The Glass Room (25 page)

Hana laughs. ‘I told you once that things couldn’t last. Do you remember?’

‘You always say that kind of thing.’

‘And now it has happened.’

The Glass Room is almost empty. The piano stands where it has always stood, in the space behind the onyx wall, but except for that and a couple of chairs, all the rest has gone. In some ways this has returned the room to its moment of birth, when the builders and the decorators left it and the furniture had yet to arrive. Just the space, the light, the white. Just the gleaming chrome pillars. Just the onyx wall and the curved partition of Macassar wood. The cool, calm rationality of the place undisturbed by any of the irrationality that human beings would impose upon it. They pause for a moment and look.

Is it rational to have a sentiment about a place? A place, a room is just space enclosed, volume sequestered by concrete and glass. ‘Does it break your heart?’ she asks, holding his hand and glancing at him.

He doesn’t reply directly. ‘It’s still ours. We haven’t sold it, we haven’t given it away. Your parents will keep an eye on it. There’s still Laník and his sister.’

‘That’s not the point, is it?’

‘We’ll come back.’

‘Will we? When?’

He squeezes her hand, and leans across and kisses her on the cheek. ‘Come on, they’re waiting.’ The briefcase he is carrying has everything important in it — birth certificates, marriage certificate, the deeds of the house, all those things that document who you are and who you might be, those scraps of paper that give you existence. Where that goes, they go.

‘You haven’t answered my question.’

‘I’m not going to because I can’t. I told you, I can’t predict the future. I can’t even be sure that the flight will be allowed.’

‘They told you it will be.’

‘They
hope
it will be. But who can tell for certain? Now come.’

But she stands for a moment, one last moment, looking at the Glass Room. Rain runs down the windows like tears from her eyes. The light is diffused, refracted, blurred by the water; just so are memories distorted by time and mood. This is no place for sentiment. It is a place of reason. And yet sentiment is what she feels, the anguish of departure, the exquisite pain of remembering, the fragility of being. When will she be here again?

Ten minutes later a small convoy of cars heads away from the house down Blackfield Road. Viktor and Liesel are in the front car with the children. Katalin follows in the second car with Marika and the luggage. Oskar and Hana follow behind. They set off on the right-hand side of the road — new regulations have come into force, a new highway code, a new way of driving. The convoy goes down the hill past the children’s hospital to the main road, then turns right and heads down towards the Ringstrasse. There is no other traffic around, and few pedestrians. It is like a Sunday morning, but it isn’t a Sunday morning. It’s a Friday, Friday the seventeenth.

‘What’s happened, Laník?’ Viktor asks through the hatch in the panel between the driver and the passengers. ‘Where is everyone?’

Laník glances round. ‘Dunno, sir. Who can tell these days?’

They turn onto the Ringstrasse, bump over the tramlines. There’s a tram stopped at a light and a thin crowd on the pavement. Another tram passes in the opposite direction, heading towards the north of the city, but there isn’t the usual traffic and there aren’t the usual crowds. As they reach the Grand Hotel they find military vehicles parked across the wide road, blocking access to the railway station. Soldiers flag the cars down. A few civilians have gathered on the pavement to watch.

Laník winds down his window as one of the soldiers advances. The man looks puzzled, as though he feels he should recognise these people and these vehicles. He’s dressed in that uniform that they’ve heard about but never seen until the last two days: dove grey with a hint of green about it. On his chest hangs a silver breastplate.
Feldgendarmerie
, it proclaims. ‘At least he’s a German,’ Viktor says. ‘That must be better than one of the local fanatics.’

The children stare at him with that open curiosity that children have, as though nothing will affect the even tenor of their lives. Liesel grasps Victor’s hand for reassurance.

The soldier peers into the car and demands their papers.

‘We’re heading for the airport, Sergeant,’ Viktor explains. ‘We have a plane to catch.’

The man shrugs. ‘Well you can’t pass here. The road’s blocked.’

‘Why? We’ll miss our flight.’

‘Orders, sir. An important convoy. You’ll just have to wait.’

There’s a feeling of panic. The plane won’t wait, the world won’t wait. They’ll be stuck here for ever, held back by a squad of soldiers. Viktor opens his briefcase and hands the documents over. ‘There is also the children’s governess and her daughter travelling in the car behind,’ he explains. ‘Her documents are there too.’

