sits on the desk and is answered by anyone who happens to be passing. ‘Physio therapy,’ they say. ‘If you want to make an appointment you’ll have to ring the main switchboard.’
‘Is that Zdenka?’
‘Yes. Yes, it’s Zdenka.’
‘May I come round and see you?’ Her voice is hesitant, as though she is fearful of Zdenka refusing.
‘Yes.’
‘Are you alone?’
‘The others are just going.’
‘I’ll be there in half an hour. Will that be all right?’
‘Yes, that’ll be fine.’
She replaces the receiver with care. One of her colleagues looks round the door and says goodbye. ‘You got one of your classes this evening?’
‘No, no I haven’t.’
‘Then I’d push off home if I were you.’
But you’re not me, she thinks. No one is me. Except me. Everyone else leads a balanced, calculated life. She crosses to the windows. How strange the Glass Room seems. The walls are as insubstantial as her own presence. Reflections glitter. Light refracts. She tiptoes across the gleaming, milky floor as though walking lightly on water, careful not to break the surface and plunge down into the depths. Ondine, she thinks, breathing deeply to try to inhale the calm that is all around her.
When she comes Hana looks anxious and slightly confused, like someone who has just woken from a deep sleep and is not quite certain of where she is. They greet each other cautiously, neither of them alluding to what has gone before. Zdenka goes into the kitchen to make coffee, the turecká, Turkish coffee, that Hana likes. ‘How are you?’ she asks as she brings the coffee out. There is something about the enquiry that makes it sound like what you might say to someone who has recently been bereaved.
Hana is standing at the window looking at the view. It is always the view that draws the eye. ‘I’m fine.’ Then she adds, ‘Look, there’s something I wanted to tell you. I think I should have said this the last time. So that you know everything about me.’
Zdenka is about to speak, but Hana holds up her hand. She attempts a smile. ‘Please. I want you to know everything before you say anything.’
Zdenka places the glasses of coffee on the table. The coffee grains are settling in the bottom of the thick dark liquid. ‘All right, tell me.’
Hana lifts the glass to her lips and blows softly across the surface of the coffee. She sips, cautiously in case the liquid is too hot. Then she puts the glass down with exaggerated care. ‘You see, I’ve never told anyone. Never.’
Is the Glass Room a place for secrets? Surely it is a place of openness and transparency, a place where no one can tell lies.
‘I had a baby. In the camp, I mean. In Ravensbrück.’
Zdenka gasps. She has been expecting other things, the careful broaching of the subject of their last conversation, the question of Hana’s love, with all the incongruities and difficulties that it implies; and instead there is this: I had a baby in the camp.
‘A baby?’
‘I’ve never told anyone before.’
‘You gave birth in the concentration camp?’
‘That’s what I said.’ Her features have that rigidity, the expression of a mourner at a graveside. She looks away through the window at the view. There is silence. Zdenka cannot, dare not ask anything more. Hana’s presence, her very existence, seems to hang on a thread. ‘I wanted you to know, that’s all,’ she says, as though somehow the knowledge is a gift, a small, very fragile but very precious gift.
‘Who was the baby’s father?’
‘It was the German I told you about. The German scientist.’ She looks at Zdenka and smiles. It is a curious smile, without humour, infested with sorrow. ‘I always thought I was barren. I would have loved a child, but it never happened with my husband, nor with any others that I went with. I suppose that’s shocking enough, isn’t it? That I tried with other men. And then this German … He didn’t want to have anything to do with it, of course he didn’t. But I wanted the baby.’
This confession hits Zdenka with an almost physical force, like a blow across the face. She feels the sting of tears. ‘Haničko,’ she says. Just that, the diminutive of Hana’s name. Nothing more because she can think of nothing more. There are no words of comfort.
‘And then they arrested me and took me off to hell and I wanted the baby even more. Can you believe that? I went to somewhere in Austria first, somewhere near Linz, and then they put a whole lot of us on a train – cattle trucks, just thrown in like animals – and we went right across Germany and ended up somewhere to the north of Berlin. Of course we didn’t know that then. It was just a wilderness. Barbed wire and rows of huts. The women in my hut looked after me. The place was chaos and things like that happened, women looking after you, women giving birth. All sorts of things happened.’
Zdenka is silent, almost without breath. Breathing seems difficult, as though something is constricting her throat. Eventually she dares to speak. ‘Was it a girl or a boy?’
‘A little girl. Just a little girl. She had dark hair, I remember. And a wrinkled face like an old woman’s. And she cried, a short, sharp cry as though she was gasping for air. Perhaps she was, I don’t know. I even gave her a name. I called her Světla. Light in the darkness. I loved her. There I was in the middle of hell and I had found love.’
‘And what happened to her?’
‘They put her to my breast for a while. She tried to feed, but of course I didn’t have milk. Nothing. And then they took her away.’ She looks at Zdenka and shrugs. ‘I never saw her again. That’s what they did then. Later on they had a maternity hut and women were allowed to keep their babies for as long as they could. As long as they lasted. But when I had Světla that is what they did. They just took the babies away.’ Hana seems to gasp for air. It is as though the Glass Room has suddenly become airless. ‘I used to imagine that somehow she would survive and we would be reunited when it was all over. If I had died, then my side of t
hat fantasy would not have been fulfilled, so that became a reason to survive. I suppose you could say that Světla saved my life.’ She begins to weep. There is no drama, no convulsion, just the slow seepage of tears. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I have never told anybody any of this, do you realise that? Never. By knowing this you know all about me. There’s nothing else.’
Against this story the myth of Ondine is nothing. Against this, Tomáš’s denial of history is a mere fancy. History is here and now, in the beautiful and austere face of Hana Hanáková. There in the Glass Room of the Landauer House, feeling as helpless as a person at the scene of an accident who doesn’t know how to staunch the bleeding, Zdenka goes round the table and puts her arms around the older woman and tries to comfort her. And all around them is the past, frozen into a construct of glass and concrete and chrome, the Glass Room with its onyx wall and its partitions of tropical hardwood and the milky petals of its ceiling lights, a space, a Raum so modern when Rainer von Abt designed it, yet now, as Hana Hanáková sits and weeps, so imbued with the past.
5
Contact
Veselý had driven from the city that morning and had lunch at a diner in Falmouth. They’d followed him of course. They were driving a two-tone Oldsmobile and he kept them in his rear-view mirror easily enough all the way through New Haven and Providence and across the bridge at Bourne. When he went into the diner they even followed him in and sat down just three tables away, two fresh-faced, crew-cut exemplars of the American way of life, the kind that would have been in the army if they hadn’t been in this line of work.