The Glass Room (16 page)

Frau Mandl frowns. ‘I don’t think so.’

‘Eva doesn’t get out of Vienna much,’ her husband says. ‘We have a very busy life there.’

‘Maybe it was in Vienna then. I’m sure we’ve met somewhere.’

‘I doubt it.’

Drinks are served. The guests exclaim at the spectacular view through the windows, at the Maillol sculpture, at the beauty of the onyx wall and the elegance of the Glass Room, and in the midst of all this Mandl’s voice is loud and congratulatory, somehow taking the credit for himself: ‘I like this place. Away with all the nonsense of the past. You seem to have what it takes in this city, Landauer. A good business culture and a modern outlook on life. Not like Vienna. Vienna is hidebound by tradition and cursed by Communism. Maybe I should move here. You’ve got the factories, all you need is the contacts.’

And then Hana exclaims, ‘I know!’ and just as she speaks there is an unexpected hiatus in the conversation so that her comment, intended only for Mandl’s wife, becomes general. People turn to look at her. What does she know?

‘I
know
where I’ve seen you before,’ she explains hastily.

Eva Mandl glances anxiously at her husband. Her eyes — green or grey? — are transfixed, like those of an animal caught in a snare.

‘You were in films, weren’t you?’ Hana cries. ‘Machatý’s
Extáze
. Oh my God, you’re Hedy Kiesler!’

For Hana this is nothing. So the young and beautiful wife of the principal guest has run across the screens of countless cinemas of the world stark naked. So she has bared her breasts — lovely, girlish breasts, so Hana assures Viktor and Liesel later — to the audiences of all those countries around the world that didn’t actually ban the film. So her ample thighs and buttocks, her elusive comma of pubic hair, have been displayed to thousands of breathless men and women in breathless auditoriums from Paris to Berlin. So she has bared that ineffably beautiful face to the camera while rising — in simulation, one assumes, but all too many didn’t — to orgasm. For Hana all this is perfectly acceptable. It is what people do and the way that art moves on. For Mandl and his young wife it is, apparently, an intense embarrassment.

‘That was when I was very young,’ the woman says quietly. ‘I’m out of films now.’

‘She was just a foolish child,’ her husband adds. ‘It is not something that we wish to discuss.’

There is an awkward pause. What to discuss if not this woman’s celebrated nudity? Hana smiles and touches the girl’s arm reassuringly. ‘But it’s wonderful.
Ekstase
was wonderful.
You
were wonderful.’

‘I said we don’t wish to discuss it.’ Mandl is getting angry, Viktor can see that. It is a low-level kind of anger, a mere tightening of the muscles of his face, a whitening around the edges of his nose.

‘What’s wrong with it?’ Hana asks him. ‘Your wife showed us such beauty, such innocence.’

Mandl replies, very carefully, ‘
Gnädige Frau
, it was a misjudgement. My wife does not wish to discuss the mistakes she made when she was a mere girl. Is that clear?’

Hana laughs. ‘But I
love
to be reminded of the mistakes I made when I was a girl. They did involve running around naked, but regrettably never in front of film cameras.’

There is a terrible moment when the party seems about to come to pieces. Then Liesel takes Hana’s arm to lead her away and Viktor says that everything is quite all right and ushers Mandl and his wife round the other side of the onyx wall to see a remarkable phenomenon, how the sunlight, shining through the great windows of plate glass and striking the wall at just the right angle, lights an elemental flame deep inside the stone.

‘How fantastic!’ Frau Mandl exclaims, looking into the fire and clapping her hands in delight. ‘How truly beautiful!’ There is something childlike about her enthusiasm, as though it is designed to curry favour with her husband rather than to express her true feelings. But the diversion has done its job and the awkward moment appears to have passed. They go through to the dining area and take their seats round the table.

‘This would appeal to Herr Hitler,’ Mandl observes. ‘The Führer is very keen on round tables and knights and all that kind of thing.’ Of course he has met Herr Hitler in person on more than one occasion, and
Il Duce
. Remarkable fellows, he asserts. ‘We know them all, Goebbels, Göring, the whole gang, don’t we Eva? They took quite a fancy to you, didn’t they?’

‘I like Magda Goebbels,’ she says. There is something wrong with her smile, as though there are tears behind it rather than laughter. ‘Magda’s fun. Some of the others …’ Her voice trails away. She glances at Hana. At this circular table there is no hiding one guest from another. The further away you are, the more directly you look at one another.

‘The Führer’s a strange fellow,’ her husband asserts. ‘Quite the family man when you get him on his own. Loves babies and dogs and that kind of thing.’

