by Simon Mawer
‘I haven’t been as happy for …’ Hana pauses. ‘Since you were here.’
‘That’s a long time ago.’ Tentatively they cross the lawn. ‘The silver birch?’ she asks, straining to hear it, the sea-sound of the breeze in its leaves.
‘Destroyed in the war. Laník’s bomb. Can you imagine, it missed the house by so little? They’ve planted another one. The idea is to return the garden and the house to exactly what it was.’
‘It can never be that.’
‘Of course not. But they want to recover the furniture, as many original pieces as possible. And use reproductions to fill the gaps.’
‘Maybe they’ll have waxworks of us to occupy it.’
Hana laughs. ‘What would we be doing, I wonder?’ They reach the bottom of the garden, and pause, facing up towards the house.
‘I wish I could see it,’ Liesel says. ‘It hasn’t changed, has it?’
‘Everything changes. Even buildings.’
Ottilie is on the terrace, calling them to come back. They want to take some photographs. The two women begin to make their way back up the slope towards the house. ‘And what about the Cuckoo?’ Hana asks. ‘You didn’t say in your letter. What about her?’
‘Katalin?’ Liesel remembers the little group as it was in those distant months before the betrayal of Munich but after other kinds of betrayal: she and Viktor, Ottilie and Martin, Katalin and Marika. ‘Isn’t it strange how people come into your life for a while and then vanish?’
‘She vanished?’
‘She was going to come with us to Cuba, she and her daughter. Do you remember her daughter? But they stayed behind. When we left France they stayed behind.’ She turns to Hana and feels that she can see her, there in the mists of memory. ‘It was better that way. Things work out for the best in the end, don’t they?’
‘Do they?’ Hana asks.
1990
The house exists, fixed in time and space like a fossil. Repair work is done, badly. Some of the original furniture is collected from the Moravian Museum and returned to its approximate place in the building. The bathroom fitments are updated, and ruined; but the window panes of the Glass Room are removed and plate glass restored so that the space is finally returned to its full lucid splendour. People visit, small, uninterested groups from the fraternal soviet states – trade union groups and visiting dignitaries mainly – and later, occasional visitors from the outside world, adventurous tourists with a vague interest in architecture or architecture students with a compelling concern over the position of Rainer von Abt in the history of the modernist movement. Somewhere in all this, on a cold, wet day in March shortly after the fall of the Iron Curtain, comes Marie Delmas. She is a small, nondescript woman, unnoticed by any of her fellow passengers on the train that brought her from Paris to Prague, or onwards from Prague to Město. For most of her adult life she has lived and worked as concierge in an apartment block in Paris, her world limited to the streets of her quartier in the twentieth, the church and the market and the park, and the cemetery where every Sunday she visits, amongst the crowded tombs of the celebrated, the grave of her husband. She has been drawn to this foreign adventure by one thing only, a simple coincidence, that one day in the public library on the rue Sorbier she leafed through a book on modern architecture and found herself looking at a photograph of her memory.
La Villa Landauer, the caption said, élévation sud.
She sat at the library desk, shocked, remembering that view as one remembers a scene from a childhood dream, something with little context and no meaning, a place of memory and confusion and contentment, and seeing it now in a glossy print, a hard, fast thing – an object. For Madame Delmas has a secret, known only to herself. She has a childhood that goes back beyond the Sisters by whom she was brought up; it is another life, peopled by strange, half-apprehended figures and informed by a different language, some of which she still remembers. Her vocabulary may be limited, her syntax childish and undeveloped, but she speaks German. So when she arrives at Město railway station it is German she uses to ask someone where she can find a hotel for the night and in German that she asks for directions as she walks through the streets of the Old Town.