The soldier examines the papers with a mixture of indifference and incomprehension. Behind him there’s a stir in the crowd. People are pointing and craning to see down the Bahnstrasse towards the ornate station building. A father has lifted his child onto his shoulders. There is a crowd there at the entrance to the station, soldiers drawn up, a banner flying and vehicles waiting.

‘Why are these people here, Sergeant? What are they here to see?’

‘I can’t tell you that, sir. Orders.’ He hands the papers back.

‘But these people know.’

‘Maybe, maybe not.’

There’s a distant roar of engines. Abruptly the soldier leaves the window of the car and snaps to attention. One of his colleagues salutes, arm extended in that absurd, histrionic gesture. Viktor climbs out of the car to look. Liesel calls him back but he ignores her. Behind them Oskar and Hana are out of their car. The people on the pavement are straining to see, some with excitement, others looking on with indifference. And suddenly the object of all the interest is there, in an open-topped six-wheel car, driving out of the station forecourt, standing there in the front seat of the vehicle, a figure of inconsequential ordinariness who has nevertheless become iconic across the continent, the sallow face with its paintbrush moustache and the eyes that stare out of newsreels and newspapers, gazing into a history that seems already destined and defined. And then the small parade of vehicles has roared away, across the station road and down Masaryk Street towards the city centre. People in the crowd around them are weeping, but whether they are tears of joy or tears of misery it is impossible to tell.

‘Did you see?’ Hana asks. She has come to the window on Liesel’s side. ‘Did you see who it was?’

‘Who was it?’ Martin asks. ‘I didn’t see the man. Who was the man?’

‘Shut up Martin,’ Ottilie says.

Hana is tense with excitement, as though she has come out here to wave and cheer. ‘How has he done it? They say he was in Prague yesterday. Here today. How does he do it?’

‘It’s not magic, is it?’

‘What’s magic?’ Martin asks. ‘Why won’t people tell me? Tell me, Maminko, tell me.’

The soldiers are relaxing. The onlookers drifting away. ‘May we continue, Sergeant?’ Viktor is asking. His voice is quiet, as though he is confiding something to the soldier. ‘We turn left just there, before the station. Otherwise we’ll miss our plane.’

The man hesitates. ‘You turn down there right away? Is that understood?’

‘Of course it’s understood, Sergeant.’

‘Get in,’ Liesel says to Hana, opening the door. ‘We can’t wait.’ So Hana climbs in beside her and takes her hand for comfort and their little convoy moves forward, manoeuvring past the army vehicles and turning left into the tunnel that passes below the railway line, away from the city centre and towards černovice and the aerodrome.

‘How did you know he was a sergeant?’ Liesel asks.

Viktor looks tense, as though the ordeal is still to come. ‘He wasn’t a sergeant, he was a corporal. But I always promote a soldier if I can. It makes them feel good.’

Hana laughs and the children laugh with her, Martin because he always follows Ottilie. Liesel joins in and the laughter is immoderate, a lifeline they grab to pull them out of their anxiety. The only traffic on the road seems to be military. The whole country is under siege.

‘Have you heard?’ Hana says, to try to keep the mood light-hearted. ‘Apparently they put up curfew notices in Olomouc yesterday — you know, just like the ones here — in German and Czech. Only they got it wrong. The ones they put up in Olomouc were in German and Romanian.’

The laughter starts again, and then dies away. It isn’t so funny after all.

‘Why Romanian?’ Ottilie asks. ‘Are there German soldiers in Romania as well?’

‘No there aren’t,’ Liesel assures her. ‘But if Auntie Hana’s story is true it looks as though there soon may be.’

The airfield lies beneath a plain and windy March sky. Grey vehicles sporting iron crosses are parked round the perimeter and soldiers are patrolling with their weapons at the port. They let the cars through reluctantly, only when Viktor shows them the tickets and explains the problem and they have talked about it amongst themselves.

On the airfield are aircraft of the Luftwaffe, grey machines that look like coffins. Inside the concrete airport building a crush of people threatens the airline desks. Policemen, ordinary Czech policemen, are trying to keep order. Voices are raised in argument. Soldiers stand guard, German soldiers here as everywhere else. Viktor wades into the crowd waving their tickets aloft. A voice over the public address system announces that the Air France flight from Paris has been cancelled. The announcement is in German and Czech, but the German comes first.