‘What about the anti-Semitism?’ Liesel asks. ‘Don’t you find that a bit hard to take?

Mandl’s laugh is like a shout. ‘They made me an honorary Aryan. How about that? An honorary Aryan. On Herr Hitler’s orders. They’re pragmatists, you see. If they need to deal with a Jew then they’ll come to an accommodation. I’m proof of that. Jews can get on with Hitler and his lot perfectly well.’

‘And when they no longer need you?’ Viktor asks. ‘What becomes of your honorary status then?’

‘But they
do
need the Jews. The Jews still run most of the economy.’

‘Yet Jewish businesses are being put under Aryan ownership.’

‘That’s the way we’ve got to play it for the moment. Things will change. They’ll get more moderate once they’ve consolidated their power.’

‘It’s riding a tiger, if you ask me.’

The man laughs again. Riding a tiger is what he enjoys. It is only Hana who has threatened to push him off.

‘But,’ says Hana, ‘if Oskar and I were living in Germany our relationship would be illegal. A gentile married to a Jew? That’s not allowed.’

‘The law is not retroactive, my dear,’ Oskar points out. ‘If you’ll forgive me, you have got to stick to the facts in these issues. Marriages already undertaken are not automatically dissolved. The race laws are quite specific on the point.’

‘Which is a typical lawyer’s way of looking at it. Whatever the detail, the new German state is quite plainly saying that people like us are in some way in an illicit relationship. And Viktor and Liesel.’ Hana looks across the table at Mandl, and then turns her gaze back to his wife. ‘From now on, it is, quite simply, illegal for Jews and gentiles to have sex.’

The menacing fricatives of the word
Geschlechtsverkehr
circle the table. Sitting between Viktor and Oskar, the professor’s wife blushes.

‘The whole thing will just blow over,’ Mandl asserts. ‘There are all sorts against Hitler, quite apart from the industrialists. I spoke to someone in Bremen who claimed that the Army was dead against him. There’s even a contingency plan to take power and reinstate the Kaiser.’

‘Would that be any better?’

Liesel says, ‘Who wants to reinstate a monarchy? And anyway, that would be against the treaty.’ Everyone knows the treaty of Saint-Germain, which came out of that great conclave of the victorious where presidents and prime ministers met to call countries into being from the wreckage of empires.

‘The treaties,’ says Mandl scornfully, ‘what are those pieces of paper worth?’

‘If nothing else they mean the creation of our own country,’ says Viktor. ‘Which ensures a stable democracy in the heart of Europe.’

And so the discussion goes on, straws drifting down the stream and being snatched at by desperate hands. After the meal they have their coffee in front of the onyx wall, their reflected images suspended over the darkened lawn. Mandl is describing his work in Italy, selling
matériel
to the Mussolini government. He uses that word —
matériel
— and makes it sound like blankets and bedspreads. For the third time the university professor helps himself to brandy from the decanter. ‘What do you think, Landauer?’ he asks, his voice unsteady.

What does Viktor think? He has a feeling of detachment from them all, from Mandl and his awful ideas of course, but also from the other guests, from Hana, and even from Liesel. He catches his wife’s eye and smiles distractedly. Is it the Glass Room itself that generates this sense of remoteness? In this place, he thinks, almost anything is possible. He looks around at his glass house where there will be no secrets. Standing beside the Maillol torso, Eva Mandl is in deep conversation with Hana. There’s a studied theatricality about Mandl’s wife, as though she is all the time expecting people to be watching her. Carrying her glass of brandy, she strolls with Hana across the room and out onto the terrace. Mandl watches them go, mirrored to perfection by the plate-glass windows of the room, a virtual image that floats out in space until Viktor, getting up from his chair, presses the hidden button. With the faint murmur of hidden machinery, the glass pane slides down into the basement and leaves behind it no replica of the people in the room but only the blackness of the night outside. Out there on the terrace, shadowed by the light from the Glass Room, are Hana and Eva talking.

‘I think,’ says Viktor in reply to the question that has almost been forgotten, ‘that if you play with mad dogs you are going to get bitten.’

‘What a dreadful man,’ says Hana.

It is afterwards. The space is empty of guests, the lights turned down. Hana and Liesel are sitting on the Liesel chairs in front of the onyx wall. The curtains are drawn across the windows now, so that the two women are enclosed in their own world. There is a litter of glasses and coffee cups around them. Cigarette ends fill the ashtrays. Hana has decided to stay the night and Oskar has left, perhaps thankful that for once he knows where his wife will be. Viktor has just gone to bed, leaving the two women alone. ‘What a dreadful, dreadful man,’ Hana repeats. ‘Do you know what Eva told me? Apparently he has been buying every print of that film he can find, the one his wife was in. He buys them and destroys them all. It’s pure vandalism. He’s insanely jealous.’