Město is only just emerging from the twilight of the Soviet era. It is shabby and run down, and cheap; even with her meagre savings, Marie Delmas can afford the Hotel U Jakuba, the James Hotel, which is the best the place has to offer; and the presence of a church nearby gives her some comfort. At home the Church is her prop and staff, her comfort when she feels alone, which is most of the time, because Madame Delmas has nothing and has had nothing. Few friends and no family, except for the husband whom she married when she was thirty-five and who died when she was forty-five, leaving her childless and penniless and with no more security than the job of concierge that gives her a roof over her head and a modest salary in her pocket. So she visits this church in the city of Město to recite a decade of the rosary and ask for blessing on her adventure, and to say a prayer for her husband and another prayer for the person she has prayed for every day of her life – her mother. Then she makes her way to the busstop in Malinovsky Square to catch the 77 bus that the receptionist at the hotel has told her will stop near the Villa Landauer.
The bus takes her to Drobného, a grand street, almost a boulevard, with two carriageways divided by a strip of muddy grass. It runs alongside a park and she is reminded of the park in her quarter back home, where she walks often and sits sometimes to feed the sparrows. No sparrows today in the cold of March in Město. The grass looks bruised after the onslaught of winter and there are still patches of snow on the ground. At the focus of the paths is a deserted bandstand, like an ornate cage for exotic birds; but the birds have long ago flown away and the season is not yet ready for their return.
Madame Delmas stands on the pavement looking round. No memory stirs. Occasional cars pass by, and grimy buses with their destination plates announcing unpronounceable areas in the northern suburbs of the city. Was she ever here? Is this whole adventure futile? On the other side of the boulevard there is a shallow crescent set back from the road. A few cars are parked there – Trabants, Wartburgs, the oft-repeated jokes of the Soviet era. Fine terrace houses loom over these vehicles like indignant observers from a more affluent past. They resemble some of the better buildings in her own arrondissement in Paris, like the one she herself runs and which she has left in the care of some temporary concierge with a distinctly Algerian cast to his face. But she didn’t cross half of Europe by train in order to be reminded of home. She came to reclaim a small fraction of her past. Behind the buildings is a hillside and to the left of the crescent there is a break in the terrace where a street of steps climbs the slope. The houses on either side are broken and grimy, like toys long abandoned in an attic. Schodová. That, the map in the guide book suggests, is where she must go.
Workmen smoke and watch as Marie Delmas climbs the steps. At the top she consults the map in the guide book again, and turns right onto Černopolní, a quiet road running across the hillside. There are suburban villas, the houses of the bourgeoisie that prospered in the brief flowering of the First Republic, before disaster struck. Some of them have the date of construction on their façades: 1923, 1927, 1931. Madame Delmas has read the history. She knows the dates and public events; now, as she walks along the pavement, she waits to see if personal and private history will ambush her. Which it does, but quietly and modestly, for the building that appears on her right is smaller than in memory, reduced almost to the nondescript: a square garage whose doors (shut) come right up to the pavement, then a low fence with a gate and, beyond the fence, a wide esplanade of paving stones that glistens in the wet and gives the impression of a shallow pool. The building itself, as low-slung and anonymous as a sports pavilion, is reflected in the water as though it is standing on an inverted, blurred watercolour image of what is painted above it in hard-edged acrylic. And she knows that this is it. Warped, distorted, refracted by the prism of recollection, this is the pl
ace that lives in her memory. She was here.
She stands there in the drizzle wondering how to get in. The flat roof of the building forms a kind of porch between the main house and the annexe on the right and there are people moving around there, out of the rain, as though waiting for something to happen or someone to come.
Madame Delmas tries the gate and finds it locked. The figures under cover look her way. There is a conversation going on between two members of the group, looking her way and then going back to talking. Some kind of argument. She tries the gate again and searches for a bell push or something. She almost expects a button with a name plate alongside it. Landauer. But finding nothing she shakes the gate like a prisoner trying the bars of her cage.
‘Look, can you just wait there a moment?’ one of the figures calls. A lady. The voice is American, that strident, imperious tone that she hears at home in the cemetery mainly, looking for the tombs of the famous. ‘You do speak English, don’t you?’