Through the windows of the airport building they can see their aircraft on the concrete apron, wings spread, its nose up, its tail like a Swiss flag flung out by the wind. Daylight gleams on the corrugated metal fuselage. The other aircraft on the perimeter are dull grey and bear the
Hakenkreuz
on their tails, and there is a strange antinomy between the two symbols, the straight Swiss cross and the crooked German one.

‘Will our aeroplane take off?’ Liesel asks a passing official, but he just shrugs. Nobody seems to know anything. She clings to Hana for comfort, dear Hana who seems so strong now, not the fragile fractured creature of the other day. ‘Hanička, maybe it won’t go. Maybe we’ll have to stay.’ And a part of her, an unexpressed, suppressed fragment, hopes that it will be so, that the airport authorities will deny their pilot permission to take off, that they will have to return to the cars and reload the luggage and set off back to Mĕsto and the quiet comfort of the Glass Room.

Viktor comes over, with his face stern but satisfied. She knows the look. He doesn’t like to celebrate his triumphs. Outside, a trolley loaded with suitcases is being pushed across the concrete towards the aircraft. ‘I’ll tell Laník that he can go,’ Viktor says. ‘We’d better get a move on before they change their minds.’ And there is the announcement over the Tannoy, that the Swissair flight to Zurich will be departing in fifteen minutes.

Liesel shepherds her children towards the gate. ‘We’re going to fly!’ Martin says. ‘We’re going to fly!’

Viktor walks behind, with Katalin and Marika. Hana and Oskar follow like a couple at a funeral — the same drawn faces, the same searching for things to say and failure to find them. At the doorway a border guard checks documents. Katalin and Marika’s Nansen passports are glanced at, then passed back with a shrug. He asks Hana for hers. She shakes her head. ‘We’re just friends,’ she tells him. ‘We’re just the people left behind.’

At the door they say their farewells, exchange kisses and hugs. Hana clings to Liesel and whispers in her ear,
Miluji tĕ
, I love you, and then lets go and stands there bereft. They go out into the cold, uncertain day, Viktor leading the way across the concrete. ‘We’re going to fly!’ Martin announces to the hostess who stands at the foot of the steps. Holding her hat on against the wind, she bends towards him. ‘You’re a very lucky boy,’ she says.

They climb the steps and duck in through the door. The cabin is a narrow, sloping tunnel with seats on either side and a dim twilight coming through the windows. It seems the very antithesis of the Glass Room, with no sense of design but instead a hard, factual functionality. Above the seats there is netting for hand luggage and behind each seat a paper bag for vomit. At the summit of the tunnel is an open door and a glimpse of daylight where the pilots and navigator are at work.

The other ten passengers are already settled into their seats. The Landauers strap themselves in, Viktor and Liesel across the aisle from each other, Ottilie and Martin behind them, Katalin and Marika just ahead. The pilot appears at the door at the top of the slope.

‘We must apologise for the delay, ladies and gentlemen, but as you know these are unusual times.’ He has the jovial manner of a sea captain about to set off on a cruise. He even uses the word: ‘We’ll be cruising at an altitude of three thousand metres. And an estimated flying time of three and a half hours. The weather seems to be improving a bit, but be prepared for a bumpy flight.’ He says
bockig
for bumpy. Martin and Ottilie giggle, and look over at Marika. ‘
Bockig
,’ they whisper and make the gesture of a bucking horse.

‘Are there many first-time flyers?’ the captain asks. ‘Well, you mustn’t worry about it. It’s what the birds do. Quite natural. If you do feel sick there’s a bag in the pocket opposite you. There will be a bit of a bang when the engines start, but don’t worry, it’s quite normal.’ He returns to his cockpit, closing the door behind him.

‘Will we be sick?’ Katalin asks. She looks round at Viktor. He is the expert, the only one of their party who has done this before.

‘Some people are, some people aren’t. It’s a bit like a fairground ride at times.’

‘I went on the Riesenrad once,’ Liesel says. ‘With Benno.’

‘A bit more than the big wheel, I think. A roller-coaster, maybe.’

The passengers wait expectantly. But still they jump when the explosion comes and the engines start. The cabin is flooded with noise, like the inside of a drum when the drummer beats a military roll. Katalin looks round and tries to smile. Liesel pulls the curtain aside and peers out of her window at the aluminium wings and the shining disk of the propeller. It seems an insubstantial thing, a ghost of something that cannot possibly pull them up into the sky. Are they really going?