‘Is that what you two were talking about? You quite monopolised her.’

Hana smiles. ‘That and other things. Her ambitions, her desires, her dreams. Isn’t she wonderful? I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much beauty concentrated all in one place. It’s almost too much to accept. She wants to get back into films but he refuses to let her. He keeps her under guard twenty-four hours a day so the poor darling is virtually a prisoner. She’s desperate to get away. She made a run for it in Paris a little while ago but they followed her and dragged her back to their hotel.’ Hana crosses her legs and reaches for another cigarette. ‘You didn’t see her film, did you?’

‘Viktor thought it would be mere sensationalism.’

‘Oh, but it was beautiful. She was actually called Eva in the film. That’s what she was, a kind of Eve in the Garden of Eden. Naked, she was like …’ Hana shivers. ‘I can’t explain. It was like seeing yourself as you ought to be.’

‘You sound quite smitten.’

‘Maybe I am.’ She draws on her cigarette and watches Liesel through the cloud of smoke. There is a long and thoughtful silence. The cool box of the Glass Room seems to wait on her words. ‘Could you ever love another woman, Liesi?’ she asks. ‘I mean wholly, sexually.’

‘That kind of love? How awful!’

‘Why awful? You see Eva Kiesler naked in that film and you think,
that’s me
. My spirit made flesh, perfected. A man might think, “that’s lovely and I want to fuck it”—’

‘Hana!’

‘But if you’re a woman you think, “that’s an aspect of me and I want to love her just as I love myself”. I think perhaps there’s nothing more perfect than love of one woman for another. There’s a completeness.’

Liesel laughs with embarrassment, feeling affection, warmth, something like amusement, and underneath it all a small tremor of shame. Hana is always saying preposterous things, but never as outrageous as this. Perhaps it’s the drink she’s had — starting off with those dry Martinis she was teaching Viktor to make before the evening really began. ‘Darling, you make it sound as though you are talking from experience.’

‘Of course I’m talking from experience.’

Her words are a shock to Liesel, and yet not a surprise. It is as though the Glass Room has prepared her for this, its spirit of transparency percolating the human beings who stand within it, rendering them as translucent as the glass itself. ‘What an extraordinary thing to say, darling. Are you going to tell me you’ve fallen in love with Eva Mandl?’

‘Not her, no. Although maybe it wouldn’t be difficult. But not her.’

‘Then whom?’

Hana lifts her cigarette to her mouth and draws the smoke into her lungs. There is the sound of her breath as she exhales. She frowns, her mouth turned down as though in distaste. ‘If I tell you the truth, will you promise not to hate me?’

‘Hanička, I could never hate you.’

Hana shrugs. ‘I wonder.’

‘Well, go on.’

She draws again on the cigarette. Her hand isn’t quite steady. Her expression isn’t quite amused. ‘It’s you, of course,’ she says.

There is a complete silence. No sound at all in the unequivocal spaces of the Glass Room. No murmur from the garden coming through the velvet curtains. No stirring in the fabric of the building. Cigarette smoke drifts like grey silk above Hana’s head. ‘I’m surprised you never realised, Liesi. Does it shock you?’ A pause. ‘Don’t go back on your word.’

Liesel searches for something to say. ‘Of course I won’t. But I didn’t expect to have such responsibility all of a sudden. I mean, I don’t want to hurt you, Hanička, I really don’t.’

‘Oh, you won’t hurt me, not unless you send me away. Just let it be. We’re not like men, are we? It’s perfectly possible for women just to remain friends without being lovers. How often has that happened?’

‘But darling—’

‘I should have kept my mouth shut, I’m sorry.’

‘No, of course not.’

Hana gets up and goes over to the record player. She puts on another of the records she has brought from Paris. There’s a clarinet playing. ‘
J’ai deux amours
,’ a woman’s voice sings, a high, fluting sound, the sound of France, the sound of America. The two women talk some more, in subdued tones now, the laughter and the acting gone. They talk of love and friendship and men and women. They talk of Oskar and they talk of Viktor. Liesel watches Hana as though with new eyes and marvels that the form is the same but not the substance. Hana loves her. The word ‘completeness’ comes to her mind and brings with it a shade of guilt.
J’ai deux amours
.