No, she doesn’t speak English. Marie Delmas replies in French, and then, sensing incomprehension, repeats it in German. ‘I thought the house was open to the public on Wednesdays,’ she says, feeling foolish admitting it, as though she should have known better.
The reply comes back, unexpectedly matching her German: ‘We have a private visit, but I’ll see if you can join us. Just wait there a moment and I’ll see what I can do.’ The lady turns back to the figure beside her, a short fat man whom Madame Delmas recognises now as one of her kind, a member of the international freemasonry of caretakers and janitors. The two argue for a while and then the man comes over, scowling and muttering something in Czech, to unlock the gate and allow this interloper in.
‘You see, I’ve booked a private viewing,’ the Américaine explains as Madame Delmas joins her in the shelter of the roof. ‘Of course that’s fine by this fellow – he’s got his orders about that. But in his world if you have a private viewing you don’t just bring people in off the street. So there’s a problem which is no problem really, but there you are.’ The woman is expensive in her dress and her manner, a sharp confection of dyed blonde hair and tailored jacket, but incongruously wearing sneakers below her trousers. Her face is lined, the skin burnished by sun and the quick polish of cosmetic surgery. There is someone else with her, a young man in his thirties, hovering in the background with that embarrassed look of someone who suspects that he is being talked about but cannot understand what is being said. ‘This is my son. We flew into Vienna yesterday and drove up this morning. We’re waiting for someone else but it looks like he’s been delayed.’
Marie Delmas tries to register what the woman is saying. But she’s thinking, imagining, looking around her at the forecourt of the house that doesn’t look like a house at all, dredging up the past from that section of memory that seems to belong to another person, a person who was smaller than she is, so that now everything seems shrunken, as though it’s a model of what it once was, this stretch of pavement, that view between the two parts of the building – a blur of winter trees, rooftops, church spires piercing the cloud, the distant view of a fortress – and the curve of milky glass that hides the front door.
‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite understand …’
‘I’m afraid my German’s a bit rusty. Don’t find much use for it back home. But you’re in now, which is what matters.’
There’s another woman, a guide presumably, standing at the front door to the house. ‘Let’s get a move on, Milada,’ the Américaine says to her. ‘We can’t wait any longer, and for Christ’s sake, he knows his way here.’
Madame Delmas looks around trying to remember, trying to capture a glimpse out of the corner of the eye of memory. ‘I must thank you very much …’
‘Oh, don’t mention it. We visitors need all the help we can get in this place.’
Milada opens the door and leads the way in. They go through into the hallway and stand there bathed in the pale, amniotic light that comes through the panes of milk-white glass. Light without dimension, light that bears you up and floats you like a sea creature drifting with the tide. Marie remembers, but what she remembers is mood and moment, the subtle flexing of memory, not this literal place that Milada is describing in uncertain English out of which Marie can only pick occasional words, gleaming nuggets of comprehension: Family. Nineteen and twenty-nine. Nineteen and thirty-eight. Milada opens familiar doors to display unfamiliar spaces, empty of reference, empty of anything. Rooms. Landauer. Lady. Bathroom.
The bathroom is tall and white-tiled, lit from skylights, like a sluice room in a hospital ward. Marie remembers it. She remembers sound booming in the pipes and the scalding water and the steam rising. She remembers being there in the hot water and a young boy laughing at her.
They move down the corridor, which is narrow and awkward. The American woman is talking to her son in English, pointing things out and shaking her head in disapproval. In one of the rooms she says, in German, ‘Look at the state of the shutters. It’s such a shame.’ And Marie agrees, it is a shame. Who maintains the place now? Who owns it? Why doesn’t the caretaker see to things like this? The bedroom seems small and box-like, with rudimentary furnishings: a bedframe, wall shelving that might have been bought in a discount store and assembled by the handyman of the house.
‘I was here once,’ she says.
‘This isn’t your first visit?’
‘No, I …’
‘Doors,’ Milada says, pointing to the ceiling. ‘Terrace … children.’ Words as disjointed as memories. There is something of the seaside about the terrace – weather-beaten concrete, a pergola made of rusted piping, a plank abandoned in the wet. Ghostly children flit uncertainly across the space, like leaves blown by the wind, one of them Marie herself.
‘What happened to them?’ she asks the guide, hoping that she will understand German. ‘What happened to the family?’
‘Please, no questions. We now descend to the main living room.’
The American woman gives a look of resignation. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ she says, and they follow the guide back to the hall, to the stairs that lead down to the lower floor. Marie remembers. She remembers running and laughing, with Ottilie following her, chasing her, swinging on the rail halfway down, secure in the knowledge that her father is not in the house to stop them. Marie counts the steps as they descend – twelve steps down, then a turn at the landing and a further nine steps down to the lower floor. Milada opens the door and steps forward. ‘You come this way,’ she commands, and they go after her through the door into space.
Marie breathes in sharply, as though startled, as though struggling for breath. She has never remembered it like this. The floor – ivory linoleum – runs away from her feet like a surface of still water mirroring the glass wall beyond it. Chromium pillars stand in the water, their convex surfaces throwing reflections round the place. She can almost hear the lap of liquid as she stands there hesitating to cross, even though Milada is doing just that, walking across the surface as though it were nothing more than linoleum. ‘Here we find ourselves in the living room of the house,’ she says. ‘Upstairs there is the sleeping, down here there is the living.’
She stands in silhouette against the light from the windows. Through the plate glass beyond her you can see the slope of the garden, and beyond that across the roofs of the city. There is the spire of the cathedral in the distance and the castle hill hunched against the clouds, capped by the grim helmet of its fortress. Marie remembers the name. The Špilas. In the Špilas there are prisoners, bad people kept in chains.
Are they Jews?
Not Jews. Jews are good. Tatínek is a Jew.
‘Here,’ Milada says, ‘is celebrated onyx wall. Here family sat.’
And her own mother as well: Marie can see her mother, the figure that haunts her, the presence that resembles her so that she, Marie, is a partial reflection of what her mother might have been, but only the plainness of her, not the beauty, not the lights and darks. And not
the eyes. Marie remembers her eyes, the light blue of the sky as it appears now over the castle hill in a break in the cloud.
The American woman is saying something complicated to her son, something that involves frowning and shaking of the head and pointing at this and that. ‘Do you see what I mean?’ she asks, and the young man does see because he nods his head and says, ‘Sure, Mom.’
And Marie tiptoes across the floor and looks round the celebrated onyx wall in case her mother might still be sitting there, like a patient in a doctor’s waiting room, the anteroom to oblivion. But nothing remains except the chair she might have sat in, a low-slung crossed cantilever of aluminium with leather squab cushions. And the memory.
‘Onyx wall is made to the architect’s choice, of one piece of onyx from mountains of Atlas. Observe patterns.’
She does as she is told, observes the patterns, sinuous veins that snake across the stone. The colours are pale gold and amber, streaked with tears. Almost the only colour in the whole space, which otherwise is white and ivory and mirrored chrome and transparent glass. ‘What happened to the family?’ she repeats. ‘Landauer. What happened?’
‘Family left in 1938,’ Milada says impatiently. ‘The house is possession of the city. Museum. Now it is museum.’
But it isn’t a museum. It is vibrant and alive, a chord struck on the piano that stands there in the shadows behind the onyx wall, a complex chord that shimmers and reverberates, gaining volume with the passing of time, echoing as a piano echoes to the noise of children and the crying of adults.
Marie has to put out a hand to steady herself. Then she sits, suddenly, on one of the chairs.
‘Please, it is forbidden to sit!’
‘What’s wrong?’ asks the American woman coming over. ‘Are you all right?’
She shakes her head. Her mother is there, inside her head. Perhaps she’s trying to shake her out. ‘I was here,’ she says, brushing tears from her eyes. ‘My mother and I, we were here.’